“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein
I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was six years old, playing on the balcony of my father’s apartment, pretending to drive a bus. Like in many childhood games, a world would materialize around my imaginary bus. The balcony was a busy street, the barstool my steering wheel, and I was completely absorbed in the adventure. Then something interrupted it. I happened to look up.
The night sky stretched above me in a way I had never noticed before. Far from the city lights, the stars appeared in overwhelming abundance. Thousands of points of light filled the darkness. I stood there staring, suddenly very aware of something I could neither explain nor fully understand.
I could not have articulated a philosophical argument. I knew nothing of cosmology, theology, or metaphysics. Yet the experience left a lasting impression because it was my first conscious encounter with wonder. I was in complete awe of our Magnificent Creator.
Looking back, what strikes me is not that I arrived at a religious conclusion. What strikes me is how naturally the experience arose. No one had instructed me to think about God that evening. No one had pointed to the stars and suggested what they meant. The experience emerged spontaneously from an encounter with reality itself.
Decades later, I know far more about the universe than I did that evening. I know that the stars I saw were not simply points of light scattered across the night sky. Some were immense spheres of burning plasma. Others may have already ceased to exist, their light continuing its journey toward Earth long after their extinction. I know something of galaxies, gravity, stellar evolution, and the vast distances that separate celestial bodies from one another.
Yet none of that knowledge explains what happened on that balcony. The experience itself belonged to a different category of knowing.
There is a kind of knowledge that explains, and there is a kind of knowledge that awakens. One tells us how things work; the other changes how we see them. Scientific knowledge belongs primarily to the first category. It seeks causes, mechanisms, and relationships. But human beings have always sought another kind of understanding as well—an understanding that addresses meaning, significance, and value.
We instinctively recognize the difference. A botanist can explain the cellular structure of a rose, yet the explanation does not replace the experience of receiving one from a loved one. A musician can analyze a symphony note by note, yet analysis alone cannot account for the emotions it evokes. In the same way, understanding the physics of starlight does not negate the sense of awe a star-filled sky may inspire.
The questions that arose within me that evening were not questions of mechanism. They were questions of meaning. They emerged not from ignorance but from an encounter.
Indeed, this raises a question that lies at the heart of contemporary discussions about science and religion. Many people assume that experiences such as mine belong to an earlier stage of human development; that wonder flourishes only when knowledge is absent. Therefore, as understanding advances, mystery retreats. Scientific explanation gradually occupies territory once assigned to religion, leaving less room for transcendence.
Some may even ask: if lightning can be explained without appealing to divine agency, if biological life can be studied through genetics, and if the cosmos can be described through physics and cosmology, then what role remains for religion?
Beneath this argument lies a powerful but often unexamined assumption: that mystery is simply what remains unexplained, and that as scientific knowledge advances, the need to look beyond the material world steadily recedes.
But this assumption deserves closer scrutiny.
It reduces religion to a shrinking collection of unanswered questions. Religion then becomes a temporary explanation, invoked only until a “better” one emerges. Yet this is not how the great religious traditions have understood transcendence. Their central claim is not that God exists where explanation fails. It is that reality itself is grounded in a transcendent source [1].
Science excels at explaining mechanisms. It tells us how stars form, how cells divide, how memories are encoded, and how galaxies evolve. These explanations are among humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements. But explaining a process is not the same as exhausting its meaning. Knowing how something works does not necessarily answer why it exists, why it is intelligible, or why it evokes wonder in the first place.
The deepest religious questions have never been questions of mechanism. They are questions of existence, meaning, consciousness, beauty, morality, and purpose. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe comprehensible to the human mind? Why do human beings instinctively seek meaning beyond survival? Scientific inquiry may illuminate aspects of these questions, but it does not render them irrelevant. If anything, the more we learn about reality, the more remarkable it often appears.
Perhaps, then, the real issue is not that science has removed mystery. The issue is that we have come to equate mystery with ignorance. Once mystery is defined as merely the absence of explanation, it inevitably shrinks as knowledge grows. But if mystery refers to the depth, intelligibility, and sheer fact of existence itself, then scientific discovery does not eliminate it. It reveals new dimensions of it. Modern cosmology reveals a universe of staggering scale. Biology uncovers extraordinary levels of organization within living systems. Neuroscience continues to illuminate aspects of cognition while exposing the enduring mystery of consciousness.
Scientific progress has expanded knowledge beyond anything previous generations could have imagined.
Whether it has diminished mystery is another matter.
Ironically, many of the discoveries once expected to eliminate mystery have instead intensified it. The more deeply physicists have probed the universe, the stranger it has appeared. Space and time are not what earlier generations imagined them to be. Matter itself proves surprisingly elusive. Consciousness remains resistant to reduction. The universe is not becoming simpler as knowledge advances; in many respects, it is becoming more astonishing.
