Resolve to Be the Warmth of the World
Christine Wicker
Contributor
Posted:
01/3/10
I grew up Southern Baptist, which means my childhood was spent believing in the Big Man with a plan. He had it all in control. Having believed heart and soul in the kind of God that science has been steadily destroying for more than 200 years makes me a kind of throwback in the academic, scientific world where I now live. I still grieve a loss of innocent faith that more modern people hardly feel at all.
These winter holidays, situated during the darkest days of the year, are all about bolstering faith. Faith in God. Faith that spring will come again. Faith that our lives have meaning, that our mistakes won't defeat us, that our resolutions will be carried out and will make some difference.
As this first decade of the new century closes, faith seems in short supply on all fronts.
Perhaps that's why a paragraph in the New York Times science section tugged at me so strongly. I read that section religiously because science is our newest god and I'd like to know more of his ways. I know his great commandment, which is that we must seek to know all that we can, no matter the cost. I know that he encourages and tests us with blessings beyond counting and punishments beyond imagination.
That's about all I know.
The story I was reading was an essay trying to explain to science idiots like myself why $10 billion and 10 years constructing Geneva's Large Hadron Collider would pay off for anyone but the scientists working on it. I wasn't reassured much on that question. But near the end of the essay, University of Texas physicist and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg supplied a short and brilliant summation of the central problem that worshiping our new god causes us with regard to faith of any kind.
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless," he wrote in his 1977 book, "The First Three Minutes." He's been explaining that statement ever since, the essay's author, Dennis Overbye, wrote.
I'll just bet he has. It's not for nothing that we humans are called the meaning-making animals. We don't take kindly to having life's purpose snatched away. Weinberg was in the kind of pinch that prophets and speakers of truth often find themselves in. Nobody on any side liked what he said. "Get yourself out of this one," I chortled to myself evilly. And he did.
Overbye wrote that Weinberg "went on to say that it is by how we live and love and, yes, do science, that the universe warms up and acquires meaning,"
That is also the kind of truth that the prophets bring. Truth as solid, as verifiable as any equation, truth we can live by and have faith in. On that, all our gods agree.
Happy New Year, warm ones.