Spaced out.

I wonder what Richard Dawkins would make of me, a spiritual person, finding some of his writing inspiring? Yesterday’s Times science magazine, ‘Eureka', has extracts from his latest book, ‘The Magic of Reality’. He writes,

“Suppose we represent the nucleus of each carbon atom in the [diamond] crystal by a football, with electrons in orbit around it. On this scale the neighbouring footballs in the diamond would be more than 15km away.” “But,” he goes on, “each electron on our football scale, is much smaller than a gnat, and these miniature gnats are themselves several kilometres away from the footballs they are flying around.”

We human beings, likewise, are mostly empty space. So why can't we walk through walls? Ah - this is where Dawkins talks about 'forces' which I don't understand. I tell my daughter (a geo-physicist) about this article and she responds that if the whole human race were to be crushed together so that all the atomic space was squeezed out, the resultant mass would be no larger than a hazel nut. And, she reminds me, it was a hazel nut that Julian of Norwich imagined held in the palm of God’s hand. My daughter is a poet as well as a scientist. We share a lack of belief in God but we both manage to combine it with the kind of trust in the universe which Julian’s image of the hazel nut expresses. Neither of us can bring ourselves to adopt the description ‘atheist': too aggressive, while 'agnostic' is a bit wishy-washy. I prefer Richard Kearney’s term ‘anatheist’. (See his book ‘Anatheism') But why did William Blake write, "every stone breathes forth its joy..."? or why did David Waggoner write, "Stand still, the forest knows you are here..."? or why do so many speak of an 'atmosphere' which some places and buildings seem to exude? Maybe Richard Dawkins is so busy being an evangelical atheist that he doesn't have time to stop and appreciate what contemplatives and mystics of many religions have known about this universe all along.