Science and Religion

A page for cumulative thoughts about the often uneasy relationship between these two areas of human endeavor.

See the links at Books and Resources for Science and Spirit, and for the NYTimes Science section.

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Castine, 25 Feb. 2001

Readings:

(1) Excerpt from an interview with Daniel Dennett, scientist, (Science&Spirit 11(2): 18-20)

"It is seldom remarked (though often observed in private, I daresay) that many, many people who profess belief in God do not really act the way people who believed in God would act; they act the way people would act who believed in believing in God. That is, they manifestly think that believing in God is -- would be -- a good thing, a state of mind to be encouraged, by example if possible, so they defend belief-in-God with whatever rhetorical and political tools they can muster. They ask for God's help, but do not risk anything on receiving it, for instance. They thank God for their blessings, but, following the principle that God helps those who help themselves, they proceed with the major decisions of their lives as if they were going it alone."

(2) Excerpt from an essay of Isaac Penington, Quaker, ca 1768

"Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the Seed that God sows in thy heart, and let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee -- and thou shalt find by sweet experience that God knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is [God's] portion."

"Respondeo etsi Mutabor" ["I respond, even if I will be changed"]

Some years ago, I ran a kindergarten in Wiscasset. The Sheepscot River, its tides, and its weatherformed the backdrop of our days. One morning, a teacher sat on the edge of the sandbox with a three-year-old child in her lap, facing the river. Itwas early in the day, and the two -- teacher and child -- drank in the moods of the unruffled river and the rapidly-changing light of the rising sun. Suddenly, the child said, "WHO put that river there?!" and the teacher, caught aback, said "What?" and the three-year-old said again, "WHO put that river there?" The teacher replied, "I suppose God did." And the child, without turning around, still facing the river, said, "Who?" and the teacher replied, very quietly, "God." They sat in silence for some few minutes, and then the child heaved a great sigh and said, "I love God."

As a geological oceanographer who has spent some time unraveling the geological development of the adjacent river, I have given some thought to an alternative answer to this child's question. There isn't any answer nearly as satisfying, particularly to the question of who, rather than by what process or how that river got there. A child naïvely ignores conventional categories of thought, and accepts at face value explanations which adult minds cannot accept without an active exertion of will. Somehow, in the process of growing up, we adults become separated from the effortless acceptance of the Transcendant and its attendant senses of wonder and gratitude which so many children possess.

However difficult the modern adult mind finds a spiritual world-view, an experience of a Transcendent Reality beyond our own experience is so universal in human history as to have a name in every known culture and language. So, while we must acknowledge the inadequacy of words to name this experience, words are all we have, and they will have to do. The names I use are only a convenient shorthand, and are not intended to exclude anyone's personal experience of an Other.

Since the early 17th century, the universality of God-experience has been paralleled in Western civilization by a world-view which is best characterized as materialism -- not mere consumerism, but a conviction that the material world is all there is, and that the human mind is capable of knowing it completely. Our Western culture is so permeated now by the materialist viewpoint that it is difficult to look at questions of spirit without looking through the lenses of materialism's most powerful tool, science.

The power of the scientific method is also its weakness when it comes to questions of religious experience and faith. Science can only address questions about the material world, and its answers are always determined by its questions. For example, over the past few years a few scientists have investigated the effects of prayer on healing. Such prayers have been shown to be effective within the limits of the experiments. Continued investigations will have as their object the precise description of the conditions under which prayer is effective, and what prayers are most effective for a given purpose, and what the characteristics are of the people who pray most effectively. Ultimately, the scientist will want to investigate why prayers are effective and what the mechanism of their effectiveness is. Such investigations will never help us with the question of whether God exists. Science is incapable of demonstrating the existence of an entity which is not a directly observable phenomenon in the material world. Nonetheless, the scientific method is the most powerful analytical tool thus far created by the human mind, and any religious conviction will have to co-exist with it.

In the passage quoted earlier, Daniel Dennett observed that most people act as if what they believed was that believing in God was a good idea. Later in the same article, he gives examples of those who truly believe in God as being persons who do not participate in medical care, or those who give all their earthly goods away in expectation that God will sustain them henceforward. He points out that such believers risk something substantial in living out their belief.

