David Solway is an author, poet, and songwriter whose latest prose book is Profoundly Superficial (New English Review Press, 2025). His translation of Dov Ben Zamir’s collected poetry New Bottles, Old Wine (Little Nightingale Press) will be released in 2026.Modern science likes to present itself as the opposite of religion: no altar, no hymns, no creed — just equations, measurements, and the cool discipline of scientific falsifiability. Yet buried deep within this purportedly rationalist worldview is a concession so enormous it deserves a name of its own. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna put it bluntly: “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” The “free miracle,” he explained, is the appearance of all mass and energy forming the universe — plus the laws that govern them — in a single instant from nothing. In other words: scientific cosmology’s opening move is not an explanation but an admission.That is not an insult to science. It is simply a recognition of the paradox at the heart of our greatest theories. The universe is here. We can chart its after-effects with exquisite precision. But the question of origins remains a locked door, and the key appears to be missing. The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that the most important problems are not the ones we can casually “solve,” but the ones that force us to revise our idea of what a solution even is.The most stubborn case is gravity, the universe’s unruly fourth force. Scientists have managed to plausibly unify the other three: the strong atomic force, the weak atomic force, and electromagnetism. Gravity remains the dissident. Sir Isaac Newton treated it in terms of absolute space and time. Albert Einstein reimagined gravity as the curvature of spacetime. Both, though, are standalone models. And the central difficulty persists: how do we “quantize” gravity, bringing it into the fold with the rest?Even if gravity were to yield, the deeper crack remains. At the level of quantum physics, we meet probability, non-locality, and discontinuity. At the classical level — the world of tables and planets and falling apples — we meet continuity, determinism, and causal sequence. The two orders of reality do not fit. They are so different that they should not, mathematically and conceptually, even coexist in the same universe. And yet they do. We somehow live inside a cosmological “society” whose separate “classes” operate under a permanent “constitution” — a workable agreement that blends incompatibles without telling us how the agreement was brokered. How can all of this be?.The modern-day reader may feel a familiar temptation: science will soon deliver the missing equation, and all will be reconciled, without any resort to faith — let alone God. But given what we actually know, perhaps that hope is itself a kind of secular eschatology, a promise of salvation in mathematical form.This is where the idea of “miracle” returns — not as a cheap interruption of physical and mathematical laws, but as a name for the fact that these laws exist at all, and that seemingly irreconcilable laws in fact cooperate somehow. The emergence of the classical physical world from a seemingly unconnected quantum base is precisely such a rupture: a conceptual break that cannot even be pictured, let alone explained. The universe is not only strange; it is unprecedented. It is, as it were, a violation of the nothing.None of this forces us into a tidy religious box. I am not a “believer” in any organized religion. But I do take seriously the testimony of minds who have looked into the abyss and refused to call it empty. Physicist Paul Davies has argued that the universe is not a byproduct of purposeless forces, but something made — an artifact of intent. Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of the laser, Charles Townes, has gone further, writing: “I strongly believe in the existence of God, based on intuition, observation, logic, and also scientific knowledge.” One may disagree with both scientific giants. The point is that the question will not go away.If our best theories cannot finally explain why there is something rather than nothing, or how time and space arise, or why radically incompatible quantum and classical realities form a working alliance, then we may have no end-choice but to admit what our age finds hardest: ignorance, limits, mystery. To concede this is not to retreat into superstition. It is to recover intellectual humility — and, with it, a more accurate sense of what human life is for.Perhaps the true “theory of everything” is not a final equation. Perhaps it is a stance: the capacity to live inside the unresolved, to perceive the world as marvellous rather than merely malleable, and to respond to existence with gratitude rather than boredom. The world is thick with small “pnemes”, a word I’ve coined to signify “spiritual particles” — those seemingly chance and at times incongruous moments that feel intended, as though reality itself were winking at us.The real question, then, is not only how the universe began, but how we are to meet it now. We can chase unification forever. Or we can recognize that the most astonishing fact is already here: a world that exists, holds together — and invites our wonder.David Solway is an author, poet, and songwriter whose latest prose book is Profoundly Superficial (New English Review Press, 2025). His translation of Dov Ben Zamir’s collected poetry New Bottles, Old Wine (Little Nightingale Press) will be released in 2026.The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
