Let me just get this out of the way right now: Yes, that was the best available thumbnail. Yes, I know how dramatic the lighting changes are. And yes, that is Simple Song by The Shins. Content over form, team. Content over form.
Have you ever read Isaac Asimov's short story Nightfall? It starts off with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson ("If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?") and comes to an ending shortly after one of the characters whimpers, "...we didn't know we couldn't know..." and I sometimes wonder if we could all see the full nighttime sky at night, would we think about our place differently?
I remember the first time I saw the Milky Way and that's all I really want to say about that story. I remember it. Our ancestors made up legends about this thing they saw in the sky every night and I remember the first time I saw it.
I remember the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope too, and that's a feeling that moves the needle close to awe. That is a place, a location, an object situated in space that is at best hundreds of millions of miles away and it shines so bright that I can see it here, with my own eyes, at night. By comparison, you lose all the lights from Las Vegas after you get a hundred miles away or so. Saturn is so far away, I can't even imagine the distance. I have to use metaphors. And yet light bouncing off that distant thing finds its way into my pupils. How can I not look up, night after night? What a tragedy it is when all the grandeur of the heavens is bounced away by clouds or drowned out by our twenty-first century fear of the dark.
I don't remember the first time I saw the ocean because I was probably tiny when it happened, but I do remember looking east out from North Carolina's coast this past fall and thinking that I would soon be on the other side of this unfathomable distance. I can see the curving of the Earth if I look hard enough in this direction, but I can't see the place that I'll be, where I'll land. I don't even know for myself if there is land directly over there. The expanse is so big that if someone else hadn't traveled and made a map for me, I would only be able to wonder, to ponder whether anything might exist out there, beyond everything that I can see.
The night before that moment of unfathomable distance, after we'd driven all afternoon to arrive seaside and the sun was long gone and the sky was patched with clouds lit up by the moon, I sat on cold sand on the edge of an ocean watching stars swirl and meteors fly. In that moment, with all the universe in front of me, how could I not talk to God?
And that's it. That's the controversial step. Because I think we're all very happy to talk about awe in nature. NPR's 13.7 blog hosted a week of great posts about awe a couple of years ago that touch on the idea that awe is not limited to those with religious sensibilities. It's more or less an empirical fact that people feel something that can be labeled awe. The cause of that awe or what that awe points us toward is different question entirely.
So why do some people react differently than others when it comes to awe? That is a deep and broad question and one that I'm going to focus by talking about two astronomers and science popularizers, Carl Sagan and Sir Arthur Eddington. Carl Sagan you know as the Cosmos guy, the billions and billions guy. If you've worked one day in a planetarium, you're on a first name basis with the man. Sir Arthur Eddington you might not as familiar with unless you've taken an astronomy class or two, but he was actually one of the first people to popularize the theory of relativity and was played by David Tennant in a movie about that bit of history called Einstein and Eddington. He actually organized a trip in 1919 to Principe during a solar eclipse to make measurements of the light from distant stars being bent by the sun's warp in space. Dude went on a safari for science.
Both Sagan and Eddington gave Gifford Lectures, which deal with natural theology (which, put very simply, is the idea that we can learn about God by studying nature) and they both touch on the subject of religious experience in lectures given during their lives.
By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe that it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion.
-Carl Sagan
Probably most astronomers, if they were to speak frankly, would confess to some chafing when they are reminded of the psalm “The heavens declare the glory of God.” It is so often rubbed into us with implications far beyond the simple poetic thought awakened by the splendor of the star-clad sky. There is another passage from the Old Testament that comes nearer to my own sympathies—“And behold the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake: but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice...”
-A.S. Eddington
How do two people who study the same subject and have the same passion for sharing that subject with the world end up talking about the religious power of the nighttime sky in such different ways? They are of different nationalities and generations, separated and influenced by different wars on different continents, went to different schools, and most tellingly, were raised and lived in different religious traditions (Eddington was a dedicated Quaker and Sagan died an atheist), so there's that, I guess. If we're the product of our times and places, our upbringings and our biases, that's that. But this idea of awe still needles at me. For all that God's not in the earthquake, wind, or fire, Eddington still talks about "the splendor of the star-clad sky." And for all that he doesn't want to privilege the Christian God, there is that connection to something bigger that's implied in a sense of awe and that unstated something is painfully easy to associate with God. It seems that there is a something to connect to, or that we think there is.
That's what I'm working with here: wonder in a scientific age, or awe in scientists, or what we fall back on when we want to talk about religious experience without being beholden to any one particular religion. When we look at the night sky, really look at it and experience it, do we bump up against something bigger than ourselves? I don't know yet, but I'm trying to find out, okay? We'll see what we find.
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