And that is the challenge Dennett's observation poses to spiritual liberals: believing in God requires us to risk something of ourselves; believing that something is a good idea does not. For Dennett, the belief that believing in God is a good idea is simply not to be taken seriously. In addition, he appears to feel that the risks and uncertainties of belief in God are not sustainable in the face of a scientific world view.

Despite the fact that our mode of thinking is permeated with -- or at least touched by -- a scientific/materialist world-view, many of us are simply not able to lay aside our questions about, and sense of connection to, a Transcendent Reality. We continue to seek a connection to Spirit, a connection some of us felt as children as well as at other times in our lives. And this seeking affects the way we live our lives. Acting as if belief in God were a good idea is relatively easy: we go through the motions that accompany "believing in God," and we are sometimes rewarded by society's approval; sometimes enjoy the warm feelings of belonging to a church community, as well as the social support that such belonging includes. This level of engagement has even been shown scientifically to have beneficial effects on health.

We live in a scientific age, but even if we did not, belief in the undemonstrable has always been a difficult undertaking. Awash in a materialist culture, our thinking permeated by a scientific world view and analytical approach to the human condition, believing that "belief in God is a good idea" requires less energy than living out our belief in God. And less risk. Believing in a Transcendent Reality demands something of us -- at the very least, deciding what our relationship to this Transcendent Reality is going to be.

In Jan de Hartog's historical novel The Peaceable Kingdom, a Quaker woman is confronted by the unimaginable filth of a 17th century English prison, and wonders why God has not intervened. Her companion picks up a mop and a pail and goes to work, saying that God has no hands but ours to do God's work in the world -- a belief resulting in action, arising from her conviction about her relationship with God and therefore with all of God's creation.

In the second passage quoted this morning, Isaac Penington is describing the process we enter when we give up our control and enter the belief that A Transcendent Something exists. "Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the Seed which God sows in thy heart, and let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee. . ." He ends with his conviction that giving one's self over to that belief radically affects one's life. ". . .And thou shalt find by sweet experience that Gods knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is [God's] portion." This is the process captured in the assertion which forms today's sermon title: respondeo etsi mutabor: "I respond, even if I will be changed." The Seed is belief in God -- the idea to which we respond -- and responding changes us.

The engagement with an idea -- any idea -- will change us: the evidence of that is all around us (and has been scientifically demonstrated). That makes it important that we choose carefully the ideas which we adopt as our own, for these ideas will determine fundamentally how we live. A belief in God to which we respond entails personal risk: we give up the illusion of control over our lives - an illusion that we cling to in spite of human experience -- and we are changed. In the words of the old hymn, "O Love, that will not let me go. . .", to this spiritual reality of our lives, we respond. And even if that changes us, it is the only path to the peace which passes all understanding.

Allen Myers

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A sermon delivered at the Deer Isle Congregational Church, 7 May 2000 (Earth Day)

One Way out of a Pickle

Lectionary texts:
Ps. 4
Acts 3:12-19
1 John 1:1-2:2
Luke24:35-48

A month or so ago, there was a report on the radio about a community down east where 70 migrant workers from Central America were all employed in a seafood processing plant. These 70 all had families, and, as you might imagine, 70 families make for a noticeable presence in any small community. The report was about the efforts local people were making to integrate these 70 Central American families -- many members of which spoke little or no English --into their community, particularly the school. There were celebrations of diversity, and potlucks where beans and rice and corn found their places beside baked beans and chowder. This effort required lots of hard work and good will on everyone's part, and it was not all smooth and easy -- but it has been successful.

Later in the report, it transpired that what these workers were processing was sea cucumbers -- 30,000 pounds of them every day! Some of this production was going to foreign markets, and some of it was going into the powdered sea cucumber pills that people are finding so helpful for arthritis. Now, it happens that, during the part of my life when I was studying the bottom of the sea, some of my best friends were sea cucumbers. [Show of hands -- how many of you have ever seen a sea cucumber?] Very little is known about their ecological function in the ocean. They are found in all oceans and at all depths. Although many consider them slimy and unappealing, I find them elegant and rather endearing. In any case, the thought of harvesting 30,000 pounds a day of creatures whose function in the scheme of things we know so little about is staggering to me! Like sea urchins, these animals grow rather slowly, and like our experience with sea urchins, we can expect a fairly rapid decline in numbers to the point where it is no longer economically feasible to harvest them. But, for the time being, their harvest is providing needed employment in the economically stressed sector of fisheries, and in economically strapped parts of Maine.

