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By Root 485 0

you know that your place in it was not foreordained, that it was not designed for us—indeed, that it was not designed at all. If we are nothing more than star stuff and biomass, how special life becomes. If the tape were played again and again without the appearance of our species, how extraordinary becomes our existence, and, correspondingly, how cherished. To share in the sublimity of knowledge generated by other human minds, and perhaps even to make a tiny contribution toward that body of knowledge that will be passed down through the ages—part of the cumulative wisdom of a single species on a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star on the remote edge of a not-so-unusual galaxy, itself a member of a cluster of galaxies billions of light years from nowhere, is sublime beyond words.

Since we are such a visual primate, perhaps images can help capture the feeling. The Hubble Telescope Deep Field photograph on the following page reveals as never before the rich density of galaxies in our neck of the universe, is as grand a statement about the sacred as any medieval cathedral. How vast is the cosmos. How contingent is our place. Yet out of this apparent insignificance emerges a glorious contingency—the recognition that we did not have to be, but here we are. In fact, compare this slice of the cosmos to two of the most hallowed and sacrosanct structures on Earth—both medieval in age but on opposite sides of the planet, literally and figuratively—Machu Picchu and Chartres Cathedral. Machu Picchu captures the numina through an interlocking relationship between nature and humanity that generated in me an almost mystical connection across space and time with the ancients who had once lived and loved atop this 8,000-foot precipice. This is the “lost city” in so many ways. When I stood inside Chartres Cathedral with my soulmate, lit candles, and we promised each other our eternal love, it was a more sacred moment than any I have experienced. Skeptics and scientists cannot experience the numinous? Nonsense. You do not need a spiritual power to experience the spiritual. You do not need to be mystical to appreciate the mystery. Standing beneath a canopy of galaxies, atop a pillar of reworked stone, or inside a transept of holy light, my unencumbered soul was free to love without constraint, free to use my senses to enjoy all the pleasures and endure all the pains that come with such freedom. I was enfranchised for life, emancipated from the bonds of restricting tradition, and unyoked from the rules written for another time in another place for another people. I was now free to try to live up to that exalted moniker—Homo sapiens—wise man.

Three views of grandeur: (clockwise from the upper left) A tiny slice of the universe as seen from the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on the Hubble Space Telescope, looking back 10 billion years to reveal hundreds of galaxies all packed into a space 1/140 the apparent size of the full Moon near the handle of the Big Dipper. Machu Picchu, the “lost city” of the Incas, as photographed by the author on the day of the “harmonic convergence” in June 1986, when hundreds of people encircled in a spiritual ceremony. Chartres Cathedral, the most consecrated of all medieval buildings. It is still unsurpassed for sacred sublimity.

AFTERWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

God on the Brain

About a decade ago when I began research on the question of why people believe in God, I asked a colleague in a religious studies program at Occidental College (where I was teaching at the time) to recommend the latest pathbreaking scientific work in this area. “William James’s 1890 Varieties of Religious Experience,” he responded sardonically, explaining that in his opinion the field was largely moribund.

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but his point was that with the exception of a handful of psychologists teaching at theological seminaries, mainstream social and cognitive scientists had largely ignored the question. This has changed dramatically in the past decade, as the renewed debate on the relationship of science