“Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose. It drives us to accumulate better data.”

Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even

Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent—quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.

From the Maya to the Shawnee, from the indigenous people of the Philippines to the indigenous people of Finland, the moon has been considered both overtly womanly and worthy of worship. Perhaps the connection comes from the parallel natural cycle of our bodies. Or maybe it’s because, for so much of human history, women have been allowed so few role

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Religion, at its best, facilitates empathy, gratitude, and awe. Science, at its best, reveals true grandeur beyond our wildest dreams. My hope is that I can merge these into some new thing that will serve my daughter, my family, and you, dear reader, as we navigate—and celebrate—the mysterious beauty and terror of being alive in our universe.

We all deserve holidays, celebrations, and traditions. We all need to mark time. We all need community. We all need to bid hello and goodbye to our loved ones. I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm of life on this planet.

How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’