The Mystery

Atheism, says Adam Frank, is not incompatible with the sense of life's mystery, of  the magic I've spoken of here. Speaking at a public debate with another scientist, he encounters the other man's refusal to see any hint of mystery in life:


  I had made it pretty clear that, being an atheist, I was not arguing for a "God" of the gaps. Neither was I arguing that limits to knowledge (if they exist) imply we should be worshiping before some choice of deity. Instead I was simply pointing to that fundamental weirdness, that "stranger-in-a-strange land" quality of being human. I was pointing to that mystery because I think its best part of the whole trip.
 We just find ourselves here. With our individual birth we just "wake-up" and discover ourselves in the midst of an extraordinary world of beauty and sorrow. All around us we see exquisite and exquisitely subtle orders played out effortlessly. From the lazy descent of fall leaves to the slow unfolding of cloudscapes in empty blue skies, it is all just here and we are just here to see it.
  Day after day we wake again to find the world still here, waiting for us as we play out our own small dramas with their small triumphs and terrible heartbreaks. And then, remarkably, astonishingly, just here just ends.

This is just remarkable. While reading it, I experienced something that happens so seldom: the recognition of a fellow thinker, a person who experiences life in much the same way myself. I have often spoken of the "Mystery" as that Ultimate Reality I sense and at times experience. Frank discusses this as entirely compatible with the project of art and science, and is something we can experience regardless of our religious affiliation. It is the essence of Awakening.

 For me that is the mystery. No amount of explanation, be it a "Theory of Everything" or a religious theology, will reduce the power of its experience. The primitive quality of feeling, the presence of life and its luminosity, is the mystery and I am damn thankful for it.
 It is the essential and unalterable question mark saturating the verb "to be" that makes science worth pursuing and gives art its potency. It sets our loves and loss into a context that has no context and somehow makes it all bearable.