This vignette contains many elements of the difficulties we humans face in trying to live on our planet. Our relationship to nature is often played out as if we were not ourselves an integral part of it, but of course we are. We harvest natural resources -- be they coal and petroleum or trees and sea cucumbers -- without much knowledge of or regard for their function, their value, in sustaining the whole organism which is earth. When the sea cucumbers are gone, we will find something else to harvest, and we may not look back very much at what the effect of our harvest was. But we will have to care for the people who are displaced by the loss of that industry.

So, another important part of the story is the care of humans for other humans -- and how inextricable economics is from our relationship with the rest of Creation. People need to live, and in our western culture -- as increasingly in every part of the world -- the needs of living are supported by cash-based economic activity. It is not only good for people to have useful work which rewards them reasonably, it is an absolute necessity. BUT, we must find ways to balance human needs with the needs of all the other things God has created on the planet or we will destroy our planet's ability to support us.

Facing the difficulties of our relationships with each other and the rest of creation, we may hear the words of this morning's psalm: "'O that we might see some good. Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O God!'" Many Biblical passages support the idea that living out our religious faith means dwelling together in unity, caring for one another in ways by which we recognize ourselves as God's agents, working with God's gifts, within God's creation. And, equally, if we truly live out our religious faith, we will find ourselves living in unity, not only with all humanity, but with the rest of the natural world as well.

When we bring our whole lives before God, that is, when we bring everything we do and think about and are into our faith life, then all of it will be seen for what it is: God's gifts on loan to us during our time here on earth. The relationship between these things which do not belong to us, and our use of them for our own benefit and the benfit of all creation, is stewardship. Stewards care for things which belong to another. What we now need to understand, and bring into this life of faith, is that we, ourselves, are an integral part of what is being taken care of. In terms of the sea cucumber story we started with, the dragger crew, the processor, the workers, the arthritis sufferers -- AND the sea cucumbers, the microscopic algae they eat, the sunlight which makes the algae grow, the nutrients the algae require which run off the land into streams and then into the sea -- all of these are integral parts of creation's wholeness.

When our use of a natural resource is in balance with its ability to replenish itself, and when our co-existence with the parts of the natural world we don't use is not destructive, we can say human life is in harmony within the creation. As far as we know now, science supports this. In terms of our relationship with creation, this is what it means to "walk with God".

And that brings us to 1 John. What does it say? In part, it says: "That which was from the beginning...concerning the word of life...was made manifest: [what] we...proclaim to you [is] the eternal life. ... This is the message we have heard from Jesus Christ and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God is no shadow at all. "

First, we must acknowledge that this image of "God as light" has fed our culture's racism, equating light with white and good, dark with bad. The biblical scholar Virginia Mollenkott points out that the Bible's many metaphors for God almost always embrace opposites -- God is terrifying and God is comforter; God is in the whirlwind and in the still small voice; God punishes transgressions and God overlooks our shortcomings. To say that God is light without shadows was the metaphor that was chosen by the author of 1 John -- but it is by no means a complete or adequate description of who or what God is.

What people of faith must always seek is to hear beyond the mere words to the place where words come from. When the author says that the message of Jesus is that God is light, and that in God is no shadow at all, he or she is saying that the message of Jesus was and is that God is perfect unity, oneness. And we can see that the unity of God as expressed in God's creation is not a bland sameness; it is a dynamic state, in constant change, but -- like an algebraic equation -- also always in balance.

There are many examples of this in our natural world. The total amount of heat reaching the earth from the sun is constant from day to day, but it is not distributed evenly across the face of the Earth. The Gulf Stream carries enormous amounts of heat from the tropics into the cold northern latitudes, so that although England is on the same latitudes as Labrador, it has a climate very similar to ours. Once it has given up its heat in the north, that water flows back south toward the equator, where it is warmed for its journey north again. Without this circulation, Europe would be unlivably colder, and the Caribbean unlivably hotter. As with the algebraic equation, it is possible to move the terms about, but the balance within the unity of Creation will be maintained.

