Sermon 101506

SCIENCE AND RELIGION II WHO GOES THERE: FRIEND OR FOE? KENNETH W. PHIFER OCTOBER 15, 2006 MAUMEE VALLEY UU CONGREGATION 20189 NORTH DIXIE HIGHWAY BOWLING GREEN, OHIO 43402-9253 Science and religion are the two master narratives of the modern western world, and increasingly of the entire globe. One is a narrative of curiosity and adventure dealing with the material world. The other is a narrative of ethics and inspiration, giving us a reason to live and guidelines for how to do so. Science and religion have enormous powers of creativity and destruction. Science has made our lives healthier, more comfortable, and more interesting, but it has also made our lives vastly more dangerous. Religion has inspired us to great deeds and kept us from despair, but it has also motivated us to hate and to kill. How these influential and volatile forces relate to each other is of great importance. A relationship of mutual respect and cooperation could move the world in the direction of beauty and goodness. A relationship of contempt and hostility could ruin the planet and all human communities. Ken Wilber may well be right to say that “the relationship between science and religion…is the most critical issue facing global societies today.” There are a growing number of people who see the importance of this relationship. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science has an office on the dialogue between religion and science. There are well over 1,000 courses on science and religion taught in our colleges and universities. Several medical schools offer courses in spirituality and medicine. Oxford University has an endowed chair in science and religion, and Cambridge a professorship in theology and natural science. There is a new and growing awareness of the importance of what science and religion say about and to each other. At the moment, the conversation between these forces is characterized by three broad categories of understanding of how science and religion do, can, and should relate to one another. Hostility is one of these. Science and religion each have advocates who hold the other endeavor and those who practice it in contempt. One observer describes this antagonism “as a series of guerilla wars between an egocentric Christianity and an arrogant secular science, neither of which is prepared to concede to the other, neither of which can achieve an absolute and unambiguous victory, and neither of which is prepared to take any prisoners.” The truth underneath that hyperbole is that a segment of both religion and science maintains a fighting stance toward the other.

Page 1

The warfare began no later than 1543, when Copernicus posthumously published his theory of a heliocentric universe. The Catholic Church scorned the idea. As this idea gained strength in both evidence and supporters, the Church brought pressure to bear on scientists holding such views to abjure them. Giordano Bruno lost his life to this pressure. Galileo recanted his views. Others were afraid to speak. Two centuries later, Darwin delayed publishing his findings and theories partly out of a concern at the likely reaction to them in the religious community. Religion in the west held power over science for centuries. It relinquished that power only under the force of overwhelming evidence that much theology was simply wrong in its doctrines of nature. Some still cannot admit this. Adherents of what was called “creation science”—truly an oxymoron as American courts and almost every scientist recognized—and the later name for the same religious doctrine, “intelligent design,” base their theories ultimately on a literal reading of the Bible. For them, the Bible is the only true epistemological authority. Anything that runs counter to what they call “The Word of God” is wrong, no matter the evidence amassed to support it. This is why efforts have be made to cast out the teaching of evolution from our schools, and, failing that, to have so-called “intelligent design” taught side-by-side with it in science classes. I am proud of the State of Michigan Board of Education who voted unanimously a few days ago to teach evolution in science classes and to keep “intelligent design” out of science classes. The latter doctrine can be taught in religion, philosophy, or sociology classes. Some religious people think science is the work of the devil. This derives in part from the myth of the Garden of Eden, which some Christians think is history. The two humans placed there violated the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, lured to do so by the serpent, Satan. This notion of their being limits of knowledge beyond which we should not go is also found in the Faust legend, first written down in 1587 by Johann Spiess. Faust gave his soul to the devil in order to “learn me magic and fulfill my desires in all things.” Part of our moral inheritance as a culture is a sense of the danger of forbidden knowledge, a lesson that science ignores. To do so, say some of those made nervous by science, can only bring about disaster. Religion can be hostile to science. Some scientists demonstrate an equal hostility to religion.

