If I really stop to think about it, I can pinpoint three moments that collectively cemented my belief in a higher power and an afterlife.
The first occurred after my first semester of college, while I was sitting on the countertop at a family friend’s house. The father of the home, a kind-hearted neurosurgeon with a trace of lofty intellectual disdain, asked about the theology classes I was taking as part of the required curriculum. He knew this was new territory for me and, giving me a serious look, asked: What’s the most important aspect of a relationship with God?
I remember feeling hot under the collar, put on the spot in front of others. I paused, then said, “I don’t know. I guess you just need to believe.” The look on his face is something I’ll never forget. He seemed stunned and mumbled, “Yeah... that’s it.” I felt relieved in the moment—but in the years since, I came to understand that something had spoken through me.
The second moment hit me in Organic Chemistry class, in the middle of a lecture on stereochemistry, specifically, enantiomers: pairs of chemically identical molecules that are mirror images of each other, like left and right hands. They can’t be superimposed, no matter how you twist or turn them. My professor, a passionate Greek chemist with wild lectures and even wilder salt-and-pepper hair, said there’s no scientific explanation for the existence of the L-enantiomer in life’s building blocks. This simple fact convinced him as proof of a higher being. His words entered my ears and shocked me to my core. I was not expecting to hear that, especially not in Orgo I. (I didn’t have the same professor or the same fascination for Orgo II, and my grade reflected that.)
The third moment came on June 19, 2001, when my father died suddenly despite my attempt to resuscitate him. That was the day I was brought to my knees. There was my life before that moment, and there is everything after.
This month, we read In My Time of Dying, Sebastian Junger’s newest book about his near-death experience and his effort to make sense of it through physics, medicine, and the shared accounts of others who brushed up against the unknown and lived to tell their stories. He had mentioned working on this book when he joined us on the Glorious Professionals podcast back in 2021. Reading it now reminded me of another book that fuses science and story: Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. It was the last book I ever recommended to my father and the last one he read.
In In My Time of Dying, Sebastian writes:
“There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be one to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it.”
It’s the L-enantiomer—and so much more—that had to go right for us to even be here.
This image, one of the first taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, shows a tight grouping of five galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet—the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. In his book, Sebastian shares that his fiercely rationalist father never wanted to look up at the stars. It was too overwhelming to even consider.
In reading this book, I was struck by how someone with so much intelligence and life experience—so close to accepting the existence of something beyond—could let that possibility collapse in the final pages, like Schrödinger’s cat disappearing back into the box. And yet, even without proof or certainty, he still writes:
“…death is simply where the veil of belief gets rent to reveal a greater system beyond.”
Maybe faith isn’t the opposite of reason. Maybe it’s what remains when reason has taken you as far as it can. And maybe belief, quiet, reluctant, or even stunned into silence, isn’t the end of the search, but the beginning of reverence.
