This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Well, there’s lots going on in the world this week, but the big one for me is the solar eclipse on Wednesday evening – followed by a huge perseid meteor shower. I’ll be watching the eclipse in Liverpool where we should get almost 92% coverage. I’d better not miss it – the next one will be in 2081 and I won’t be able to see anything by then.
In the distant past eclipses were often regarded as portentous, ominous, scary. In more recent times, as we have understood more about the science of the universe, an eclipse – whether partial or total – still captures the imagination and sets human minds a-wondering. Which is no bad thing. At least, for a couple of minutes, we’ll look up at the heavens instead of down at the traumas of the earth.
One of my earliest childhood memories was reading the ‘Peanuts’ cartoon where Charlie Brown sits on the edge of a cliff with Snoopy the dog and peruses the sky. It makes him wonder why he matters. And, from a very young age, I experienced that same sense of awe at the enormity of all that is Out There. Lying on the grass in Zimbabwe one night and looking up, I saw the depth of the visible universe and the billions of stars unseeable in England. Amazing.
Such experiences, though understandable in mechanical terms, still evoke a sense of wonder for most people. Three thousand years ago a poet captured this: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” That psalmist sought to comprehend human meaning in terms of God and creation. But, wonder and questioning are not the sole preserve of the religiously-minded.
The point here is that the experience of cosmic wonder provokes questions: Who am I and why do I matter anyway? And whereas the scientist asks specific and technical questions about how this universe came to be, many of us ask why we are here in the first place? Confusing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions is really unhelpful – especially, for example, when it leads people to dismiss the creation narratives in Genesis as ‘unscientific’ and, therefore, not credible. It’s poetry. And the question being asked by the poet was not the ‘how’ one, but the ‘why’ one. Ask the wrong question and you’ll get the wrong answer.
I hope there’ll be lots of us looking at the sky on Wednesday – and facing those existential questions. Not with fear or superstition, but with the stirrings of wonder and awe.