Page 2

A century ago, T.H. Huxley wrote that “the cradle of science is surrounded by dead theologians as that of Hercules was with strangled serpents.” Even science as an infant is strong enough to destroy religion’s claims. In our own times, Richard Dawkins joins this chorus of those who despise religion. He has called religion “a virus” that infects human beings, replicates, and spreads. He renounces scientists who profess a belief in God because, in his view, atheism is the only rational choice for an intelligent person. “What,” he once wrote, “has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody?” A survey several years ago revealed that 90% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, the most elite group of scientists in this country, describe themselves as atheists. Few of them have anything good to say about religion. Cosmologist Rocky Kolb, for example, urges that science and religion be kept apart because religion is the antithesis of science. Murray Gelll-Mann called his brilliant system of particle classification The Eight-fold Way, not as a tribute to Buddhism but as a joke pointing out the silliness of religion in the face of scientific evidence. Francis Crick wrote a whole book to disprove the existence of a soul, stating bluntly on the first page that human beings are “nothing but a pack of neurons.” One can hardly blame scientists for their mistrust of religion. Consider that Ptolemy divided the earth into latitude and longitude and wrote eight volumes still being used by modern cartographers. His work enabled later explorations of the globe. He also argued that lands lay beyond the waters that seemed to encircle Europe and Africa. For more than 1,000 years his work was suppressed by the Christian Church. In its place were produced maps that reflected orthodox Christian dogma about the shape of the earth —a circular dish divided by water beyond which was an ocean that was the boundary for the whole earth. The priority of doctrine over knowledge has too often been the religious way. Science and scientists and all humanity have been damaged by that attitude. The hostility of science to religion is, if not desirable, at least understandable. Hostility is one of the ways that science and religion have related to each other and relate to each other today. Hostility is rarely a fruitful mode of communication, and it certainly has not been in this case. A better way is the path chosen by those who define religion and science as dealing with different areas of knowledge by different methods. They have no reason to be hostile to one another. They really have nothing to say to each other. Alfred North Whitehead wrote in the early years of the 20th century that “the dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious

Page 3

experience of mankind. In exactly the same way the dogmas of physical science are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the sense-perception of mankind.” As the Rev. Peter Gomes put it several years ago, “the canons of one simply do not apply to the other, and neither is challenged or diminished by being simply what it is.” Ian Barbour, in his excellent book of 40 years ago, ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION, spelled out several ways in which science and religion seem to be so different as to be virtually unable to talk to one another. Revelation is the way of religion, whereas reason is the way of science. Religion takes its authority and draws its inspiration from the divine revealing itself to the human—in the Torah of the Hebrew Bible, in the figure of Jesus Christ, in the words spoken to Mohammed by Allah and found in the Koran. Science draws on evidence that observation and experimentation disclose—that if water is cooled sufficiently it becomes ice and that if is heated sufficiently it becomes steam, and we can learn at precisely what temperatures these changes will occur. A second difference is that religion has to do with the personal, whereas science deals with the impersonal. Religion is about what I must do to be saved, whether that means following the intricate ritual and moral laws of Judaism, believing in Jesus as the Christ, surrendering to the will of Allah, or just being a person of integrity. Religion is about how to live together with other people—by loving our neighbor, doing justly, honoring our father and mother. Religion is about making sense of the apparent nonsense of the constant and bewildering array of events that floods our lives. Science is impersonal, the effort to arrive at the truth of the world as it is, not as we interpret it. Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg argues that the more we learn about the universe the more pointless it all seems. That may be, but he and we still go on trying to learn more about the universe—about the Big Bang and the billions of stars in our galaxy and the billions of galaxies in the universe, about the strange world of quantum physics which Einstein found so disturbing, about our genetic inheritance and the measure in which it restricts our free will. Science is not about pleasing human tastes or desires, or even about addressing human needs. Science is about learning what is really so about the world, whatever the consequences of that knowledge may be. Another way of describing this distinction is to say that religion is about life orientation and science is about technical description. Religion seeks the answer to questions that begin with the word why, such as why there is something rather than nothing, why was I born, why is there suffering?

