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.
Quotes from the Book:
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.
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