Why is the sky blue? One of my earliest memories is of me asking my mother that question. Her response was fairly quick and bouncy as I recall: “Because God made it that way.” Even at age two-and-some, that was not the answer I sought. I would be a sophomore in college before I both knew and understood the answer to that question.
I have never been satisfied with answers like that. I was born a Catholic, and even received a couple of sacraments, but by age nine, I’d had enough. The beliefs in the religion that was foisted upon me were baseless, or at best had no root in anything objective. Of course, at age nine, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it as such, so I just pitched a fit until Mom finally gave in and stopped dragging me to church.
Despite all of the rejected dogma, I cannot deny that I have something in me that makes me live. It is a “life force” as best as I can tell, and it is greater than the sum of my corporeal parts. Some would call it a spirit, or a soul, and if that’s the term to be used, then so be it. It goes beyond a simple desire to live. It greatly transcends mere existence. It drives me to do more, to be better, to seek answers, but it is also more than just ego, or ambition, or curiosity. Yet, I am compelled to ask, is it necessarily of divine origin? Remember, I am going to need a much better answer than a simple “yes.”
I discovered Carl Sagan like most people did back in 1980 or so when he published his series Cosmos. I credit him—along with my dad, the Carter Administration, the space program, and Mr. Spock—for fueling my fascination with science and my desire to become an engineer. In a segment of one episode, Sagan describes a two-dimensional universe. It is perfectly flat, as are all the creatures that inhabit it. There is no understanding of up. There is no down. A house would be a simple rectangle or some other empty shape. A creature’s body would be nothing more than a closed line representing skin, in which there would be flat organs that collectively comprised the creature.
Now imagine a three-dimensional being looking in on this two-dimensional universe. Where a flat creature is enjoying blissful privacy within the confines of his rectangle doing whatever it is that flat creatures do, we would be peering in on him and his neighbors and all their collective internal organs simultaneously without their knowledge. It would be an effortless feat.