Page 4

Science asks questions that begin with words like what and how does this work, like what is the distance between the earth and the sun, what causes seasonal changes in the weather, and how does the body heal itself and how can we help that process along? According to this way of thinking, there is no reason for conflict. Religion and science are simply doing very different things for very different reasons in very different ways. A couple of years before his untimely death, Stephen Jay Gould published his contribution to this discussion, ROCKS OF AGES: SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE FULLNESS OF LIFE. Gould announced a principle he called NOMA, or NonOverlapping Magisteria, areas of authority that do not contradict each other because they are so different. “The two domains, “ he wrote, “hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life, and they remain logically distinct and fully separate in styles of inquiry, however much and however tightly we must integrate the insights of both magisteria to build wisdom.” Science is about facts. Religion is about values. We must not confuse them. True enough if not held to dogmatically. Gould, however, does just that, arguing that we “cannot draw moral messages or religious conclusions from any factual construction of nature.” We should not use nature as a proof text for our favored theories or fervent wishes, but it is not correct to say that we cannot use nature to draw moral messages or religious conclusions. What other data than nature do we have for such reflections on the cosmological, the biological, and the human scales? Gould was confusing two ways of approaching material, often confused by religionists. He rightly condemns the one but wrongly condemns the other along with it. Eisegesis is a term used by theologians and ministers to describe putting meaning into a Biblical text. It is considered to be dishonest and self-serving. Exegesis is the proper mode of Biblical study, or textual study of any kind, for it tries to draw forth the meaning(s) that is(are) there. Exegesis is committed to the truth of the text. Gould is right to say that we should not perform eisegesis on nature, but wrong to say that we should not do exegesis. We do so in order to live our lives in consonance with what is real and true. Even Gould tells us the facts of nature point to human insignificance, a splendid example of exegesis, though one with which I disagree. Religion has validity only in the measure in which it confronts all the facts of existence, however brutal, and meditates upon them to arrive at moral and theological conclusions. Science and religion are quite different, but the NOMA principle takes the separation too

Page 5

far. It is the third way of understanding the relationship of science and religion that offers the most promise. This approach to science and religion says that there is no necessary conflict between them. The Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, for example, argues that science seeks to understand order in the universe and religion seeks to understand purpose and meaning. “Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are also not very far apart. “ Science and religion may differ, but they do not necessarily disagree. Both, for example, speak of Mystery. The evolutionary biologist Ursula Goodenough write in her splendid little book, THE SACRED DEPTHS OF NATURE, “Mystery. Inherently pointless, inherently shrouded in its own absence of category…The Mystery of where the laws of nature came from. The Mystery of why the universe seems so strange.” The Presbyterian John Buchanan writes in a similar vein that science “is now teaching us the ancient truth about mystery, a truth that used to be ours; that when it comes to ultimate truth, the most appropriate posture is modesty, silence, reverence, not propounding, shouting, condemning, excommunicating.” Mystery inevitably generates in us a sense of awe and wonder. That is why religions instruct us to take off our shoes when we walk upon holy ground, to close our eyes or kneel or prostrate ourselves when we pray. Religion speaks of the mysterium tremendum, the tremendous Mystery, and the awfulness—full of awe—of encountering that Mystery. Science is no less struck by a Tremendous Mystery. Dr. George Washington Carver, asked what was the most indispensable thing for science, replied, “The capacity for awe.” Einstein said that the mysterious is “the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science…One who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead.” Genuine religion and genuine science have the same source, a sense of curiosity about and a sense of astonishment before the Mystery that is existence. Knowing how to live is the purpose of both scientific and religious work. As Stephen Jay Gould once noted, “the common goal of science and religion is our shared struggle for wisdom in all its various guises.” If this be true, then what we need is to be clear about the ways in which we can interact, complement, and challenge each other, rather than figuring out how to keep from talking to each other or how to best the other in arguments and debates. We might begin by recognizing that science and religion are already involved with one another. In the simplest sense, religion depends on science, as do we all, for the artifacts of life that are at the heart of our daily existence. Clocks, cars, computers, radio and television, electricity, vaccinations and antibiotics, and ten thousand other practical items that science can take credit for are integrally woven into the way we live.

