Wonder and Awe
Fr. Bart Geger, SJ
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
--anonymous
One muggy summer day when I was in eighth grade, I was moping around the
house, bored out of my skull, when I found a paperback book lying on my parents’
cupboard. It was Cosmos, by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. I cracked it open to the
first page. By the end of the first paragraph I was hooked. By the end of the chapter I
wanted to be an astronomer. By the time I finished the book two days later, I’d fallen in
love with science.
The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of
the Cosmos stir us--there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation,
as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the
greatest of mysteries.
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost
somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic
perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is
young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have
made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place
within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have
evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival.
I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a
mote of dust in the morning sky.
These explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination will often
carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables
us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond
measure--in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe. 1
I read as many of Sagan’s books as I could find. By the time I was a seventeen I
saved enough money from my jobs as a busboy and janitor to buy a telescope. From my
backyard I could see the rings of Saturn the four biggest moons around Jupiter. The
Moon’s mountains and craters seemed so close that I could see their shadows on the lunar
surface. When I pointed the telescope at Venus I saw a bright yellow disc that goes
through phases like the Moon; and once, when the sky was really clear and Mars was
relatively close, I could see its polar caps.
I went to the library to get books on astronomy. I read that Saturn’s rings are
particles of dust from an exploded satellite. The four moons of Jupiter were first
discovered by Galileo Galilei after he invented the telescope. That discovery led him to
the conclusion that Earth could not have been the center of the universe, as most people
believed in his day. In a weird sort of way I felt like I’d witnessed history itself. The
white caps on Mars are what’s left of water that used to flow freely in rivers and oceans.
Whatever happened to turn the planet into a frozen wasteland? Did life once exist there?
Did a huge meteor knock it out of its orbit? Could the same thing happen to us?
1Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 4.
Suddenly the sky didn’t seem so safe and predictable anymore. I learned Venus appears
bright yellow because it is completely covered in clouds of sulfuric gas that raised its
surface temperature to a hellish 950 degrees--hot enough to melt lead.
But I didn’t really have any idea what awe feels like until I pointed my telescope at
the stars. I could see so many, the sky was no longer black but misty white. Is it possible
our Sun is the only star that supports life? I increased the magnification as much as I
could, thinking the stars would appear round like the planets. But they remained no more
than bright pinpoints. The stars are farther away than I ever imagined; so far, in fact, that
their light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, takes years to reach Earth. The closest
star (other than our Sun) is Alpha Centauri, which you can’t see unless you’re below the
equator. Its light takes 4.3 years to reach us. When we look at Alpha Centauri with the
naked eye or a telescope, we don’t see it as it is now, but as it was 4.3 years ago. And
that’s the closest star! Most of the others are hundreds or thousands of light-years away.
Time travel is possible! All we have to do is look at the sky.
I don’t have the telescope anymore, but part of me still dreams of being an
astronomer. I think that’s one reason I wanted to be a Jesuit. From what I’d read, I knew
they were big into astronomy. Forty craters on the moon are named for Jesuit
astronomers. Obviously these guys didn’t think science was an enemy of their faith.
They even run two observatories in Arizona and Italy. In 1992, when I was in the
novitiate (that’s Jesuit boot-camp), I wrote the Jesuits in Arizona, asking permission to
spend the summer at their observatory. I’d mop floors and wash dishes if they’d let me
see the place. The Jesuits politely refused. An international conference of astrophysicists
would be there that summer, and there wasn’t any room. But the possibility is always
there. A few years ago a young Jesuit friend of mine spent the summer at Castel
Gandalfo, the Italian observatory, studying Jupiter’s moons.
Occasionally I think back to the hot summer day that changed my life. What was it
about Dr. Sagan’s book that captured me? I didn’t know then, but I know now. The man
was filled with wonder. Life was never boring for him. He didn’t know how to be bored.
Where we see rocks, he saw million-year-old relics. Where we see simple objects like
apples and tables, he saw beings composed of particles so small and fast that they dart in
and out of our reality. His life was exciting because he understood, like few others do,
the mystery that surrounds us and fills our lives with wonder, excitement--and especially
humility. Some people think science is close to answering all our questions. Dr. Sagan
knew better. The more scientists learn, the more they realize they don’t know. And that
was fine with Dr. Sagan. He loved mysteries. He even made a list of some that filled
him with wonder.
● Could there be an undiscovered integer between six and seven?
