Dori: grieving mother Orca reaffirms my belief in God

I’ve been following the story of the grieving mother Orca that, one week ago, gave birth to a calf. That baby orca died shortly after, and the mom been carrying it around ever since. She will either carry it by one fin or balance it on her head as she travels through the water. Sometimes the baby whale will slip off of her, and she will dive down into the depths of the Sound and retrieve it.

It’s really a beautiful story.

I’m going to get religious on you here. Like most people, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my faith. I don’t think too many people arrive at their belief in God, or their lack of belief, without spending a fair amount of time thinking about it. It’s not something that I just accepted because I grew up in the church — I’ve spent quite a bit of my time thinking on it.

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The conclusion I’ve come to is, either we were created by God, or we are the result of a cosmic accident that happened billions of years ago with the Big Bang. The cosmic accident theory is a chain of improbabilities that, to me, is much more incredulous than the idea of a supreme being creating us.

Here’s what I keep coming back to as I try to be as objective as possible about my faith. In nature, everything is optimized for efficiency. That’s the theory of evolution. In all of that, there is no way to explain love. Love is not efficient. It is not efficient for this mother Orca whale to carry around her dead baby for a week. And for humans, as we know, love can be really inefficient. Who of us hasn’t been messed up in our lives because of love?

Where does love come from? That depth of emotion is just so out-of-whack with the efficiency of nature. If there isn’t a god, I just cannot reconcile the role of love out of this Big Bang. Where did it come from out of that? I could not make sense of that intensity of emotion that you feel for your spouse, children, siblings, parents, and friends if we are all just cosmic accidents.

My faith doesn’t need any reinforcement; I’ve reached conclusions that are unshakable and inescapable. But as I watched this mother Orca whale, it just reminded me of the time I spent when I was a bit younger as I tried to rationally justify my deepening Christian faith. I always came back to that — I don’t see that kind of love coming out of the Big Bang without a guiding hand.

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