The ordinary miracle of existing is something we all can believe in

Supernatural miracles no longer hold any appeal for me. They’re almost certainly fantasies of human minds that are looking for the miraculous in the wrong place: in a realm beyond the physical universe.

Physicist Alan Lightman points us toward a genuine miracle in an Atlantic essay, “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing.” (That’s a gift link that should work for everybody.)

I can’t speak to whether Lightman gets the probability correct of someone with our DNA being the product of an egg fertilized by a sperm, but I’m totally on board with the astounding unlikelihood of me, or you, or anyone existing as the being we are right here, right now. After discussing the immensity of the universe in comparison to our minuscule selves, he writes:

It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all. Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event.

Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

Of course, there’s another way to look at this: the probability of us existing as the being we are right here, right now is 100% — given the stark reality of our existence.

This is brought home to me when I play my favorite Solitaire game on my iPhone, Klondike.

When the cards are dealt into seven stacks, with seven cards showing, sometimes I’ll be amazed at those cards. Maybe they’re all spades. Or include four of a kind. But actually every solitaire game I play is extremely improbable, because there are so many combinations of which seven cards will be showing out of the 52 cards in a deck.

But my mind focuses on certain combinations more than others. That’s a feature of my mind, not of how the cards are dealt. Likewise, Lightman’s ordinary miracle of existing is a feature of his mind, not of the universe. Which doesn’t really matter, because I share Lightman’s wonder at the simple fact of existence. ( wrote about this in a 2005 post, “Existence exists. Amazing!”

There’s something. And I’m part of it, as are you. This simple fact is so amazing, it should be a daily wonderment—the Wow! that keeps on wowing through all of life’s routines and trivialities.

Existence exists. Seemingly there could have been nothing, though this is a subject that philosophers love to debate: can “nothing” be? Parmenides, I seem to recall, said “no.” Calling something nothing makes it something—a nothing. Buddhists similarly speak of the emptiness of emptiness, though speaking in this fashion fills the void with words, displacing the emptiness.

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For me, existence pure and simple is absolutely real, though I’ve never seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted it. I have no idea what it is, this essence of everything that can’t be a thing itself and certainly isn’t nothing either. I feel it much more than I think it. Not emotionally, but like sensing an invisible presence in a dark room that you know you’ll never be able to put your finger on.

Yet, is there. Oh yes, is surely there. So there, it’s more there than solid, substantial things. Existence somehow can make us starkly aware of its omnipresence without revealing the barest hint of its essential nature (assuming it has one).

Lightman speaks of the ordinary miracle of existing in more down-to-earth terms, which I like a lot. Most of us take life for granted to a greater degree than perhaps we should. After all, not only is death inevitable, but we have no idea when it will come and this life that we’re living now will fade to black — likely forever.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous.

Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not have the luxury of pausing to take stock of such moments.

There is a little more to the story. There will never be another you in the future of the universe. (Some apologies are due to Buddhists and Hindus, who believe in rebirth, but even the reborn individual is not the same.) From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.