edgar-mitchell

32
The Way of the Explorer
not only reinterprets much of 20th-century science, but also shows some
of its basic flaws.
In the towns we visited through these nomadic years, Louise and I
sought out local parishes where we found pastors and congregations with
sensibilities more or less compatible with our own—that is to say, concerned
with the deeper questions of purpose, destiny, and the human
condition. In West Newton, we found this companionship in the company
of Jim Remington, a young married man my age who pastored the local
Baptist church. On warm summer evenings Jim and I would sit out on the
patio and become lost in discussions that meandered from free will and
determinism to the nature of God, to the structure of the universe itself,
and how this new science I was becoming acquainted with illuminated our
understanding. Jim was an uncommon man of his vocation, in that he was
vitally interested in discussion that challenged Christian dogma. He was
never dogmatic in his own beliefs, having an intellectual bent that I liked
to think was similar to my own. I was coming to realize as an adult that it
was possible to place myself within the same sphere of influence as that of
a Baptist minister and still maintain an independence of mind. And perhaps
as a result I came to realize how my early fundamentalist upbringing
had shaped my thought, though I was fast on my way to becoming a dyedin-the-wool
agnostic. My mind, I knew, was somehow capable of containing
this paradox. Yet for many years I would harbor some hidden fear of
God, some fear brought to bear by the residue of that upbringing, a soft
whisper warning me of the eternal penalty for blasphemy or casual irreverence.
There was the sense that the potential for damnation lay in the
spoken word, and even perhaps in thought.
But this was my own shadowed background, one I ignored as Jim and
I sat in the cool evening air making rather erudite investigations into what
our place was in this wide world. The climate of inquiry, I silently told
myself, was sufficiently reverent for any kind-spirited Creator.
I haven’t always had an interest in the details of enigmatic scientific
problems. When I came to MIT I was a passable mathematician. The abstract
topography of science was a landscape I was comfortable moving
about, yet there were deep domains with which l struggled. But here I was
at one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning on the planet,
working on a project mandated by a president slain while I was in residence
there, all of which was in the interest of landing a man on the moon.
In spite of this, I had no interest in exploring the finer, capillary regions of
science, but preferred rather the broader issues of morphology and cosmology.
My interests lay in how things fit together. I saw mathematics
simply as a tool, a language, but one of various methods for obtaining a