● Could there be an undiscovered chemical element between the atomic
number six (which is carbon) and atomic number 7 (which is nitrogen)?
● A growing cancer sends out an all-points bulletin to the cells lining
adjacent blood vessels: “We need blood,” the message says. The
endothelial cells obligingly build blood vessels to supply the cancer cells
with blood. How does this come about?
● You mix violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red paints and make a
murky brown. Then you mix light of the same colors and you get white.
What’s going on?
● Many animals behave strangely just before an earthquake. What do
they know that seismologists don’t?
● The ancient Aztec and the ancient Greek words for “God” are nearly
the same. Is this evidence of some contact or commonality between the
two civilizations, or should we expect occasional such coincidences
between two wholly related languages merely by chance? Or could, as
Plato thought in the Cratylus, certain words be built into us from birth?
● The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in the Universe as a
whole, disorder increases as time goes on. (Of course, locally worlds and
life and intel-ligence can emerge, at the cost of a decrease in order
elsewhere in the Universe.) But if we live in a Universe in which the
present Big Bang expansion will slow, stop, and be replaced by a
contraction, might the Second Law then be reversed? Can effects precede
causes?
● The human body uses concentrated hydrochloric acid in the stomach to
dissolve food and aid digestion. Why doesn’t the hydrochloric acid
dissolve the stomach?
● Why is ordinary ice white, but pure glacial ice blue?
● The technology now exists to move individual atoms around, so long
and complex messages can be written on a microscopic scale. It is also
possible to make machines the size of molecules. Rudimentary examples
of both these “nano-technologies” are now well-demonstrated. Where
does this take us in another few decades?
● Life has been found miles below the surface of the earth. How far
down does it go?2
2Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House: New York,
1996). pp. 330-333.
Now I’d like to list a few wonders of my own. Many of them are so ordinary that
you might have assumed scientists already know the answer. They don’t.
● Why do objects fall to the ground?
● Bees communicate the coordinates of new pollen sources using an
elaborate dance that triangulates between the Sun, the pollen, and the hive.
How do bees know trigonometry?
● How do birds know how to build nests without being taught?
● Languages continually evolve toward greater efficiency, e.g., we
gradually drop awkward words like “whom” and “whence”. The
implication is that primitive languages emerged already complex. How is
this possible?
● Caterpillars to butterflies: there’s something downright spooky about
that.
● All objects are composed of atoms so far apart that 90% of what we see
is really empty space. So why doesn’t my hand pass right through the
table?
● Of the infinite number of people that could exist but never will, why do
I exist?
● A certain cicada species plants its eggs between the “shoulder blades”
of another particular insect, the only vulnerable part of its body. How are
cicadas born with knowledge of another species’ anatomy?
● How in the world did a small band of illiterate peasants like the ancient
Jews outlive the Roman Empire and the Ming Dynasty?
Our sense of wonder isn’t limited to things we don’t understand. We’re often filled
with awe by things we do understand--or think we do, anyway. I don’t know about you,
but I’m amazed that a two-hundred ton airplane can get off the ground, or that television
images can move invisibly through the air, or that detectives can solve a ten-year old
murder using a strand of hair, or that physicists can plot a probe’s trajectory so that it hits
a precise spot on a planet 20 million miles away and moving at 40,000 miles per hour.
All this, and we still can’t balance the federal budget.
Wonder is everywhere, if you open your eyes.
My admiration for Dr. Sagan matured as I got older. I discovered my hero had faults
and prejudices like everyone else. Dr. Sagan believed science was the answer for everything. He said ridiculous things about religion. He lapsed into decidedly unscientific
thinking about anything he didn’t like. He often overstepped his bounds, making
statements about things he clearly didn’t understand. He could also be frighteningly
sarcastic. During an interview shortly before his death in 1996, he was asked whether he
ever felt the desire to pray. (He was suffering from cancer.) Dr. Sagan replied that he
was glad he never humiliated himself by stooping to that level.
But that’s okay. In a strange sort of way, discovering his faults deepened my
admiration for him. I suppose it’s not unlike the feeling most twenty-year-olds get when
they wake up one morning and realize their parents are also their friends. If we cannot
admire a man with whom we disagree, it says more about us than him.
I regret not writing a letter to Dr. Sagan before he died, thanking him for making the
universe such a fascinating place for me.
WHAT IS WONDER?
Philosophy begins with wonder.
