by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

We awaken again this morning to a world of wetness and wonder, and to the astonishing particularity of human life.  And we walk through these doors yet another time to take up our sacred role in the universe as makers of meaning.  Come, let us worship together.

One hundred Aprils ago, a twenty-six-year-old clerk working in the Swiss Patent Office dashed off a whimsical, newsy letter to a friend.  “Conrad!” the letter writer began, “What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul?” After inquiring about the condition of his friend’s soul, he brought Conrad up to date on his favorite hobby:  theoretical science.  Squeezed in alongside being a husband, a father, and a government worker, it seems he had found time to write a few science papers.

This chatty correspondence is still around for us to peruse because the writer was a guy named Albert Einstein. In one of those spare time science papers from 1905, he worked out the special theory of relativity, the foundation for work which transformed physics forever.  This is an interesting centennial milestone, but why focus on Einstein in church?  I turn to Einstein because religion and science are acting like antagonists these days; and yet Einstein, who became the living symbol of science, was passionate about their interdependence. 

He described the deep religious feelings of scientists this way—“a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. . . . It is beyond question closely akin,” he said, “to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. . . . [T]he cosmic religious experience,” he declared, “is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.” 

These opinions put Einstein back at the center of intense controversy over science and religion—controversy that has turned into a more or less constant antagonism.

Take the case of Terri Schiavo, the patient whose feeding tube was removed after she was found to be in a persistent vegetative state, igniting an unprecedented controversy between religious groups shouting “sanctity of life” and doctors and scientists shouting “quality of life.”  When Schiavo died on March 31, the New York Times observed, “Rarely have the forces of politics, religion, and medicine collided so spectacularly.”

While the Schiavo case was moving up and down our state and federal courts, about a dozen Imax theaters refused to screen a documentary called “Volcanoes of the Sea” because its discussion of evolution offended fundamentalist religious groups.  At the very same time, a survey was released by the National Science Teachers Association showing that approximately one-third of our country’s science teachers feel pressured to teach Biblically based creationism as a scientific theory.  If you think that might be paranoia, take a look at the legislation just introduced in about a dozen state legislatures that would entitle college students to take their professors to court if they feel their views on scientific theories are not being given equal time—legislation specifically designed to force the teaching of Biblical creationism as a scientific theory.

Now, before we become too indignant about these assaults on science by the Religious Right, we should take a sober look at how science has so taken over our culture and very way of thinking that it has almost become a religion.  The way science has pushed spirituality and religion off into the margins in our society is not as sensational as the headline-getting tactics of the Religious Right, but its effect is far more profound.  All of us are under its spell to one degree or another.  It is part of the cultural air we breathe.

Science has solved so many problems that most of us have come to expect, consciously or unconsciously, that eventually it will solve everything.  To take just one example of many, the noted physicist Steven Hawking practically says so in his book A Brief History of Time, declaring that we may soon discover why the universe exists.  This, he says confidently, “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”

These salvos are not simply a rarefied squabble between theologians and scientists.  Even though we don’t use the jargon, we are all practicing both religion and science in our daily lives.  The controversies we are seeing in public mirror interior struggles between the scientist and the theologian inside every one of us.

This struggle is a particularly intense one for me as I leave law practice behind and move into ministry.  Now, I grant you, law is hardly rocket science; but it partakes of scientific habits of mind to a remarkable degree.  Lawyers constantly question how we know what we know.  Their work is both empirical and theoretical.  The reliability of evidence tested by time-honored fact-finding procedures is central to their calling. 

My work is very different now, but I don’t want to jettison those habits of mind.  Religion ought to make sense.  Its claims ought to be tested by how they play out in the empirical reality of our lived experience.  More than anything I have ever done, ministry calls on me to bring my whole self to my work—the theologian, the counselor, the social scientist, the logician, everything I can bring to bear.   So I have some skin in this game. 

What Einstein had to say about the complementarity of science and religion is every bit as brilliant as E=MC².  For this wisdom to gain currency, though, it will take another revolution in which both scientists and theologians participate—both the professionals and the amateur ones that live inside all of us.  Here’s what that revolution needs to be about and why Unitarian Universalists should lead it. 

Right relationship between science and religion first requires clear conceptions of each.  Einstein described religion as providing us with what he called “a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends . . . They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation . . . One must not attempt to justify them,” he said,  “but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.”  He described science as “the study of “how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other.”  He observed that “objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. . . .”  That “other source” he declared to be religion.

This longing reflects an attraction to mystery.  The physicist and science writer Chet Raymo describes the place where this attraction takes us in our pursuit of both science and theology—using the metaphor of a finite island of understanding surrounded by an infinite sea of mystery.  We dredge up more solid ground at the water’s edge and expand our perimeter.  Occasionally the sea pushes back, washing away the results of our labors and leaving us with less understanding.  And then, after the deluge, we start dredging and building again. 

If the sea of mystery is infinite, then expansion of our island of understanding can never diminish the sea.  It can only lengthen the shoreline along which we pursue our science and our religion—our never-ending work of delving, dredging and filling at the water’s edge. 