The assumption that scientific progress inevitably leads to disenchantment may therefore rest on a misunderstanding of science itself. Scientific inquiry often reveals not a smaller mystery but a larger one. Each answer opens new questions. Each discovery uncovers new depths. The horizon of understanding expands, but so too does our awareness of how much remains beyond it.
Perhaps the real question is not whether science has removed mystery but why so many people no longer experience the world as mysterious.
One answer may be found in a phenomenon that classical spiritual thinkers identify as the human tendency to become habituated to reality [2].
When something is encountered for the first time, it awakens curiosity, reflection, and wonder. The mind becomes active, the heart becomes attentive, and questions arise naturally. Yet repeated exposure gradually dulls this responsiveness. What was once extraordinary becomes ordinary. What once inspired awe becomes routine.
This condition has been described as a form of familiarity that blinds rather than illuminates. We see something so often that we stop seeing it altogether. We assume we understand it not because we have penetrated its depths but because it has become familiar [3].
The result is not ignorance but a more subtle danger: the illusion of understanding [4].
We cease asking questions not because they have been answered but because they no longer occur to us.
In this sense, familiarity can become a kind of blindness. We resemble the proverbial fish living in the sea yet unaware of the sea itself [5]. Surrounded by wonders from birth, we cease to notice them. We do not marvel at air because we have never lived without it. We rarely contemplate consciousness because we have never experienced its absence. The most extraordinary realities become invisible precisely because they are constant [6].
The world remains extraordinary; it is the observer who has become accustomed.
Consider sleep. Every night consciousness disappears. Hours later it returns. We enter worlds populated by dreams, lose awareness of our surroundings, and awaken as though nothing extraordinary has occurred. Yet what could be more remarkable? Or consider sight. Patterns of light striking the retina become color, memory, recognition, and meaning. We move through the world using a faculty so astonishing that we scarcely pause to think about it. Or consider the earth itself. We are amazed when natural disasters interrupt ordinary life yet rarely reflect on the greater marvel that this planet carries billions of conscious beings through space while sustaining conditions suitable for life [7].
The remarkable becomes unremarkable not because it has been explained but because it has become familiar.
This habituation affects not only our perception of nature but also our spiritual lives. Every significant truth is vulnerable to becoming familiar. Truths that once stirred the heart gradually become intellectual possessions [8]. We continue to affirm them, yet they no longer disturb us, challenge us, or transform us.
A verse that once moved us to tears may eventually be recited absentmindedly. A prayer that once felt like a genuine encounter may become habitual. We may speak of mortality while rarely contemplating death, recite words of gratitude while scarcely noticing the gifts that surround us, and affirm belief in a Creator while moving through creation as though it were entirely self-explanatory.
Human beings seem to possess a capacity for sustained existential responsiveness—a condition in which questions of meaning, mortality, beauty, and transcendence remain vividly present. There are moments when this attentiveness awakens unexpectedly: the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a night beneath a sky filled with stars, an encounter with great beauty, a moment of profound prayer.
In such moments, reality feels larger than our ordinary categories. We sense that existence exceeds our descriptions of it.
Yet this sensitivity is difficult to sustain. Responsibilities accumulate. Habits form. Familiarity settles like dust upon perception.
What is lost is not merely wonder but something deeper. A sense of metaphysical tension, an awareness that existence itself is worthy of contemplation. When that tension weakens entirely, something important is lost. Questions once felt deeply become merely conceptual. Reality remains the same, but its depth recedes from view. The challenge is not simply to believe certain truths but to remain awake to them.
Perhaps this is why the world’s religious traditions repeatedly call human beings to remembrance, reflection, gratitude, and contemplation [9]. Such practices do not provide new realities. Rather, they help us see again the realities that have been before us all along.
The challenge of modernity, then, may not be that scientific knowledge has displaced mystery. The greater challenge may be that familiarity has displaced encounter.
The stars that captured my attention as a child have not changed. The universe has not become smaller. Reality has not become less mysterious. What changed was the ease with which I perceived that mystery.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if that six-year-old child on the balcony could stand beside me today and look at the same sky.
She would know far less about the universe than I do now. She would not know about galaxies, stellar evolution, dark matter, or the age of the cosmos. Yet she might still see something I have spent much of my adult life trying to recover.
Not ignorance. Not naivety. But the ability to encounter reality before familiarity renders it ordinary.
The question is not whether mystery remains. The question is whether we have lost the capacity to encounter it.
References
1. Nursi, Said. Epitomes of Light (Mathnawi al-Nuriya)
2. Ibid
3. Gülen, Fethullah. “Familiarity (Ülfet) and Metaphysical Tension.”
4. Gülen, Fethullah. “What Is Familiarity (Ülfet) and What Are Its Negative Effects?”
5. Gülen, Fethullah. “Familiarity (Ülfet) and Metaphysical Tension.”
6. Ibid.
7. Nursi, Said, The Words; The Flashes; The Kastamonu Addendum.
8. Nursi, Said. Epitomes of Light (Mathnawi al-Nuriya)
9. Ibid.
