I was video-chatting with my friend the other day when she asked me, shyly, if I had ever tasted dirt. As a matter of fact, I had. When I was little, I dribbled a fistful of soil into my mouth out of curiosity about its flavor. “Doesn’t it taste wonderful? It’s so fresh and rich,” asked my friend. “Yeah, actually, with the exception of the crunch,” said I.
Our little exchange, to some, may seem absurd. But I’m sure there are others who have feasted upon the earth. The yearning to learn the characteristics of our world is widespread; to some, the compulsion manifests itself in odd ways, but seekers of truth are a common species, curious always about everything: the origins of the universe, the purpose of life, and the bigger meaning of it all.
Ironically, I’ve found that this species of people often loathes science more than those who prefer to enjoy the universal playground without contemplating abstractions. It is the feverish inquirers who are grudgingly signing up for the required science general education courses. Although the questions of life fascinate them, they think that science sucks the magic out of everything. They thrive off of that sense of awe that fills them when they contemplate what they don’t understand — the poetry inherent within the mysterious. To them, science is the enemy of this feeling.
I used to hate science. When my grade-school physics teacher explained that apples fall from trees because of this inevitable force called gravity, I thought with horror that he had killed my ability to be amazed by the experience of being rooted to the planet. “It may seem like this beautiful miracle to be alive, but it’s actually very explainable mathematically and scientifically and logically and you’re stupid if you aren’t motivated to memorize and embrace the boringness of it all,” my science teachers seemed to say.
But then USC professors like neuroscientist William McClure and science journalist K.C. Cole changed my perspective. The hypocrisy of it was elucidated: I claimed to be in love with something that I was too afraid to look at in the face, for fear that it might not actually be beautiful. I was seeking ‘the secret of life’ without taking the time to get to know what life was.
But the heart of each scientific discipline, I discovered, throbs with an un-killable magic. Sure, we can explain that a sperm meets an egg and triggers a cascade of cell growth and division that eventually becomes a baby human. We can talk about how this enormous explosion at the beginning of time caused the universe to come into existence. We can study how the stimulation of brain cells gives rise to behaviors and perceptions.
But the fact is that biology, physics and neuroscience are actually revealing the ultimate unknowability of the world — a familiar and breathtaking unknowability that, to the relief of religious people everywhere, resembles, if anything, God.
Scientists still have absolutely no idea why life or the universe or thoughts occur. We can explain how they happen and what they look like, but not what is behind them. For example, I can have the thought, ‘There is a unicorn beside me,’ and we can explain that the thought occurred because neurons in my brain fired in a very precise way. But why did they fire in the first place? It’s not like there’s actually a unicorn here. What is the initial push that caused this squiggle in my brain? It is inexplicable, just as the initial ‘push’ behind the Big Bang is inexplicable. We can describe how the cells in a fetus multiply, proliferating and migrating to certain locations to eventually create an organism, but this doesn’t reveal the ultimate question: why?
Science cannot strangle ‘the secret of life’ because it is by nature inscrutable. It cannot be gotten hold of. The ultimate question — why are we here? — seems outside of our capacity to answer. It is like trying to see the eye with the eye. You can only know, intuitively, that you are a part of it. That the answer is somehow you.
We are the universe looking at itself. In the language of the religious, we have been made in the image of God. Life is the only thing in the world capable of perceiving the world, of giving it meaning and trying to discover its nature. We can study and characterize the limbs, the body, of that from which we sprouted, but its ultimate secret is unknowable. It seems to be locked within what we are looking at it with –– consciousness itself.
The resultant elusiveness doesn’t mean that the pursuit of it is pointless. No, it is the greatest miracle of all: the butterfly that can never be caught, whose wings we can never turn to dust, and which will remain forever beautiful.
This, ladies and gents, is the realization that, unlike anything else, can make the spirits soar.
