I’ve always been a big fan of The Big Bang Theory and have seen some episodes in rerun so many times I’ve practically memorized them. I’ve also watched many episodes from Young Sheldon, though none from the final season. Eventually, I’ll catch them on Netflix.
There’s a really interesting narrative arc within the two shows that speaks to the question of why we need connections of the heart, not just connections of the mind.
Going chronologically, we see a very young Sheldon Cooper who is struggling to fit his very big intellect into a very ordinary human life. He sees what his family members do not. But this cuts both ways, because his family members have big enough hearts to make space for Sheldon to be himself – something Sheldon cannot do for others until the end of adult series.
At the start of the 12-season Big Bang Theory, Sheldon has kind of fallen into the dark side of the mind. He’s so enamoured of his own brilliance that he lacks compassion, empathy, trust, and courage (all of which he considers a complete waste of his precious mental energy).
His problem looks on the surface like an either/or debate between science and faith. But it isn’t. His problem is logic suppressing love. The battleground where this plays out in the series is science. But it could be any major aspect of human endeavour: religion, education, identity politics. We see the suffering caused by logic suppressing love throughout our world today.
In the early years of the adult series, Sheldon believes he doesn’t need anyone else to help lift him to the heights of his natural genius, but his research suffers until he finally learns to balance his logic with his love. His friendships and his love for Amy make him a better scientist – maybe because the biological brain inevitably starves itself of healthy, broad-minded thinking and processing networks if love isn’t part of the mix.
Sheldon’s journey is about the great weight of knowledge, the heaviness of it when it isn’t balanced by the uplifting effect of love, a mysterious universal force that creates bubbles and spaces and voids in which other people can expand to their true potential. (Even God’s universe is filled with cosmic voids.)
As a society, we’re all struggling with the great weight of knowledge. With the internet and social media, we can hardly get away from it. We think the solution to the problems created by too much knowledge is . . . . more knowledge, better knowledge, faster knowledge. But maybe, if we want to hear what God is saying to us through the medium of science, we need more love.
Christianity (that is, the teachings of Jesus) offers people the option to balance both mind and heart in our daily lives. Not all Christians want this balance, as we know from our history and from our current news. But it’s there if we want it, and it produces some pretty amazing fruits – especially a balanced, mature relationship with a loving God outside the rigid boundaries of religious doctrine and ritual.
At the end of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and Amy win the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theory of Super Asymmetry – not symmetry, but asymmetry. The balance of heart and mind is nothing if not beautifully and divinely asymmetrical.