ANDREW LAM
EDITOR'S NOTE: Science chips away at our ancient myths only to reveal even greater mysteries. For a Vietnamese whose cherished moon goddess was dethroned by American astronauts when he was a small child, news about the possibility of life on Mars confirmed what he always knew. PNS editor Andrew Lam is a San Francisco based writer of short stories and essays.
Each year during the mid-Autumn Moon festival, a pastry shop near our house in Saigon would display the figure of a dancing goddess was gone, replaced by three strange looking creatures adorned with Christmas lights.

"Mother," I asked, "are those angels?"

"No," she answered. "They�re American astronauts and they�ve landed on the moon."

Until that moment, I had believed the goddess really did live on that silvery globe that hung outside my window at night. Now these American astronauts, by stirring up the lunar dust with their metallic boots, had debunked her corporeal existence. I was both saddened and awed.

Science dethrones all the old, known gods. The Hubble telescope" our amazing eye in the sky" has found at least 150 billion galaxies, many of them still being formed. There aren�t enough gods and titans in human history to name the planets in our own vast Milky Way, let alone the rest of the awesome universe. Instead, scientists use letters and numbers " MS13 for a galaxy, GC143 for a star.

When Nietszche asked, " Have you not heard that God is dead?" it was a rhetorical question. Galileo, Newton, Einstein and the like revealed a universe more startling than any ancient myth could describe. The sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus.

And yet it is my contention that science, even as it slays the old gods, does not destroy human spirituality. Quite the contrary, they reinforce each other.

A while back, at UC Berkeley, a physics professor offered his attentive young students proof that God exists. He called it the Big Bang theory. Most scientists now believe that the universe began with an instant of creation some 20 billion years ago. The fragments of that formative explosion are still flying outward from the focus of that unfathomable blast.

So what triggered the original blast? Where did the energy come from that defies all known physical laws to form the universe? No one knows. Science has its limitations, after all. The ultimate source of energy remains, always, a mystery." You may say God, if you like," the professor told his startled students, "set the ball rolling."

God set the ball rolling once again with the recent news that an ancient meteor from Mars carries evidence that life once existed on that neighboring planet. I have to admit that the moment I heard the news, my mind went blank, so dumbstruck was I by its implications. There�s life out there after all, just as I had secretly hoped and, perhaps, always known.

At such a moment science and spirituality seem to mingle in a metaphysical embrace. The more science reveals, the more mysterious the revelation. Science, in other words, is at its best when it evokes, like art, the experience of wonder.

"The first step of mystical realization is the leaving of... a defined god for and experience of transcendence, disengaging the ethnic from the elementary idea," wrote Joseph Campbell. Some Zen Buddhist monks understand this point very well. To go beyond the trappings of idolatry and reach enlightenment, they smash their Buddha statues. The true god is impersonal, unknowable, always beyond sight.

So where did my beautiful moon goddess go?

She neither lives nor dies and has no name; she has been internalized. She�s the moment of wonder itself. In her presence the child still gazes, wide-eyed. Beyond her, there dances a marvelous night sky full of stars.