Even though science and religion are very different kinds of work, the attitudes underlying them are similar.  They call us to awe, reverence, and humility at the mystery of creation. From the perspective of the Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, from whose speech Kate read today, everything in our world is astonishing; nothing is ordinary. 

And Arnie Pickar, transfixed by a lowly but miraculous wasp burrowing in the ground, is moved by the same impulse.  Einstein described this impulse as a “sensation of the mystical,” which he characterized as “the most beautiful and profound experience” and “the sower of all true science.”  Small wonder, then, that the great physicist Niels Bohr once said “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.  The poet, too,” he said, “is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.” 

Science and religion both utterly depend on faith.  Scientists, Einstein observed, build their lives on “faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason.  I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist,” he declared, “without that profound faith.”  Faith in reason is still faith.  To persevere in one’s job trusting that something unknown is waiting to be revealed is to place great store in faith. 

And the scientist and theologian inside all of us are both lovers, because they love truth.  To love is to see the truth everywhere, to surrender to it, to be willing to be surprised by it, and to accept it just as it is.  Science and religion demand this of us, even at the expense of having our precious ideas sometimes turn out to be error colliding with truth. 

If we are willing to bring these attitudes to the water’s edge, science and religion can enable us to make very different but complementary translations of mystery:  in the case of religion, into the values and goals of a good life; in the case of science, into an understanding of the realities in which that good life must be grounded.  Wholeness in human experience is impossible without harnessing these disciplines in a harmonious way.                 

The harmony between religion and science thus is profound.  As shown by the controversies now raging along their borders, however we lose our connection to this harmony when, in the practice of either science or religion, we forget how to be humble.

When religion arrogantly pretends to be science by claiming the Bible as an authoritative scientific text, the result is bad science because it arrests human curiosity and brings no empowerment to the rational side of human living.  When we search for a cure for cancer, two and two had better be four, even if Genesis says it is five.  It is also bad religion because it imprisons God within one characterization of the divine—the one found in a particular human literary rendering.  When God is kept small, human spiritual experience is also kept small. 

Conversely, when science arrogantly pretends to be religion, claiming the scientific method is the only way of apprehending creation, the result is bad religion because this leaves unaddressed the human longing for unity with the infinite, about which the scientific method has nothing to say.  It is also bad science because it starves curiosity at its source, which is that sense of awe and reverence for inexhaustible mystery.

The physicist Steven Hawking and the fundamentalist Christians inveighing against the theory of evolution thus actually have much in common.  Both are guilty of singling out and elevating one part of creation to the holy status that should be reserved for all of creation taken together, or in theological language, God. 

The fundamentalists claim to know the mind of God because it was revealed, they insist, in the Bible.  They consider this text the perfect, complete, and exclusive source of revelation of the divine.  Any source in all of creation that deviates from this text is blasphemy.  The religious term for this perverse adulation is idolatry, or, more precisely, bibliolatry—the worship of a book, of one small sliver of creation – singling it out and elevating it to a holy status, blinding the idolaters to the revelation of God in all of creation. 

Is the physicist Hawking really any better?  If scientists make discoveries that they claim reveal the mind of God, as Hawking predicts, these too will be bibliolatry, based on their writings.  These discoveries would be rendered in a new holy scripture of higher mathematics, which would then have to be interpreted by the high priests of physics.  Subjected to the governance of the new scientific principles and explanations Hawking believes are now within reach, God would no longer be God.  Instead, these principles would be God.  Once again, we would be back on the familiar terrain of dogma.  To me, this is papal infallibility dressed up in a lab coat. 

Hawking’s prediction that we are about to achieve the ultimate scientific knowledge has a distinctly religious twist, because it amounts to a proclamation that the end is near—the end of time and history and the arrival of last things.  We have heard this from scientists before.  It is another form of that loss of awe and wonder that comes with loss of humility. 

A scant ten years before Einstein’s revolutionary physics papers in 1905, two leading scientists, Lord Kelvin and Albert Michelson, declared that all significant discoveries in physics had been made and that science was at an end.  Einstein himself was perhaps guilty of a similar arrogance in reaction to quantum mechanics, which superseded his own work in important respects.  Bothered by its probabilistic framework and departure from the notion of a definite and fully predictable universe, he turned to religious language to express his displeasure.  “God does not play dice with the universe,” he growled, adding that if quantum mechanics is right, the universe is “spooky”—a description that would cause most theologians no discomfort. 

And then sometimes religion comes looking for science because of our culture’s inability to deal with religious conflict.  In my previous career as a lawyer, I often had the uneasy feeling that the judges and advocates were practicing religion disguised as social science.  We used legal jargon to sound objective.  We had three-pronged balancing tests and all manner of other ways to make our work sound like sticking litmus paper in a beaker and simply reporting the result.  But we were trafficking in values, translating mystery into ethics and calling it science.

So.  When we look with unclouded eyes, we can see that harmony between science and religion is natural and appropriate; but our world seems to be very far from that blessed state today.  What can Unitarian Universalists do? 

