The Miracle of the Universe

If something can be fully explained by reference to the natural world, can it still be considered miraculous?

A total eclipse of the sun occurred earlier this week.  In the days leading up to the event, there was a lot of chatter and coverage. Yet, despite a certain level of anticipation, schools remained open, as did most offices, business, and jobs.  Team meetings were held.  Games were played. 

In the standard coverage, the descriptions of the upcoming eclipse all coalesced around certain repeated themes, which are summarized as follows: a solar eclipse is a scientific phenomenon in which the moon temporarily blocks the sun.  Depending on where you are at the time, the sun would appear either partially blocked or, if you were located in the path of totality, fully blocked.  Wear glasses, as looking at the sun can damage your eyes.

Virtually all eclipse-related content also contained graphics purporting to show the celestial bodies in action, all the while seeming to assure us that what we would be seeing was really just a visual display caused by scientific things, planets and moons and such.  These explanations were particularly useful to the extent the audience was comprised of cavemen who would otherwise descend into madness but for that scientific primer. 

The drumbeat all followed a similar rhythm: what was going to happen was in essence a scientific spectacle.  Although it may be happening outside, in the sky, involving the heavenly bodies that we otherwise behold each day, it might as well be happening in a high school science lab.  They don’t close schools and jobs for science experiments.  Nerds welcome. Cool people need not look up.  Cool people should continue doing the cool shit they were already doing.        

Nonetheless, despite these lukewarm previews, I decided to watch the eclipse.  The total one, in fact. 

It turns out it was grossly, almost criminally, undersold. 

My brother invited us to his house to see the eclipse months ago.  He’d apparently been aware of this for the last five years, marveling at how his cabin in the Adirondacks happened to be in the midst of the narrow path of totality.  Wouldn’t it be something to watch a total eclipse from the comfort of your backyard?  We decided to find out.  My brother drove up with our almost 80-year-old mother.  I drove up with my 11-year-old son.  The sky was sunny that morning when we went outside to shoot bow and arrows, but the weather forecast took a turn for the worse, from a clear sunny day to expecting cloud cover just in time for the peak of the eclipse.  At that point, since I wasn’t sure what to expect, I didn’t know what we stood to lose.  Around noon, I received the text from my son’s school saying he was absent.  When the designated time approached, the four of us settled in the backyard, looked up at the sky, and waited. 

There is a reason the solar eclipse was undersold, I believe.  It’s the same reason so many things we encounter in our lives come across as bland, flattened, and dead.  Of course they were right that the eclipse can be effectively explained using scientific terms.  After all, they knew exactly when and where it was going to happen, years in advance.  This certainly entails a level of astronomical knowledge and modelling that far exceeds my level of comprehension.  Yet…  

It doesn’t mean it wasn’t magic.  I was there.  I saw it.  It was magic. 

But let’s face it.  There are few people in any meaningful position of influence willing to acknowledge that there is magic in the world.  It may well be that people see magic all the time, but the cultural context of our modern Western civilization frowns upon any attempt to acknowledge it.  It conditions us to look away.  To pretend it’s not there.  To tell ourselves that the scientific explanation, the material, is sufficient to capture the reality of what we behold. 

There is a prevailing story about the world that is widely accepted among polite educated society.  The Universe exploded into being from a singularity billions of years ago.  Our planet is just another satellite among an unfathomable number of planets, our sun just another star among an unfathomable number of stars.  Even life, which as far as we know only exists on this one planet, was the result of random chance, starting with a singular life form and, through random mutations curated through natural selection, led to more and more complex forms of life, which we humans are just the most recent and advanced example.  We are mammals, ho hum, and the Universe would be doing this whether we were here to observe it or not.

Fast forward to today, and we as a species can deftly map out the movements of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, and are able to precisely predict when they will get in each other’s way and cause the phenomenon we refer to as a total solar eclipse.      

This modern tale is so steeped in the materialistic world view that, despite the ability to predict when and where a total solar eclipse will occur, those that tell themselves that story actually end up missing the obvious thing right in front of everyone’s faces. That the total eclipse of the sun was a bona fide miracle.     

