The Eternal Riddle

I am a seeker of Truth.

You might guess that statement would be attributed to such soulful spirits as Gandhi, the Dali Lama, or Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Guess again.

The greatest scientific mind since Newton was also a spiritual pilgrim – Nobel laureate Albert Einstein.

Einstein died 50 years ago this month, and perhaps the portion of his bio that is most overlooked is his faith in the unproven – a higher being – God.

Albert Einstein is the embodiment of intellect coexisting with faith. And the lesson for the rest of us is, questions of religion, faith and God can indeed withstand the challenges of science.

His pursuit of a super-theory of everything included his pursuit, as Einstein said, to read the mind of God. In other words, Einstein’s faith accepted the unknown reality that eventually, science and religion would intersect.

Astronomer Carl Sagen wrote a novel in the 1990s that later became the Hollywood movie, Contact. The movie starred Mathew McConaughey as a religious leader and Jodie Foster as, you guessed it, an astronomer, who believes signals from space has directed her to build an Ark, of sorts -- a time machine.

The movie symbolizes the tug-o-war between science and faith;

I'm not against technology, doctor. I'm against the men who deify it at the expense of human truth.

What the makes the story compelling is how the movie applies the epiphany usually associated with a religious awakening and applies the language to a scientific experience;

I...had an experience. I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever. A vision of the universe, that tells us undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone.

Sagen captured the soul of Einstein.

Space; The final frontier? Einstein might disagree.

The soul; The final frontier. And perhaps, they intersect.