First, we can celebrate science in our church life as a spiritual value.  Our Principles and Purposes revere the free and responsible search for truth and meaning not because this is good civics, but rather because it brings us closer to the divine and therefore it is sacred.  We will honor this principle in action on May 7, when our Seventh Principle group presents a stellar conference on global warming.  This wonderful piece of work by a large group of dedicated volunteers is grounded in our deep conviction that our connection to the earth is sacred and deserves the love and care we give to all sacred things. 

Second, we can begin to say loudly in the public square something we regularly say to each other within these walls:  that the book in which revelation, discovery and understanding are inscribed is never closed.  Gracie Allen said “Never put a period where God put a comma.”  She was right.  It’s time to get evangelistic about this, our most important message. 

Third, we can begin to face down fanatics who would make dogma of either religion or science.  Both science and religion are grounded in what our Principles and Purposes call the “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder” that we claim as a source of our living religious tradition.  The work of science is as holy as the work of religion. 

And finally, we can become the conveyors of a deeper dialogue.  We Unitarian Universalists like to say that we place our faith “in the conversation.”  Real conversations about science and religion only happen when people are ready to accept that there are no final answers.  We cherish that little phrase “I don’t know.”  We are willing to be the church of I Don’t Know, and yet to act in the world with the humility that comes from living with imperfect knowledge.  The gift of our religion to the world is its insistence on working at the water’s edge, rather than remaining on the safer, dryer ground of dogma and moral certainty.  The conversation needed for the reunion of science and religion is our kind of conversation.  It’s time for all of us to get our feet wet. 

PRAYER

Great Spirit, we yearn to bring our whole selves to the work of our world.  In a time of extremes, help us keep our balance.  Turn us away from the wound and tragedy into which we fall when science and religion make war on each other.  Open our eyes to all of creation and to all ways of touching it.  This we pray in the name of all that is holy. 

Amen. 

BENEDICTION

You are blessed with the capacity for awe and wonder and inspiration, for many kinds of knowing, and for the boldness to pursue deep secrets of the universe.  Go humbly into the world today and honor these gifts.

EPIPHANY by Arnie Pickar

What do you do when a Jehovah’s Witness shows up on your doorstep? As for me it had been an opportunity for some theological exercise. Two well meaning and really quite nice ladies would periodically appear on my front porch a few years back. I don’t remember too much in detail what we had to say to one another but I do know that I enjoyed our conversation, particularly (and perhaps this was not so nice of me) when I detected a glimmer of self doubt creep into their expressions. Perhaps that is why they stopped showing up. But there is one exchange I remember vividly. At one point, one of the ladies remarked “Surely you must admit that the Bible was inspired of God.”  “Yes,” I replied, hardly skipping a beat “but I also would think that Albert Einstein’s first papers on relativity were inspired of God.”

Thinking of this afterwards, I had to ask myself was my answer simply a bit barbed repartee calculated to unbalance a verbal adversary. My conclusion was that in fact my response reflected a deeper aspect of who I was. I know that as far back as I can remember there have been two driving forces behind my serious thinking. One of these has been a seeking after rational explanation as a counterforce against the mystical and superstitious which, as a child, served only to confuse and even frighten. The second strain of thought was a sense of wonder and even awe regarding the intricacy and magnificence of the surrounding natural world.

Sometimes this kind of mentality leads simply to strong curiosity—how do things work and why do things happen? I remember watching with curiosity and fascination as a lone wasp painstakingly cleared a burrow in the ground and then pulled its prey down inside as sustenance for its offspring. Here before my eyes was what we often call the miracle of life playing out in such a tiny creature. Sometimes reflecting on the natural world can have an almost dizzying impact. I think of lying under a star filled sky and, as I have on a few occasions, mentally changing my point of view so that I am no longer in the center looking out. Now, just as correctly, I am pinned by gravity with my back up against this spinning ball of ours looking down, over and across all existence.

When it came to finding a life work it is natural that I chose science—and in particular, as someone with a taste for tinkering and an aversion to massive memorization—experimental physics. But also physics seemed more to address the ultimate questions—how did it all come to be and how at a fundamental level does it all work?

I think of spirituality as the seeking after the ultimate reality. I think of religion as facilitating that search.  I think we all enter this quest after the ultimate in many ways—scientists included.  We do this through expressive arts, through good works, and through working for the common good. In science the way is to read the truth about that ultimate reality, not in the book of man, but in the book of nature. I am always thankful for the existence of our worldwide community of faith and for congregations like ours, where all these paths to spiritual fulfillment are honored and encouraged.

Of course not every physicist—perhaps only a few—is suited to work directly on the deepest underlying mysteries. But everyone who has done basic science knows the “Aha” moment, when a discovery, even a relatively small one, leads to the realization that at that moment he or she is the only person who has ever understood this particular thing about nature. But rather than being a moment to be marked as one of triumph or conceit, this is truly a moment for humility. At such a time one has been privileged to get a special glimpse of that great reality—to reach down, as it were, from our spinning ball to touch for a moment the ultimate.