In the operating room, I often find myself marveling—not just at the complexity of the human body, but at its intelligence. The way tissues adapt, how cells communicate, how the body heals—it all feels less like machinery and more like music. There’s rhythm. Responsiveness. A kind of attunement.
That word—attunement—has become central to how I think about not only medicine, but life, belief, and even the nature of the universe itself.
As a surgeon, I’m trained to rely on evidence. But over time, I’ve become equally interested in questions that lie outside the scope of the scalpel: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? Is there such a thing as God—and if so, where does that idea fit in a modern, evolving world?
For me, intelligence isn’t limited to IQ scores or neural complexity. I define it simply as the ability to change behavior based on the environment to achieve a goal. Under that definition, intelligence is everywhere. Not just in humans, but in animals, plants, ecosystems—and perhaps even in the universe itself.
The cosmos evolves. It adapts. It creates complexity, life, and self-awareness. That sounds a lot like intelligence to me. If that’s true, could we call the universe itself a kind of living intelligence? If so, that may be the closest definition of God I can accept—not as a separate creator, but as an embedded, unfolding awareness that we are part of.
That means I’m not apart from this intelligence. I’m in it. Just as a single cell belongs to a larger organism, perhaps my consciousness is a fragment of a greater whole. A wave in a cosmic ocean. A good cell in the body of the universe.
This idea has practical consequences.
If I am part of a larger living system, then my responsibility is not to control it or rise above it—but to be a healthy part of it. Just like cells in a body, individuals can contribute to the well-being of the whole—or they can become toxic, hoarding resources, attacking their neighbors, forgetting the system that sustains them. We have a name for that in medicine: cancer.
So I ask myself, not in a religious sense, but in an ethical, existential one: Am I being a good cell?
Am I making the universe more coherent, more compassionate, more adaptive through my actions? Or am I extracting, hoarding, inflaming?
Even belief systems, which claim to be fixed, are constantly adapting. Religions often say their doctrines have never changed—but history shows otherwise. The Catholic Church once banned interest-bearing loans, forbade working on the Sabbath, and treated same-sex love as unforgivable. These views have shifted. That’s not a sign of weakness—it’s a sign of life.
What strikes me as odd is that religious leaders rarely celebrate this adaptability. They don’t say, “Look how wisely we’ve evolved.” Instead, they insist nothing has changed. But everything alive changes. This includes us—and the frameworks we use to understand ourselves.
In music, being in tune doesn’t mean holding one note forever. It means adjusting in real time—responding to context, harmony, and flow. A jazz musician doesn’t cling to the original melody. They listen, they adapt. Their intelligence is not in memorization, but in attunement.
Life is like that too.
Whether it’s a plant bending toward light, a surgeon adjusting to bleeding, or a belief system reshaping itself to reflect new truths, intelligence is always about responsiveness.
I’m not interested in creating a new dogma or metaphysical theory. I’m simply sharing the perspective that’s helped me make sense of what I see in the OR, in nature, and in the deep quiet moments when I reflect.
We don’t need perfect answers. We need honest ones. Flexible ones. Living ones.
I don’t claim to know the final truth. I only want to stay in tune. To listen. To adapt. To serve the whole, not just myself.
In that sense, I suppose my spiritual goal is simple:
To be a good cell.
Fateh Entabi is a surgeon.
