I will end with a final illustration of spiritual materialism, as I see it. There is very good scientific evidence that all the atoms in our bodies, except for hydrogen and helium, the two smallest atoms, were manufactured at the centers of stars. If you could tag each of the atoms in your body and follow them backwards in time, through the air that you breathed during your life, through the food that you ate, back through the geological history of the Earth, through the ancient seas and soil, back to the formation of the Earth out of the solar nebular cloud and then out into interstellar space, you could trace each of your atoms, those exact atoms, to particular massive stars in our galaxy’s past. At the end of their lifetimes, those stars exploded and spewed out their newly forged atoms into space, later to condense into planets and oceans and plants and your body at this moment. We have seen such stellar explosions with our telescopes and know they occur.
If, instead of going backwards in time, I were to go forward in time, to my death and beyond, the atoms in my body will remain, only they will be scattered about. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand. If I could label each of my atoms at this moment, imprint each with my Social Security number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants and trees, dissolved in the ocean, and then floated again to the air. And some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people. So, we are literally connected to the stars, and we are literally connected to future generations of people. In this way, even in a material universe, we are connected to all things future and past. I don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe in the miraculous.
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