Science and Religion

A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Lafayette Indiana
February 5, 2001
Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

Happy is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding,
for the gain from it is better than gain from silver and its profit better than gold.
She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her.
Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy.
The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens;
by his knowledge the deeps broke forth, and the clouds drop down the dew.
Keep sound wisdom and discretion; let them not escape from your sight,
and they will be life for your soul and adornment for your neck.

From Proverbs 8
Does not wisdom call, does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights beside the way, in the paths she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:
"To you, O men, I call,

A.Powell Davies:
If science in the United States ever became dominated by a reactionary government, or by a reactionary church, or by both together, the result could be disastrous. 

I contend with extreme emphasis that it is treason both to science and to religion to exclude the scientific method from the inner life of man.  I also insist that such an exclusion is perilous.  We need, above all, people who are equal to the problems they must solve: people who think well and think straight, and whose emotional life, whose spiritual life, is disciplined towards its hardiest and healthiest.  We need the scientific separation of truth from error.  As it seems to me, only the religion that admits this--indeed, proclaims it--can be such a religion as science may endorse.

This kind of religion--liberal religion--also maintains the open mind to future discovery.  It is not restricted by a creed.  When new knowledge comes, it entertains it sincerely and takes the consequences of it.  It follows advancing truth, and sifts out all wisdom, both new and old, trying always to know what experience vindicates.  it is only with this kind of religion that science can get together and remain scientific.  It is only this kind of religion that keeps the door open for the scientific future.

I think that scientists do indeed have need of religion; of its basic faith, its moral responsibility; of its deeper insights, its wisdom, its inspiration.  But let it be a genuine religion!  They need a free church, and a free religion. When science and religion get together, let it be to mingle their resources on an honest, forthright basis.  Let churchmen truly embrace the scientific method, and let scientists be loyal to scientific truth when they join a church.

It is high time that religion began to be powerful in the hearts of men.  It is high time that we know that for religion just as much as for science, truth is supreme.  Truth set free--truth in the open light of earth and sky: truth as experience proves it.  Let the churchmen and the scientists both repent--the churchmen because of their pride, trying to shut up God in a box that only they can open; the scientists because of their aloofness, trying to exclude the truth of the heart from the search for knowledge.  Let science and religion meet and mingle. 

They say that the art of good sermon writing is to find a topic of bite size and then, thoughtfully, to chew on it for twenty minutes. Well, as the ubiquitous they say again, nice work if you can get it – Still I have two objections to this notion – the first is that – I want to share with you, of a Sunday morning more than simply bite sized thoughts – or even simply thoughts. I want to share with you the deepest of explorations and the farthest of journeys, the most profound of encounters and the tenderest of feelings. Adrienne Rich wrote "I want to climb with you up every sacred mountain…" And I do -- but the thing about those sacred mountains is that they are usually in ranges and you end up having to scale a few smaller one before you get to the bigger ones – or at least to explore the foothills. So it was with the journey of this sermon – following an interest of my dear husband I decided to read Wendell Berry’s book Life is a Miracle and offer a sermon on that book. I put it in the newsletter – as you know putting a title in the newsletter is often the kiss of death for many a topic – and set to reading it. The book is about the relationship of science to nature – it is about the ways that science enhances life and is used to defeat life. It is about the need to find a moral compass in the work of science…

So -- like any good book it opened up a much larger world of questions. The relationship between science and religion -- nature and the soul are the ground upon which these two meet Then, last week there was a wonderful morning Forum here, offered by Lee Trachtman and Robert Perucci, about whether or not science was under siege and the questions got thicker still. So, as it happened, I am and must be still in the throes of the questions and the exploration and that is the most honest thing that I can share with you. Further, I can’t treat this casually and quickly as though the core issues which move history and the world could really be treated in twenty-minute blocks. So come with me – let us look slowly and follow carefully – and seek for those deepest of explorations, farthest of journeys, most profound of encounters, and the tenderest of feelings and settle for nothing less. Therefore, this is the beginning of a sermon series on the relationship of science and religion – and, just so you know, the next sermon won’t be on the same topic – well, I suppose that in a way it will – but we will again pick up this thread later.

