Cancer refers to the disease, not the constellation, yet the disease is linked to the cosmos in my own mind.

A little more than a year ago, I underwent surgery for bladder cancer at White Plains hospital in White Plains, N.Y. A superficial but high-grade tumor roughly the size of a silver dollar was removed. A good-news, bad-news kind of thing. “High-grade” meant that it was an aggressive tumor, while “superficial” meant that it had not invaded the muscularis propria, the medical term for the bladder’s muscle wall. If it had, removal of the entire organ might have been necessary. Radical cystectomy, it’s called. Relieved that I would not have to spend the rest of what remains of my life pissing into a freezer bag belted to my waist, I then had six weeks of immunotherapy: the tuberculosis vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, BCG for short, was injected into my bladder through a urinary catheter. BCG tricks the immune system into thinking it has been invaded by TB,thus mobilizing it for war against any attacker, including re-emergent cancer cells.

Because bladder cancers carry a high risk of relapse, check ups, called cystoscopies, are performed every three months for a year following surgery (and every six months to a year thereafter for five years). Once again, a catheter wriggles up the urinary tract, this time tipped by a tiny camera that projects images of your bladder onto a computer screen.
The four cystoscopies I’ve had so far have shown me to be cancer-free; but given the high rate of recurrence, it will be a while before I uncork the champagne.

To paraphrase what Samuel Johnson said about being sentenced to hang, being diagnosed with cancer tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Things that had seemed important become not so important; the supposedly great events of one’s times, the wars and crimes and follies of humankind, fade into a background hiss as you face the fact that your body, the body you have fed and bathed and exercised all your life, that has been your friend, has turned against you, and may do so again, its traitorous, malignant cells multiplying faster than horny rabbits. Your thoughts take on an eschatological bent as you contemplate the possibility, or probability, that you might die sooner than you’d expected. Let me note, tangentially, that I’d come to terms with my own death in Vietnam, at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. However, though death by any other name is still death, there is a difference between confronting it as a young warrior on the battlefield, where it is swift, violent, and cloaked in the mantle of the heroic, and confronting it as an old man with a potentially terminal disease that might take months or years to finish you off. I do not fear death itself; but I do dread the process of dying. Still clear in my memory is the picture of an older cousin who died a decade ago after a courageous, 12-year struggle with a rare blood cancer: tubes in every orifice except his mouth, more tubes stuck in his veins, his mind half gone from drugs and morphine drips, thrashing and moaning on his hospital bed.

I’ve been led to ask questions that, before my diagnosis, I would have pooh-poohed as the sort that you might hear in a philosophy major’s dorm room at the University of Chicago. What is the meaning of life? Does my life have a purpose? Will its inevitable end be a passage into an after-life or into oblivion? These solitary interrogations inevitably lead to bigger questions: Does the human race exist for a reason, or are we all children of aimless evolutionary forces, strutting our hours upon the stage to no purpose whatsoever? Is there a God who imbues the universe with meaning, or is the universe, its vastness and marvelous complexity notwithstanding, merely a brute, mindless fact?

All right, I don’t spend every waking hour making these inquiries; and sometimes it seems futile to devote any time to them at all because they are probably unanswerable. But I do. It’s a kind of intellectual pilgrimage, a quest for evidence of the divine in nature. Yes, I’m aware that such evidence most likely doesn’t exist. I’m likewise aware that in seeking the divine, I’ve prejudiced the quest, implying that there is a God. In these ramblings, I’m not going to try to prove that He, She or It is real, but I do hope to convince anyone who reads this that believing in a Supreme Being is not irrational.

But why do I think that is important in the first place? Aside from my confrontation with cancer, I’ve been motivated by the “New Atheists” or “Militant Secularists” whose most celebrated champion is Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of “The God Delusion”. As that title indicates, Dawkins and company are waging an intellectual jihad against people of faith, portraying them as delusional dupes who believe in fairy tales, hocus-pocus, nonsense. Obviously, I don’t agree. It may seem impertinent for a journalist and mid-list novelist to question intellects as formidable as his, but in jumping the scientific reservation to become a polemicist, he and his cohorts have exposed themselves to enemy fire, as it were; so I feel justified in firing off a few rounds.

Steven Weinberg, physicist, Nobel laureate, and also New Atheist (albeit a far more considerate one than Dawkins) famously said in an interview with the New York Times: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” This aphorism has been quoted over and over in books and essays, on websites, and in a thousand conversations.

