Trip #21 -- NYC for Science and Transcendence

I interrupt my series of posts on the book I’m writing to revert back to a special one-episode travelogue. I’m sitting in the Delta lounge at LaGuardia airport, on my way home from NYC. Colin and I were here for a few things the last two days related to the podcast we make for BioLogos. Traveling together like this has been a pretty frequent occurrence for us the last few years. In fact, sitting outside at Ray’s Pizza on 7th Ave for lunch, we counted up 21 podcast trips we’ve taken (sometimes with other people too). Yesterday I interviewed Alan Lightman for an episode and told him that doing this podcast has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my professional career. Going places and seeing interesting things has certainly been a big part of that. Here’s a quick recap of this trip.

I left South Bend airport Wednesday morning, but there was a massive storm between us and Detroit, so the plane was rerouted from what is normally a 25 minute flight. At one point I had Google maps open on the flight (which you can do on airplane mode, by the way), and saw that we were south of Cincinnati. Talk about a detour! That made me miss my connection for LaGuardia, but there was another flight a couple hours later. I landed, took a bus, then a subway and found may way to our hotel by Central Park. I had tried to set up a couple of meetings for Wednesday night, but they didn’t work out, so Colin and I took the subway downtown to a jazz club, which was very cool. I play the upright bass occasionally at church (probably better to say I play with an upright bass occasionally), and was in awe at the proficiency of this guy. The rest of the group was pretty smooth too.

Arthur’s Tavern in Greenwich Village.

The next morning, we met a BioLogos friend at the American Museum of Natural History, and he gave us a guided tour through the human evolution section. At one point we heard a familiar voice and wandered over to see Francis Collins giving a speech about evolution and Christian faith (he wasn’t really there… it was an exhibit).

David Lahti, Colin Hoogerwerf, and me, with Francis Collins hovering digitally in the background.

After a couple hours of the public exhibits, a museum staff member we know took us up the back stairs to his office to talk about Neanderthals, the history of wine, and lemurs.

Then Colin and I had to head downtown to the main event of this trip. Another BioLogos friend was hosting an event at a fancy meeting space, to screen a documentary by Alan Lightman on science and the transcendent. This friend has a grant for the project, and part of it is for public dissemination, so he asked if we’d be interested in making a podcast episode about it. Of course we were, so we showed up at the event with our recording equipment. But before it started, Alan Lightman agreed to record an episode with me about his work. He’s a theoretical physicist and a novelist. He’s not a person of faith, and at one point I called him an atheist, but he objected to that. We had a fun conversation about the transcendent and miraculous experiences he has had, which he thinks are really remarkable and can’t be explained by science… but neither does he want to invoke anything beyond the material. That episode will come out on the Language of God feed in a couple of weeks. It was pretty fun.

That’s Alan Lightman and me posing with each other’s book.

Then there was the public event for the screening of the film, and then an hour-long panel discussion afterward. The panel was “moderated” by Robert Lawerence Kuhn, who is pretty well known for hosting the PBS series “Closer to Truth.” I put moderated in scare quotes, because I’m pretty sure he didn’t set the standard for moderators and drawing out interesting conversation from the other panelists… he spoke more than everyone else combined, and there was more than a little dismay ruffling through the audience by the end. But it certainly made for an interesting evening.

Our friend, Brandon Vaidyanathan standing, introduces the panel for the evening.

After the event, we stay around and hob-knobbed for another hour, and then walked about 40 blocks home, through Times Square, where at 10:30pm on a Thursday night, it was absolutely packed with people.

This morning I had a couple of work things to tend to, and then we decided to make maximum usage of the unlimited Metro passes we got and go down to the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. I’ve been there once before, and like that time it moved me to tears remembering that day.

However, I also feel bad about feeling bad, when there are so many worse things happening around the world on a fairly regular basis. It was also kind of surreal standing by Wall Street as the financial markets crash for the second day in a row due to a particular view of American nationalism that has taken root. When you take public transportation like we did, people who descended from European immigrants several hundred years ago like I do, are definitely in the (sometimes extreme) minority. But these more recent immigrants are Americans too, the vast majority of whom have the same legal right to be here that I do. And it’s difficult for me to understand how my ancestors coming 300 years looking for a better life ago gives me some kind of morally superior status to those coming today looking for a better life. Those early Europeans didn’t get here first, if that’s the claim that grounds your intuitions. They simply had better weapons when they got here and could subdue the people who did get here first.

Travel like this gives me a bigger view of the world than I get in northern Indiana and southwest Michigan where I hang out most of the time. I wish you could all come along to experience it for yourselves, but perhaps reading about such trips does a little something.

Now I need to get back to writing “The Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens.” My little journey to NYC somehow fits into that bigger picture of our species and who we should become. See you next time.