What is the relationship between science and religion and why should we bother thinking about it? Why be concerned about this right now? After all this is an ancient question and, to be honest, those of us gathered here have developed a pretty good grasp on this – I mean a good portion of us are scientists and the rest of us have developed a relatively good relationship between our senses of wonder and our sense of research. Well, my answer to this question – why should we bother with this right now – is that it has been the losing sight of that connection that has lead to trouble in Paradise – for generations – and we are headed for more trouble even as we speak. Trouble from science and trouble from religion. And that Paradise – the only one we believe we can know – is all around us outside our walls.

We come together here in a church a building set aside for the purposes of religion – but what are the purposes of religion? It is Sunday morning and we have each set aside this time to show up here. Some of us may have thought a great deal about this – weighing carefully the cost of getting out of bed and meeting the world – again. Some may have come at long last, after long deliberation, yearning for something – community, support, new thoughts, spiritual nourishment, guidance for children, a period of unmolested grown up thought, sense in a world often senseless. The word religion comes from the Latin root – religare- to tie, to bind together, and to tie back – and it seems to me that on Sunday morning – when somehow each one of us has set this hour aside to be together – here – that the experience that we share should be about our – oh knitting the raveled sleeve of care, creating the ties of deep community, or putting back together in some way – the experience that we share should be about our retying the threads of sense that keep us whole as we move through life.

The work of religion has been the work of binding together the world – it has done this well at times and poorly at times. But what religion seems to know – what we each seem to know – intuitively, experientially, blunderingly is that something is asunder and needs to be reconnected. Perhaps many somethings – like Aristophanes’ tale of split human – you know – the story he told in Plato’s symposium and, I think, in The Birds – about the time when humans were all two souled creatures – male and female, or male and male, etc and that we were severed by the gods and have spent forever trying to get back together. And it is surely true that the masculine and feminine in our lives have been some split and so much else has been but what I am concerned with is this other split. Something that we thought split asunder in the Garden of Eden – but truly did not – we just lost the key to its wholeness and have lived in exile – not out of the garden – it is around and within us – not out of the company of the sacred – it is around and within us but of the unity of our spirits – our natures – both wise and questing. I go back to that story of garden again and again, as one returns to the scene of an accident – not a factual accident but a metaphorical one – where those two aspects of humankind were declared split – a split was pronounced between the search for knowledge and the search for wisdom. Eating from the tree of knowledge was the ticket out of the garden of relationship with the holy. Science and religion.

Both aspects of the wonder and beauty of the human spirit. Religion – at its best – seeks to draw together in wonder and admit of mystery – to bind in love and covenant those who can find meaning together. Science – at its best – seeks to work with the miracle of life – to see the connections between things and to use matter as a gateway to understanding. And in my experience the most profoundly humble and awed persons have been scientists – and here I am thinking in particular of my astronomy professor in college who opened the heavens for me with cameras that revealed wonders and equations that delivered me into the speed of light and reaches of distant space.

So have science and religion really been split? That is a question that has been debated again and again – and what I have found – very similarly to what Mr.’s Trachtman and Perucci found – is that the answer to that question is typically completely grounded in the beginning perspective of those who are asking and answering it. And that would be a sermon for another day.

Anyway, perhaps one of the places where there is no division between science and religion is in some American fundamentalist religion – in the practice of belief in creationism. To explain that the world truly was formed in six days and nights by the hand of God – is for religion to take ownership of science – and attempt to control it. To try to introduce that idea into the curriculum of public schools as though it were truly science is to entirely erase the difference between them. Stephen Jay Gould maintains that these creationists are a wild occurrence – a rare outcropping of real conflict – overlapping – deliberate and destructive -- between religion and science.

Gould, who was active in fighting the battle over creationism in the Arkansas court, and whose writing and thought I deeply respect, holds a very different position from the creationsts. He wrote in Rocks of Ages that – yes – they are utterly separate – and have always been separate. They see the world differently and answer questions differently. For Gould they are non-overlapping. Gould labels each of these areas of knowing – magisteria – there is a magisterium of science and a magisterium of religion. Gould defines magisterium this way – he writes: it is a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution… Science covers the empirical realm, the magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks and religion gets the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion, how to go to heaven." He has a great sense of humor. But what he is saying is that religion and science look at different things, study them with different tools, and speak of them in different languages.