Page 6

Science looks to religion for language to express things that scientific language seems inadequate to do. Stephen Hawking writes of knowing “the mind of God.” Freeman Dyson talks of the human mind as “the inlet of God on this planet.” Francis Crick spoke of the origin of life as appearing “to be almost a miracle.” Eugene Wigner, a physicist, used words like “mysterious…no rational explanation…miracle…wonderful…we neither understand nor deserve” in an essay describing the importance of mathematics for science. Furthermore, many scientists have been and are religious, some in a quite traditional sense. Newton and most of predecessors and colleagues in the 17th and 18th centuries were devoutly Christian or Jewish. Michael Farraday, whose work in developing field theory was so important that Einstein kept a portrait of him on his study wall, was a lifelong member of the Sandamanian Church, a small fundamentalist and ascetic Scottish sect. Francis Collins, the Director of the Human Genome Project, has just published a book called THE LANGUAGE OF GOD in which he describes his journey from atheism to born-again Christian. A survey by Scientific American a few years ago found that some 40% of American scientists believe in a God who is in intellectual and affective communication with us and to whom we can pray in expectation of receiving an answer. Barbara Smith-Moran, who has degrees in chemistry, biology, astronomy, and divinity, said recently that one of the problems for science and religion is a misunderstanding each has of the other. Religionists need to get over their sense of “the mystique of the laboratory.” Scientists need to realize that religion has not stood still for the past 500 years. Another scientist makes the same point in these words: “Human nature is at the very least far more a product of self-contained evolution than ordinarily conceded by philosophers and theologians. On the other hand, religious thought is far richer and more subtle than present-day science can explain, and too important to abandon.” There must be a new kind of self-awareness and mutual respect if the relationship is to be fruitful. To make that happen, we must come to an understanding of how and why religion and science need each other. Religion needs science to ground it in factual reality. Religion has a tendency to drift off into discussion of matters that are well beyond human knowledge, for example, the nature of God. Religion has a tendency to rely too heavily on tradition, which is precisely what science is always trying to overturn by new observations and experiments that will lead to new or modified theories. Science keeps on saying: stick to the facts. That is a message religion needs to hear. For example, whether there is a deity in charge of the universe or not, religion must base its understanding of that deity less on ancient texts and more on the facts of cosmology

Page 7

and biology, the nature of the world as we know it. The Hebrew Bible is wrong to say that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and stop moving around the earth and factually wrong to picture Jesus ascending bodily into heaven above us. Cleaned up, the Biblical passages might yield important metaphorical meanings, but wedded to a false picture of the world, they can only mislead. Edward O. Wilson gives religion a good starting point when he describes his three truths: “ humanity is ultimately the product of biological evolution; second, the diversity of life is the cradle and the greatest natural heritage of the human species; and third, philosophy and religion make no sense without taking account of these first two images.” Science grounds religion in factuality. Secondly, and growing out of the first point, science provides the raw material for the new epics that religion must develop. The stories that are so essential for human life— myths and legends and biographies and histories from all over the world—have much potency but they are for the most part based on incorrect understandings of how the world actually works. We need to be busy about the task of creating new stories that are rooted in what we now know. Science fiction has been a fruitful source of such efforts. Examples include the novels of John Varley, Arthur Clarke, and most recently Mary Doria Russell. We need to see ourselves and our world in new ways that speak the truths of life in story, symbol, and metaphor, the means by which certain truths are learned more deeply. Thirdly, there is a splendid suggestion by the physicist-priest John Polkinghorne that science would be an excellent meeting place for the different religions of the world. His point, which I can validate from my own experience with interfaith conversation over the last 35 years, is that it is very hard to discuss doctrines and very hard to discuss rituals and very hard to discuss the history of one’s faith. Each religion is sensitive, defensive, proud, and pretty well persuaded if not downright dogmatically convinced that it has the truth. Polkinghorne proposes that the religions might meet to discuss questions that science has helped us to realize are important, such as “How do we understand the nature of the physical world and our relationship to it; what is the relationship between religious metaphysics and quantum theory’s mixture of structure and flexibility and its picture of an interconnected web of events which participates in togetherness-in-separation; are the deep intelligibility of the physical world and the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ in its scientific description signs of the cosmic presence of Mind?” These and other questions suggested by Polkinghorne and other scientists and religionists could open up a fascinating way of having the religions of the world converse with each other as well as with science. Finally, science can curb religious exceptionalism.

