The Miraculous from the Material

Introduction


I call myself a spiritual materialist. By “materialist,” I mean that I believe the world is made of material stuff, and nothing more, and that material obeys rules and laws. At the same time, like many of us, I have “spiritual” experiences: feelings of connection to other human beings and to the larger cosmos, moments of communion with wild animals, the appreciation of beauty, wonder. Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. We human beings stand in awe of those phenomena. That’s part of my view of spirituality.

I became a materialist early in life. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I installed a laboratory in a large closet off my second-floor bedroom. There, I collected little bottles of various chemicals like potassium and molybdenum and sulfuric acid, petri dishes and test tubes, beautiful glass beakers and boiling flasks, Bunsen burners, motors of different kinds, a microscope and glass slides, resistors and capacitors, batteries, photoelectric cells, coils of wire of varying thick­nesses and grades, delicate pipettes, filters and crucibles, voltmeters and ohmmeters, scales, pressure gauges, and random devices I’d found in the discard pile of an electrical supply store. It was in that home­made lab that I began my investigations of the material world.

I loved to build things. I read in Popular Science or some other magazine that the time for a pendulum to make a complete swing, called its period, is proportional to the square root of the length of the pendulum. What a fascinating rule! But I had to see if it was true. With string and a fishing weight for the bob at the end of the string, I constructed pendulums of various sizes. I measured their lengths with a ruler and timed their periods with a stopwatch. The rule was true. And it worked every time, without exception. Using the rule I had verified, I could even predict the periods of new pendulums even before I built them. Evidently, the physical world, or at least this little corner of it, obeyed reliable, logical, quantitative laws.

In high school, in collaboration with a friend, I built a light-borne communication device. The heart of the thing was a mouthpiece made out of the lid of a shoe polish can with the flat section of a balloon stretched tightly across it. Onto this rubber membrane we attached a tiny piece of silvered glass, which acted as a mirror. A light beam was focused onto the tiny mirror and reflected from it. When a person talked into the mouthpiece, the rubber vibrated. In turn, the tiny mirror quivered, and those minute quiverings produced a shimmering in the reflected beam, like the shimmering of sunlight reflected from a trembling lake. In this manner, the information in the speaker’s voice was precisely encoded into light, each rise and dip of uttered sound translating into a brightening or dimming of the beam. After its reflection, the fluttering ray of light traveled across the room to our receiver, which we built from largely off-the-shelf stuff: a photocell to convert varying intensities of light into varying intensities of electrical current, an amplifier, and a microphone to convert electri­cal current into sound. Finally, the original voice was reproduced at the other end. Looking back on this project decades later, I still regard the contraption as miraculous. Yet I knew exactly how it worked. I had put it together piece by piece. (In college, I also learned how photocells and microphones work.) As with my pendulums, here was evidence that mechanism and cause underlay the workings of the world. There was no need to invoke magic or the supernatural or any nonmaterial essence to explain earthly phenomena.

The physical world was miraculous all on its own.

At the same time I was forming these materialist views of the cos­mos, I also observed some amazing spectacles. With my microscope, I discovered an entire world, invisible to the naked eye. In a thimbleful of water from a nearby pond, I saw tiny creatures wriggling and glid­ing about, shaped like ellipses with little waving hairs. Paramecia. I saw roundish blobs, pulsating with smaller blobs inside them. I saw other minuscule organisms, hundreds of times smaller than a grain of sand, gyrating, turning, throbbing, sporting about.

Our family took vacations near Kentucky Lake, about 175 miles northeast of Memphis, where I grew up. Many mornings, if I rose early, I could see a mist hanging low over the lake. Ambers and laven­ders and mossy green hues would refract in the air for an hour, then melt away like some rare species of plant in bloom for only a few hours.

In college, I had my first look through a good telescope and saw the rings of Saturn. Anyone who hasn’t seen them should. They are perfect circles. They are so perfect and pure that you think they couldn’t be real. You think that nothing in nature could attain such perfection. And yet there they were, almost a billion miles away, austere, cold, and crisp, floating in silent perfection.

Understanding the material and scientific underpinnings of these spectacular phenomena hasn’t diminished my awe and amazement one iota. So I don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe in the miraculous. The miraculous abounds, and the material world and its laws are quite enough to explain it. And that too is miraculous.