Ken Wilber, in his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul, claims that they were deeply connected and were severed over time by the Enlightenment. He has a lovely and very complicated way of saying this not nearly so quotable as Gould – so that it easier for me to simply explain – that Wilber says that religion held the reins before the period that we call the Enlightenment and that science was controlled by this fact. The pursuit of knowledge had to conform to the dogma of the church – to support it and to shore it up. The Enlightenment introduced empiricism. Empirical evidence is the evidence of the senses—and empiricism is the belief that it is the evidence of the senses that is real -- this made empirical experience more valid than faith. The Enlightenment introduced this idea: What I see is more important than what you tell me I ought to believe. Whew! If a tree falls in the forest… anyway … Over time religion and science moved apart – and they needed to. Science gained freedom to explore and explain. But then – but then – science came back and began to disembowel religion. Religion, at various periods would rise up and quarrel with science but, ultimately ceded to science the world of matter – which, as we know, much of conventional religion didn’t much want anyway.

Unfortunately, the world of matter is where we live – at least most of the time – but we will return this later.

What Gould and Wilber share is an understanding that Science and Religion do often speak of and to different sectors of life. And that this is good for both science and religion and for human life in general.

At this point it seems like a good idea to get some working definitions of religion and science out on the table. The trick here – what I have found in so many sources – similarly to the finding of Trachtman and Perucci – is that both science and religion are defined differently by each different person and in this way they are easier to argue with or down. I began to define religion earlier – but that definition was – a handy one – true but partial.

Religion – from that Latin root Religare -- is not only what binds together -- it is also defined, by so many thinkers, as bodies of dogma, articles of faith, accepted canonical stories, binding commandments for behavior, prescribed practices, and ecclesiastical hierarchies. To be honest – it is this version of religion that seems to have the most trouble when it trips over or runs into science. Religion includes spiritual practice. More religion is about relationships among people and with nature in the context of various ethics and understandings.

Science interestingly enough rises from the Latin root scindere to split – really more interesting than one would like. But it means to split as in a department of systematized knowledge or an object of study. But most of the time when we are talking about science we are really talking about different things – one being the method of science and the other being the movement of the study of the group of the sciences and their impact on the world. So – there is the scientific method, which is a method for exploring and then checking the results of that exploration. Thus, science is the study of the operation of general laws obtained and tested through scientific method and also that knowledge, or system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena. Those are the dictionary definitions. Often when Science is spoken of it is the mass of sciences that are meant – all of those disciplines which use the scientific method to explore the terrain. Science is all of these things and much more. Science is about relationship, as well – it is about the relationship between things in the context of cause and effect.

They are separate – in some ways – and in others they meet and must meet…

A good example can be drawn from part of our discussion while we were looking a couple of weeks ago at H.D. Thoreau. We found that while nature was rich with comfort, inspiration, and metaphor – and science may study it in detail and with devotion – it does not yield a guide for moral living – after all, nature produces creatures that eat their young, live as parasites, and nature engages in events of mass destruction such as earthquakes. So it seems clear that we have to look elsewhere for a moral compass.

In talking about the theory of evolution Gould put it this way – "factual truth cannot dictate or even imply moral truth." Darwin’s discovery was not intended to explain human systems or to justify them – it was not intended to prescribe behavior or relationships – it rose from a scientific observation of nature. Science can study nature and the cosmos but it cannot draw moral conclusions about its observations.

Wilber wrote: There is a strange and curious thing about scientific truth. As its own proponents constantly explain, science is basically value-free. It tells us what is, not what should be or ought to be. An electron isn’t good or bad – it just is…"

Thoreau believed in the value-rich relationship of human life and nature – but he was no romantic – in Walden he wrote: We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers – certainly no resounding affirmation of the natural man.

