A Scientist's Perspective on Mystery

There is no natural world and supernatural world, there is only the natural world, but it has strange qualities that seem supernatural to us. There is not a physical and a metaphysical universe, there is only one universe which is both physical and metaphysical.

We are natural creatures, born of nature, with abilities and limitations. Because of our abilities we have been able to understand and describe the world around us to a large degree. Sometimes we have used our feelings and observations. Sometimes we used instruments and human logic and reasoning. But all these are limited. We cannot see that space is curved, but it is. We do not feel that time is relative, yet it is. We cannot conceive of an electron in its real form as a cloud of probability density, but that is how it exists. We cannot understand the dual properties of light, yet we know that these properties are real. We don’t know why and how we are who we are, yet we are.

Human beings discovered natural laws and built a model of reality that conformed with our own perceptions. This model was not wrong, but neither was it right. It was incomplete, because our own perceptions are limited. The universe was not built according to what makes sense to us. It would be strange if it were, for who are we? Only natural creatures with brains and consciousness.

At some point, during our scientific explorations into the nature of reality we went too far. We got experimental results that made no sense, that could not be true, yet were. It was the dawn of the 20th century and a new awakening of the human mind into the real nature of reality. It led to quantum theory, relativity, particle physics, cosmology and a new understanding of how much we cannot understand.

If there is a mystery, it does not mean that it is not real, it might simply mean that we cannot understand it. It turns out that the universe is constructed on mysteries. One mystery after another. We know some things. Other things we say we know, but we really can only describe them with mathematical language, not with human language. Still, that is enough to know that the mysteries have real solutions, and that these solutions make no sense to us as human beings, and this fact, the fact that they make no sense, is not because they are inherently strange, it is because they are strange to us, because of who we are -natural creatures with brains and eyes and senses that operate in some ways and not others.

Some examples. Birds have a perceptive world of sight that would be astonishing to us if we could experience it. Bats can sense magnetic fields. Most animals have one or more senses that are better than ours. Somewhere there may be creatures that can see in more than 3 dimensions. Imagine any of a number of scenarios that have been put forward by philosophers for years. A two dimensional creature experiencing space for the first time. A color blind creature trying to imagine blue, a dog playing a role in an avante garde play, that most of the human audience doesn’t understand.

We are watching a play that is beyond us. We can get a lot of it, or some of it, I have no idea how much, but I am certain that it is not a large fraction. We have hints that there is so much more than we can even understand exists. And beyond that there is more that we will never even have the slightest idea if it exists or not, because it is simply outside anything we can access. Its like passing the woman you should have married in a large crowd and not even knowing she was there.

So if we don’t know about it, so what?  It isn’t real. It doenst exist. There is no perfect woman (or man) for us. Electron clouds and string theory and the origins of consciousness are too hard to grasp? So what.  If we humans can’t know the deepest things in the universe, if we cannot know them because our brains were not built for knowing such things, or even being aware of them, then it is the same as if they don’t exist, because if we cant do it, then who can?

There is an answer which we can call God. This is as good a definition of God as I can think of. God knows. God sees. God sees all. “All” here does not mean that God sees you peeking at Mary Jane with inappropriate thoughts as she walks by. “All” means all that is invisible in the universe, all that exists that is beyond us. God perceives all the dimensions, all the hidden glories of the universe. He doesn’t need equations to get it. He sees quantum jumps and quarks the way we see blue. He sees the true nature of time without using a clock.

We would like to be God. This has been humanity’s dream both individually and collectively since our origins. We know just enough, can see just enough, can feel just enough, to want more. “Yes, yes I can see that the water goes over the falls and into the stream, but then where does it go?” “Yes I know that the moon waxes and wanes, but what is the moon?”

We have made great strides. Think of how many things we could teach the average cave man. Actually think how many things we could teach the average modern citizen. But we are not satisfied, and neither would be the cave man or the average citizen. We cannot answer everything, in fact we cannot answer most things. So what can we do? What do we do? We ask God. God knows all. God knows why our favorite cousin died in a car crash, He knows why we are still in love with the same woman. God knows how light works, where the universe is heading, what happened to the missing dark matter and what it is. God knows all. So we ask, and always have. We know that we humans don’t really know. Even our wizards, our magi, our scientists, we know that they don’t really know. And of course they know it too., I am one of them and I know it. I also ask God.

The problem is that God doesn’t answer. At least not directly. If we ask God, “God, how can I get that promotion?” He doesn’t answer, “Stay at the office all night and finish the Schmidlap report”. He is silent. If we ask him “Why are genomes so filled with uninformative DNA sequences?” He answers “go figure it out for yourself, that one isn’t so hard.” If we ask “Is a Black Hole really a discontinuity?” He laughs and says “Whats the matter don’t you believe your own equations.?” God is not an easy customer.

Yet, there is an amazing mystery, another to add to all the mysteries we have come up against. That mystery is that God does answer us. He just doesn’t answer us with the answer. He answers us in ways that we usually don’t see, just as we don’t see 99.9999999% of everything we could see. We don’t see that old woman staring at us as we get on the train, we don’t hear the bird singing to us as we listen to our walkman. We don’t notice the beautiful human drama being played out on the sidewalk between a man and his young daughter, because we are engrossed in our cell phone call from a potential new lover. That’s the way we don’t hear God’s answers. We are too distracted, there is too much going on, we are busy, and God sends us no signals that he is about to give us a priceless gift. He just sends it. And 99 times out of 100, we miss it. At least for me. Maybe its more, I have no idea how many times God has answered me, but I do know that once or twice, maybe a few more times than that, I was lucky enough not to be reading the paper, watching TV, making love, or lost in some deep and important mental activity, like yelling at the stupid quarterback for not getting the ball off in time, when the answer came from God, and I got it. Its happened to you too. Just as often. God has no favorites, this I know. He treats us all the same. So you have had it happen to you too. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe not since childhood. Then you got it a lot, maybe most or even all of it. God loves to speak to children, because they really listen to Him. If you have children or any experience with them, you know what I mean. “Daddy, why did Grandpa die?” you answer something stupid like “he was old honey,” or “he was very sick” or “God wanted him in heaven”, so the kid gives up on you and asks God, and of course God answers. But these answers are in a special language that we lose after childhood, and since children are so good at all languages they can get it, but they cannot translate it for us. Think very hard and you might remember getting some of those answers, you might even remember what the answers were, but you will not remember the language.

So if God cannot use this language to answer us, what does he use? He uses music. He uses poetry, beauty, art, kindness, smiles, handshakes, moments of discovery, embraces, movies, coincidences, reunions, tears, insights, laughter, and love. But aren’t all these human things? aren’t they all the stuff, the essence of humanity?