Everything I Know About the Universe

 

Meditations on Reality and Spirituality from a Doctor, a Patient, a Scientist, and a Reluctant Believer

 Nonfiction

Date Published: June 29, 2024

 

Written from the perspective of a doctor and scientist, Everything that I Know About the Universe is a selection of essays explaining why we need to rethink some of our basic assumptions about science and theology and how the two fields of thought can coexist. The need to ask where we came from and why we're here is a fundamental part of being human. This text seeks to take those two questions and reframe them to show how they can be scientifically answered, but spiritually informed, with appeals made to evolutionary biology, quantum mechanics, cosmology, and large number theory. Along the way, the author lays out definitions for the mind, consciousness, and spirituality, and shows that even if we can't have definitive answers to the big existential questions of life, asking those questions is one of the most important things that we can do. The essays also delve into some of the most important critiques of traditional religious and scientific perspectives on the universe.

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Quotes from "Everything I Know About the Universe"

Spiritual enrichment is an important but underrecognized component of how all of us ought to nurture ourselves. Why are we here? How can we feel like we have purpose if we can't even try to answer this question? We emphasize physical fitness and intellectual enrichment, but we spend much less time and effort on our spiritual health.

 

While seeing people helped by the sciences has been intellectually satisfying, witnessing how we deal with disease has deepened my own spiritual curiosity. On the frontlines of diagnosing and treating disease, I've witnessed various relationships manifest between spirituality and suffering. During and after periods of suffering, we are often more likely to ask the bigger questions of life. With all the trials and hardships that we endure, we ask ourselves, what is it all for? In our darkest moments, it's an even more compelling question.

 

Why are we here? What is the purpose of the universe? These are questions that we are born with, and they weigh heavily on our minds and on how we relate to each other. But as we grow and develop into adults, the big questions become supplanted by smaller, daily questions: How should we pay our bills? What should we eat for dinner? Should we make a particular plan or arrangement? These smaller, daily questions stack up and often distract us from thinking of ourselves as spiritual beings.

 

The deepening problems of psychological pathology also speak to a society that is in increasingly desperate need of spiritual nourishment. We are becoming more isolated. We are carrying a more formidable sense of isolation into illness and old age. This exacerbates the already inflated costs of providing care to the elderly and those with chronic illness. Rates of isolation and the resultant depression that we feel contribute to psychological morbidity and mortality, with increasing rates of suicide and drug use. Isolation is an increasing epidemic, and it magnifies the disconnectedness that comes from an increasingly materialistic world.

 

If you created a map Human intelligence and consciousness are extremely rare phenomena, and the pathway that the universe has mapped towards creating our level of intelligence is simultaneously exceedingly tenuous and ultimately inevitable. There is only one way to create human-level intelligence that we know of, and that is by creating the entire universe. But from what we know of the laws of physics and biology, as well as the interplay of those laws, we are not only rare and difficult to produce, but also, we are the inevitable, ultimate, consequence of the total sum of the laws of the universe. of almost any individual feature or quantity of the observable universe, and you tried to estimate or assess the human experience and delineate its scope relative to that map, you would conclude that we are so infinitesimal that it can hardly be said that we even exist at all.

 

Whether you believe that consciousness is endowed by a divine creator or by a process that is purely mechanistic,it seems both spiritually and intellectually nourishing for us to actualize this rare, unusual, potent gift and use it to understand the universe even more clearly.

 

How is it possible that you could have come into existence? It takes quadrillions of atoms smashing together and spinning in the ensuing explosion for 13.8 billion years in a stew of incalculable energy and culminating in the narrowest of outcomes. Only this universe could have created you, and it only could have created you through a consequence that is both infinitely improbable and ultimately inevitable. Everything in the universe sang in unison over an unimaginable expanse or space, time, and matter in order to create the symphony that reached a chorus in the moment of your existence

 

If God is indeed omniscient, the tremendous intellectual curiosity of humans must have been a facet of our design and intention. The intense urge for discovery and explanation of causality is maybe one of the most central defining features of human behavior. Scientific progress should be treated by all religions as a manifestation of one of the most central and therefore one of the most sacred characteristics of our existence as humans.