There must be some sort of differentiation between science and religion – because they will and do teach us different things but the differentiation is mechanical – for we are surely that being described in Genesis – the one who relates to the sacred and to the world with a yearning to learn and to grow beyond the boundaries of the known. AND, and, there is still a command that nature carries – for it is our home, our container, our being, and our context. Life is a miracle – not in the sense of supernatural interventions by the hand of God but in the sense of the wonder and complexity outlined in that famous poem (and UU Hymn) by William Blake – that miracle of finding the universe in a grain of sand and eternity in a wildflower. We are not simply of nature – we are embedded in it – dependent upon it, interdependent in it. The hymn says its winds are music in our mouths – we are the body of the earth – and this is both a scientific and a religious proposition. Nature must be our starting point – it is more than poetry and more than natural resources, it is more than a place that we live – it is in us and our bodies are of it. And all of this is bounded by relationship – relationships of power, ecology, giving and receiving, loving and feeding, dying and suffering. Relationships – we know that this is true and that this truth has consequences for every choice we make – every right we champion or deny, every new discovery, experiment – has impact.

This is the hard place where science and religion meet. Here that there is great danger. It is neither science nor religion that carries the danger alone – the danger rises because they are installed in larger culture – worlds of greed and hunger for power and both science and religion have been badly used – but we cannot live in ivory towers of wishes nor crystals cathedrals of fancy -- this is the context of science and religion. That danger, alone is a sermon’s worth and more – if science is value-free how do we order and safeguard life – which is so impacted by the work of science and its active agent – technology? If religion is beyond the reach of reason – how do we safeguard the freedoms and the new revelations of reason?

Perhaps religion and science and the other magisteria must meet somewhere – somewhere they can powerfully inform one another. It makes me think that there must be a magisterium between science and religion – a true common ground that reflects this fact – we are not creatures of simple compartmentalization – we are utterly snarled up in this ball of yarn we call the cosmos. In one another’s laps. Interdependent.

It seems that there must be another magisterium that bridges the two and I believe that there is and that we are sitting in it now – this place – this house of the reasoned faith – where scientists worship and mystics reason. Predictable, you say – she always think we have the answers here. Well… I know for a fact that while we may not have all of the answers here – I know that we will ask the questions – and the questions – as well as the unfettered truth will set us free.

Rev. A. Powell Davies, Unitarian minister, wrote in a sermon entitled Can Science and Religion Get Together? "If science in the United States ever became dominated by a reactionary government, or by a reactionary church, or by both together, the result could be unfortunate." "Let the churchmen and the scientists both repent--the churchmen because of their pride, trying to shut up God in a box that only they can open; the scientists because of their aloofness, trying to exclude the truth of the heart from the search for knowledge. We need the scientific separation of truth from error.  As it seems to me, only the religion that admits this--indeed, proclaims it--can be such a religion as science may endorse." So wrote Davies in 1947.

And today I would say that that liberal church – that dwelling place of liberal religion is the new magisterium – that ground where science and religion may walk and work together. And we will explore this further together over time—in this place that allows us – this place where we have made the freedom to explore together. Life is a miracle – like the universe in a grain of sand its wonder cannot be fully seen under a microscope – or figured by mathematical calculation. And yet life is a miracle and its wonders cannot be fully known by the mystic’s eye nor captured by some vague poetry. We need all our vision – what Ken Wilber calls the three eyes – of Mind and Flesh and Contemplation. To see our way to the ground were reason and science meet. We need all our vision -- connected. Surely we do and keenly – for our power is great and our understanding is small and its best hope is in the union of our insight and our experience, our wisdom and our knowledge, our boundedness by earth and our groundedness in mystery. – In the working and knowing re-union of science and religion.

This kind of religion--liberal religion--also maintains the open mind to future discovery.  It is not restricted by a creed.  When new knowledge comes, it entertains it sincerely and takes the consequences of it.  It follows advancing truth, and sifts out all wisdom, both new and old, trying always to know what experience vindicates.  It is only with this kind of religion that science can get together and remain scientific.  It is only this kind of religion that keeps the door open for the scientific future.

It is high time that religion began to be powerful in the hearts of men.  It is high time that we broke the bondage of the past and became liberated to the real possibilities of religion.  It is high time that we know that for religion just as much as for science, truth is supreme.  Not truth dwarfed and cramped to be fitted into a formula that disfigures it; but truth set free--truth in the open light of earth and sky: truth as experience proves it. 

Let there be only one truth, and let it be in the fullness of the soul's need that we seek it: but truthfully!  Then indeed shall it be as Tennyson pleaded: that
 "...knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But  vaster."

divorce occurred between science and the search for knowledge and spirit – which is the meeting point of mind and heart – and the search for wisdom.

Sagan page 213.