--Aristotle
We use the word wonder in two ways. First, it’s a feeling of awe or reverence we
get when face-to-face with great beauty or majesty. Sometimes a starry night leaves us
feeling small and insignificant; at other times we feel grateful to exist in a universe filled
with so many possibilities, so many worlds to explore. A newborn baby excites its
parents with awe. They look at the crinkled little face, the tiny fingers and toes, and
know in their gut they did nothing to create or deserve such a gift, that something far
more wonderful than they can possibly imagine is at work here. A young man sitting in
his room suddenly realizes that there is no good reason why he had to be born--that it was
possible that he might never have existed at all. Gratitude and a certain kind of
nervousness washes over him.
This kind of wonder doesn’t depend on our ignorance. We know perfectly well the
stars are Suns like our own, but we still gaze at them with fascination. We know what
causes mountains too--the collision of tectonic plates and such--but we’re still
overwhelmed when we see the Rocky Mountains.
Wonder leaves us with feelings of humility and gratitude. That’s why a healthy
sense of wonder is essential to happiness. We will never know how precious life is--or
how precarious--unless we take time to appreciate what’s all around us.
When one sees effects whose causes are hidden from him, he wonders about the cause .
--St. Thomas Aquinas
Second, wonder is curiosity we feel when faced with mystery. Children wonder why
the sky is blue and where babies come from. Adults wonder what lies beyond the
boundaries of the universe, or whether anything awaits them after death. This kind of
wonder is what motivates us to find truth in the first place. If we never wondered about
things, we’d never ask questions. That’s why Aristotle said philosophy (the love of
wisdom) begins with wonder. He could have said the same about science and theology.
To recap what we’ve covered so far, wonder causes in us a sense of gratitude,
humility, awe, reverence, excitement, and curiosity. It makes sense, then, that anyone
without wonder would be largely boring, arrogant, presumptuous, and unconcerned about
the truth. Would you hang around with someone who never took an interest in anything?
who never seemed grateful for the world in which he lives? who regarded mysteries with
more irritation than appreciation? Too many people are like that already. It cannot be
that way with you.
Those who does not experience wonder are as good as dead.
--Albert Einstein
Wonder--in both senses of the word--is a distinctly human phenomenon. Animals do
not experience awe or wonder about causes. This should tell us something: namely, that
people who do not experience wonder are not as fully human as they could be.
This is the moral of Stanley Kubrick’s famous sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In
2001 an alien object is found buried under the lunar surface. Months later a five-man
expedition is sent to Jupiter to locate the source of the object. Accompanying them is a
computer with artificial intelligence named H.A.L. You notice two things about the film
right away. First, it’s filled with beautiful scenes of nature, outer space, and man’s
technological accomplishments. Second, the film is boring. Kubrick deliberately made it
that way. The reason it’s boring is that human beings in the 21st century have completely
lost their sense of wonder. All their conversations are banal and repetitive. In one scene,
Dr. Haywood Floyd discusses the alien object with a panel of scientists, and even though
Dr. Floyd describes it as “the greatest discovery in the history of science,” his voice lacks
any excitement or enthusiasm. In another scene, he calls his daughter from the Moon to
wish her happy birthday. The Earth rotates majestically in the window, but Dr. Floyd
does not once look outside. He takes it all for granted.
In an ironic twist, HAL is the only “human” character on the Jupiter mission. Frank
and Dave, the two astronauts not in suspended animation, are boring as death. All they
do is eat, sleep, and make boring conversation. When the ship encounters something
interesting, HAL wants Frank and Dave to investigate, but they show no interest.
2001: A Space Odyssey was made for an intelligent audience. It has no explosions
or nudity to keep the audience watching. But if you’re patient until the end, and watch
the film carefully, Kubrick rewards you with powerful and symbolic images. For
example, near the end of the film, HAL kills the astronaut Frank by severing his air
supply during a space-walk. HAL did this because the astronauts were plotting to shut
him off. But HAL wanted to find out what waited for them at Jupiter--much more than
Frank and Dave did--and HAL was not about to let two mindless “humans” with no sense
of wonder and mystery stop him. Kubrick’s audience does not feel particularly sad for
Frank; how could anyone feel sorry for a person who never appreciated his life in the first
place? But ironically, most of us feel sorry for HAL when Dave finally manages to
disconnect him.
The end of the film is extremely powerful. At the risk of revealing too much, Dave
finally realizes just how boring and shallow his life has been. Just before he dies, he
reaches out with a sense of wonder (to what, you’ll have to find out!) and is transformed
into a radically new being.
The film won “Best Picture” of 1968.