For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Whatever your ancestry, the list of wars, raids, plagues, famines, and droughts your genetic material had to overcome is stunning.

“Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose. It drives us to accumulate better data.”

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” It applies to nations, religions, philosophies, and cultures, too.

How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

My parents taught me that the provable, tangible, verifiable things were sacred, that sometimes the most astonishing ideas are clearly profound, but that when they get labeled as “facts,” we lose sight of their beauty. It doesn’t have to be this way. Science is the source of so much insight worthy of ecstatic celebration.

Religion, at its best, facilitates empathy, gratitude, and awe. Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams. My hope is that I can merge these into some new thing that will serve my daughter, my family, and you, dear reader, as we navigate—and celebrate—the mysterious beauty and terror of being alive in our universe.

All these losses feel connected. They all pull me back to the original heartbreak of my life: the loss of my father.

But as I grew, I realized the puzzle had no edges, no borders. It went on forever in all directions. Every new piece just revealed how many more pieces were still missing. I came to understand that I could never get to the complete picture.