H.P. Lovecraft, the father of American science fiction, had an honest response to his perception of humanity’s place in a vast, indifferent cosmos. He regarded the cataclysm of the First World War as a triviality. “The celestial bodies perform their accustomed motions without regard to the state of war or peace upon this one tiny sphere,” he wrote. But if I read Weinberg right, he’s saying that the cosmos, this whole amazing contraption, trillions of stars, solar systems, galaxies, nebulae, and supernovae, is itself a kind of gargantuan Rube Goldberg device, whirling along to no end. That carries some profound philosophical implications. If you accept the premise that the part cannot be greater than the whole, it logically follows that if the whole (universe) is pointless, then so are its parts, which would include us. A bleak prospect, producing the existential angst probed by philosophers like Sartre and Camus, who thought that the problem of suicide is the only problem worth exploring. If one’s life, its triumphs often overcome by tragedies, its joys often diminished by suffering, lacks meaning, then why bother to get out of bed in the morning?

Weinberg touched on that issue a couple of years after the Times interview: “Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.”

I’m somewhat puzzled by that statement. If the universe has no point, why study it? And is Weinberg further saying that everyone who does not scientifically study it has no purpose? That would leave 99.99 percent of the human race groping, blindly and futilely, for a reason to live.

As for myself, I have enjoyed amateur astronomy for years. I’ve star-gazed under the pristine skies of the Southwest and the murkier, light-polluted heavens in the East. I love it when my monthly issue of “Sky and Telescope” arrives online and in the mail. My favorite part of the New York Times is “Science Times,” which runs every Tuesday. I’ve also collected a modest library of astronomy and cosmology books written for the layman.

Studying the universe, however, is a nature hobby, rather like bird watching. It is not my purpose in life; writing fiction and nonfiction is. Moreover, it is not a purpose I chose; it chose me, that is, it’s a vocation (to use an almost archaic term). To say that one is called to an endeavor is to imply that someone or something is doing the calling. I cannot prove, either through pure logic or the scientific method, that fate, destiny, or God summoned me to become a writer. I knew from a fairly early age that I wanted to be one; but in 1967 I came to the startling recognition that I had to be. When I started writing my first book, “A Rumor of War”, it was as though a power outside myself had directed me to pick up a pencil and begin. This power — you can give it, him or her any name you wish — spoke to me, as it were, telling me, “This is what you must do, this is what you were meant to do, this is why you’re here.”

I mention this experience to illustrate that the three I’s — imagination, intuition, and inspiration — can provide accurate road maps to truth. Scientific reasoning — the formulation of hypotheses that can be proven or disproven through experiment and observation– is critical to our understanding of the world, but it is not the only path to knowledge.

My intuition is that the universe burst into existence for a reason when the Big Bang banged 13.7 billion years ago. Intelligent life eventually also arose for a reason, or for many reasons. (One is to inquire why there is something rather nothing. Another is to conquer the demons and beasts in our hearts and reach for the better angels in our nature). Even absent a supernatural cause, the Big Bang strikes me as an almost miraculous event: a singularity, an unimaginably small, unimaginably dense particle or wave of quantum energy suddenly exploded into an unimaginably hot fireball that expanded at many times the speed of light, and in time (about 380,000 years) cooled sufficiently to begin forming the stuff that the stars and we are made of. I don’t think that this moment, Time Zero, was an accident. Probably because I’m a novelist, I like to think of the singularity as an idea in the mind of a Creator, one that He or It wanted to express. The Big Bang was its expression, and it continues to evolve and will until, well, God knows when.

For all that, I am not at ease with the God of scripture, the interventionist God who performs miracles and who is all-perfect, all-benevolent, and answers prayers; nor am I at ease with the God of the 18th-century Deists, who proposed that God got the whole thing going and then retired. I am more at ease with the God of the ancient Stoic philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, in whose cosmology It-He-She is the “divine intelligence of the universe.” This Being is the author of the fixed laws that govern the cosmos, and remains active and involved through their workings. It strains my credulity to suppose that gravity, electromagnetism, and the other forces of nature operate the way they do just because.(I’ll tell you why in a moment).

To use an imperfect analogy, the Higgs Boson, recently discovered by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, bestows mass on subatomic particles like electrons and protons. Without it, they would not be. For that reason, it’s been whimsically called “the God particle.” I think of God as the particle that imparts meaning to the entire universe. Without it, this whole shebang would be as pointless as Weinberg thinks it is, leaving us with no task but to figure out how to go on living in the midst of an unfathomable absurdity.

I came to this conclusion partly through reading and thinking about the world we live in, and partly by reflecting on a semi-mystical experience I had a few years ago, as I scanned the skies through astronomical binoculars on the high desert in Arizona. I saw the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. The light striking my eyes had begun its journey to earth not long after our Australopithecine ancestors started to walk upright; yet the Andromeda Galaxy is a neighbor by cosmic standards. Some galaxies are so distant that it’s taken 12 billion years for their light to reach us! I felt overcome by such an immensity of time and space, wonder-struck, awed, and humbled almost to the point of humiliation. What was I? A short-lived microbe on the skin of a small planet orbiting a mid-size star in an average solar system in an ordinary galaxy that IS merely one of billions. And yet I was also a microbe with a consciousness capable of comprehending what a light year or a galaxy or a solar system was. I perceived a divine order to things. My mind seemed to soar outward and expand and unite with a universal mind, infinitely greater than I. In a heightened state of awareness, aware of being aware, I saw that despite my insignificance, I was part of creation, which made me feel grateful and exalted even as I was humbled.