On the drive from the city to the mountains, my son gave me a primer on a few fun facts about the upcoming eclipse.  One of the facts struck me immediately and I asked him to repeat it, because it was hard to believe at first.  He said the reason we here on Earth are able to experience a total eclipse is that the sun and the moon appear in the sky to be the exact same size.  Why?  Well, apparently, the reason is that the sun is approximately 400 times the size of the moon and approximately 400 times farther away than the moon.  Therefore, the two heavenly bodies appear in our sky to be the same size. 

When I looked up this seemingly random mathematical anomaly, not only was he correct, but every explanation was the same.  This was a coincidence.  No other planets in our solar system experience anything remotely resembling a total solar eclipse, even if there were observers there in the first place, which there are not.  Some planets don’t even have moons.  Only on Earth.  You know, the one planet with life on it, and certainly the one planet with advanced intelligent life that could contemplate the causes and meaning of this phenomenon.  Nothing to see here.    

To my simple non-mathematical mind, facts like these, even if derived through astute scientific observation, tend to cast doubt on the story of the Universe adopted and repeated by those same science-worshiping cultural forces.  Why is it so much easier to describe something as a cosmic coincidence (i.e., the odds of it actually being that way are literally astronomical) as opposed to something that makes us believe for a hot minute that there is something special about Earth, or, God forbid, that there is something special or privileged about human beings?         

I know we used to believe this to our very core.  It was a reasonable and intuitive assumption, and then Copernicus and his progeny provided a starkly different model for the Earth’s place in the skies. That rapid re-imagination of our solar system, through Galileo and Kepler, culminated with Isaac Newton, who figured out that a universal force—gravitation—could explain not only the movement of objects on Earth, but also in the skies.  Newton, however, marveled, that the gravitational force was seemingly perfectly fine-tuned so as to prevent the objects of the Universe from collapsing in on one another.  He credited and praised a genius Creator for having conceived of such a world.

As physics surpassed even the genius of Newton, and Einstein and his progeny began to opine on a dynamic universe, it ended up only reinforcing the conclusion that Newton had once reached—that the Universe didn’t have to be, in fact shouldn't be, but instead was finely-tuned so as not to implode or explode, to exist, to exist in such abundance so as to allow for the emergence of observers to its wonders. 

As we now know, the Universe is not static, but in a constant state of change.  We are living during a particular epoch in that history, an epoch in which not only does it not collapse in on itself or expand and break apart, but a period in which the existence of life is possible.  Even the distance between the Earth, Moon, and Sun is in flux, such that in a few million years, the majesty of a total solar eclipse will no longer be possible.  When something is just right, despite unfathomable odds, why does the term “coincidence” satisfy anyone’s desire for explanation?  Why isn’t the appropriate term something else?    

The clouds held off just long enough. The initial excitement started when my brother put on his eclipse glasses and noticed the shadow starting to form around the periphery of the sun.  This is what we saw during the last partial eclipse.  If you look at the sun without glasses, you don’t perceive much.  By the peak, the sky is dimmed.  This is interesting, no doubt, but does not necessarily generate an emotional reaction. 

Then it happened.  The sky darkened into a deep navy blue.  The glasses came off so we could see it exactly as our pre-civilization ancestors would have seen it. The steady buzz of birds and insects dissipated.  Then the coyotes howled.  The last vestiges of the sun were encompassed by the black circle of the moon, but the outer rim of the sun continued to flicker, to circulate around the edges in silver, interspersed with bursts of red and orange, a pinwheel in the sky.  Each of us uttered exclamations of wonder. We took some video and snapped some pictures, but for the most part just watched something happen that you would never appreciate as being possible, no matter how many pictures you might have seen.  No matter how much the world explained in advance what you would be witnessing. 

When it was over and the sky lightened, we were all exhilarated.  Still am.  It had surpassed our expectations by an order of magnitude. Grandma, who has been walking this planet for almost 80 years, exhaled.  “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”   

The miracle is there.  It’s there every day, wherever you look.  Wherever there is life, it’s there. Including your own.  The choice we all face every day is whether to see it or not.