Page 8

Timothy Weiskel writes of the common prideful mistake of religions in positing a time of judgment or a time of destruction from which the faithful will be exempt. The concept of the Rapture, in which there will be devastation for all but the believers, who will rise bodily to heaven, is an example of this mode of thought. In a lecture on the environmental crisis in religious perspective, Weiskel argues that science provides a corrective to shallow thinking by showing how the world operates and that if disaster comes—through global warming or nuclear holocaust or some other terrible event—there will be no exceptions for “true believers.” It is not a believers-saved-and-unbelieversdamned world. It is a world in which we are all connected and we shall all be saved or we shall all be damned. Weiskel makes the point going the other way as well, that religion can help science to avoid its own exceptionalism. Thus he provides us with a bridge from the ways science helps religion—to be grounded in facts, to provide new raw material for stories, to offer a meeting place for inter-religious conversation—to a discussion of the ways religion can help science. The exceptionalism of science is different from that of religion in that it calls on us to believe that science and only science can save us—and that it will do so—from the various disasters we are now imagining might happen to us. It is assumed that science will find a way to avert nuclear meltdowns, to solve the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, to remedy the grievous threat to the diversity of life caused by the destruction of the rain forests. The powerful tradition of prophecy in western religions challenges this view. The ancient tradition uses the words that “the earth is the Lord’s” and tell us that we are not masters but stewards of the planet. We cannot do everything we want to do. We cannot repair all the damage we perpetrate. Religion can be a reminder that science is not God either. The task of religion is not to refute science, as the Inquisition thought in the 17th century or as the Catholic Church though about evolution until 14 years ago or as the creationists still think in regard to this same issue. The task of religion is to remind science constantly of the irreducible Mystery of human life and of all life. Life is more than just an objective description of the things that make it up. Human life, for example, is not just matter but spirit generated by matter as well. That spirit makes us each unique, precious, sacred. This is the central point of religion, that the subjective is also a datum of reality. Mere objectivity misses the point of much that is important in life. As Einstein was once heard to remark, “What’s the use of describing a Beethoven symphony in terms of air-pressure waves?” Beyond the short-sightedness of pure objectivity, there is danger in thinking that only matter is real. When science loses sight of the fact that human life has value, that all life has value, it can perform dreadful deeds.

Page 9

It did just that in the Tuskegee experiments by denying treatment to men with syphilis in order to see what happens in the natural, untreated course of that disease. It did just that by following the technological imperative to complete the building of the first atomic bomb even though the original reason for doing so—to do it before Nazi Germany did—was no longer a concern. There was barely a pause after learning of the surrender of Germany before the team at Los Alamos proceeded with their work because doing this difficult task had become a goal in itself. Science has been immensely successful and therefore may not want to listen to what religion has to say in such instances as these. Success breeds confidence, but it can also breed arrogance and blindness to the possibility of error. Science needs what religion has to offer, experience and perhaps some wisdom regarding the purpose and morality of proposed actions. Hugh Dickinson, Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, writing in the Financial Times a few years ago, says it very well. He points to the moral and spiritual profundities that religion has brought forth, the way religion understands the motivations of the heart. Then he asks, “If scientific knowledge has been misused to poison the atmosphere and massacre large chunks of the human race, is the remedy more likely to be found with Francis or Schweitzer, with Bishop Tutu or Martin Luther King, with Gandhi, or with the Cavendish Laboratory or MIT?” Science can learn from and be helped by religion, which at its best teaches the very ideals and ethics needed to make science worthwhile—the importance of truth, integrity, morality, goodness, and beauty. Science and religion are important in and of themselves. They are important to each other. Henry Nelson Wieman once pointed out that science offers us a model of efficiency, while religion offers us a model of appreciation.. There is no reason to choose between them. We can have both, and maybe we have to. Werner Heisenberg once observed that “the common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate.” We need a new concept of unity. That must begin with the recognition that science and religion are not enemies, are not profitably to be isolated from one another, but are best engaged in complementing, interacting with , and challenging each other’s work. As a religionist, I feel it proper to let a scientist have the last word. Edward O. Wilson has just published a book called THE CREATION. It is in the form of a letter to a Southern Baptist minister calling for an alliance between the two of them, between science and religion, to save the earth. The spirit of that letter, of that book, is found in a passage I used last week as closing words. Wilson calls for “an uneasy but fruitful alliance… (between science and religion). The role of religion is to codify and put into enduring poetic form the highest moral values of a society, consistent with empirical knowledge, and to lead in moral reasoning. The role of science is to test every conclusion about

Page 10

human nature remorselessly and to search for a bedrock of ethics. Science faces in religion its most interesting challenge, while religion will find in science the necessary tools to retain moral leadership in the modern age.” I have changed my mind. I do want the last word. AMEN!

Page 11