Now, back to the question, Can one affirm the proposition, God exists, reasonably and without being considered a tent-revival holy-roller who thinks the Earth is only 6,000 years old? A cretin taken in by fables? Certainly a lot of non-cretins have believed in a Creator: the Islamic astronomer Averroes; the Jewish historian Josephus; Dante, Milton, Hayden, to name five out of a list containing thousands. Closer to our own day, Georges Lemaitre, considered father of the Big Bang Theory, was a Jesuit priest. And Francis Collins, prominent geneticist, leader of the human genome project, has said that he sees “the hands of a Creator” in setting the parameters that rule material existence.

Collins was referring to the “Anthropic Principle,” which posits that the fundamental forces in nature, the nuclear, the weak, the gravitational, the electromagnetic, and the mysterious force called “dark energy,” have been “fine-tuned” to permit life to exist. For example, if the nuclear, which binds electrons and protons to the nucleus of atoms, were just slightly stronger than it is, the universe would consist of nothing more than random particles of helium. If it were weaker, then atoms could not hold together, and the universe would be a mass of radiation. No stars, no planets with plants and animals, and no us. Likewise for gravity, electromagnetism, and dark energy. If the values for those were just a little greater or smaller than they were at the beginning, the universe either would have been still-born, collapsing in on itself, or would have expanded so rapidly that no large bodies would have had a chance to form; again, life would not have been possible. Mathematicians have calculated that it is extremely improbable – one chance in several billions – that this should be so. Yet it is.

Theologians, philosophers, and scientists like Collins have deployed the Anthropic Principle as an argument for the existence of God. If you claim that the universe has been fine-tuned against incredible odds, you’re strongly suggesting that there is a fine-tuner, meaning that the universe is the result of intelligent design. That makes sense to me. If there is a preponderance of circumstantial evidence for design, and if we apply the principle of Occam’s Razor (among competing hypotheses, the simplest is probably true), maybe there is a designer. Or: If it walks, quacks, and flies like a duck, most likely it’s a duck.

In “The Accidental Universe”, Alan Lightman dryly notes, “Intelligent design…is an answer to fine tuning that does not appeal to most scientists.” The explanation that does appeal is the Multiverse, a theory parented by two others, String Theory and Eternal Inflation (both of which are very, very difficult for non-physicists to understand. In fact, there some physicists who don’t quite get them). The Multiverse idea proposes that there have been, and continue to be, zillions of “Big Bangs,” each spawning a universe. The process has gone on from eternity, and will go on forever. Thus, our universe is only one of countless others, each with different properties. One universe, for example, might have a nuclear force many times stronger than ours; another might have a gravitational force significantly weaker. Some of these alternate universes will be huge blobs of lifeless plasma, some will be dead seas of subatomic particles, but some, like ours, will be congenial to life, including intelligent life.

How many other universes does the theory predict? 10 to the 500th power. That is 10 followed by 500 zeroes, a number for which we haven’t got a name (the largest named number is the googol: 10 to the 100th power). It is also a number that’s incomprehensible, infinite for all practical purposes, which poses a problem: Maybe the universe is incalculable, and we’ll never fully understand it. There are additional difficulties with the Multiverse that have led some physicists to question whether it is science or philosophical conjecture. Problem 1: There is very little physical evidence to support the validity of its father and mother, Eternal Inflation and String Theory. Problem 2: String Theory requires the existence of seven spatial dimensions beyond the three we’re familiar with.

Let’s go back to the scientific world’s antipathy to the design argument. Why its lack of appeal? It’s a dead end for scientists, who are in the business of describing and explaining reality through the study of natural phenomena. A designer, a creator, a supreme being, is supernatural, outside matter and energy, and so cannot be investigated, measured, observed, tested. The Multiverse, with its grounding in mathematically-based theories, promises a natural explanation for fine-tuning. But is it a false promise? Our universe’s multitudinous ancestors and siblings and children, if they exist, dwell in 5th, 6th, 10th dimensions, which also lie outside our ability to investigate, measure, observe, or test.

Lightman succinctly sums up the conundrum. The Multiverse, he writes, requires us to “believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world…we must believe in what we cannot prove…Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith, scientists are not.”

My own view of the Multiverse is that it is a scientist’s version of Genesis, rational if unprovable. But I submit that believing in a grand designer, also unprovable, is no less rational. If I live long enough to see the invention of some astonishing instrument or method that actually shows even one of the 10 to the 500th other possible universes, I’ll change my mind.