The second point the author of 1 John is making is that "...If we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have partnership with one another...." That is, if we live in the unity that God is, we will dwell together in partnership with each other and with all that is. That is a vision of finding our rightful place within Nature rather than "dominating" it (or trying to). This vision asks us to exercise stewardship for the earth including ourselves without having control over the way it will all turn out. Science can help here -- it has led us to a profound understanding of the ways all things are connected -- but its answers are always partial and statistical. Our response to the world must engage our whole being, and include all of creation, not just the parts we deem useful at the moment.

What each of us does, when we go out from this place of worship, makes a difference in the achievement of harmony within God's good creation. We must carry our sense of worship into our daily mundane tasks, and sanctify them with our conviction that walking with God will bring us into unity with all creation. Will we make mistakes? Yes, and that is the third part of our scripture lessons today: our need to acknowledge what the author calls sin and what we can easily undertand as the inevitabliity of our own mistake-making, and God's assurance of forgiveness and help. Stewardship 's negative side is our need for control: if we take care of something, it is possible for us to think that in some sense we control it, and that we can use it in any way that we want to without thinking about the consequences.

In our care for the earth, we must exercise responsibility without control, because control belongs to God, in whom and through whom we have our being. If we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors throughout Creation as ourselves, Creation, including all of us, will be covered with the protecting shadow of God's wing.

The Spirit Blows Where It Chooses 

Matinicus Congregational Church, UCC    20 July 2003

Allen C. Myers

Isaiah 6: 1 – 8;   John 3: 1 – 17

            Have you ever noticed the slimy trail a slug or a land snail leaves behind as it crawls along?  Well, snails in the ocean do the same thing – they shuffle along a slimy roadway of their own making, and, in fact, they can’t move without it.  This slime is considered very choice food for bacteria, and bacteria are choice food for a whole lot of marine creatures.  Long ago, I got curious about how much slime periwinkles in the tidal zone produce as they crawl around.  So, I devised a simple experiment for measuring it.  I made a whole bunch of glass strips of different lengths, all about an inch wide; then got a different periwinkle to crawl down each glass strip.  Once I had the periwinkle slime on the glass strip, it was pretty easy to analyze chemically the amount of organic matter the snails had left behind.

            The trick, though, was to get the snails to crawl in a straight line down the glass strip.  I don’t know if any of you have tried to control a crawling snail, but, frankly, it’s easier to herd cats!  Periwinkles have two feelers on top of their heads, and they move their heads slowly from side to side as they crawl along.  Whenever a crawling snail started to turn right or left, I discovered that I could touch the feeler on that side, and the snail would turn the other way.  Thus, by touching alternate feelers, I got the snails to crawl in a more or less straight line down the middle of the glass strip.  It takes a great deal of patience to do this for fifty snails crawling a combined total of 25 feet!

            How do we navigate our life pathways?  We know what we mean generally when we talk about “walking the straight and narrow path” – usually we think of such a path as akin to living a moral and upright life – and we often associate those values with religion.  But the practice of religion as a series of rituals, learned by rote and carried out without thought, can lead to a dry and empty following of rules.  Jesus spoke often against such a rule-dominated religious practice, and Christianity too has often been plagued with a similarly slavish rule-orientation throughout its 2000-year history.  Religion – the organized institutionalization of beliefs about God – must be enlivened by a sense of the mystery toward which it tries to point.  Religion incorporates some of the answers to the questions that people have asked about God, but all the answers are approximations, or metaphors, or analogies.  The mystery that is God always eludes description by the limited powers of human language.  If all language about God is inadequate, how can we talk about “communication” with God?  If we and everything around us are part of God, then how do we conceive of “having a conversation with God”?  How do we know that what we choose to do with our lives from moment to moment is in some kind of harmony with God?  Are we simply snails crawling along, with God touching our feelers from time to time to let us know when we are getting off the track?

            Imagine for a moment that you are a periwinkle, crawling along the rocks beneath a forest of brown seaweed, waving your feelers back and forth.  Your feelers are giving you information not only about your physical world – whether there is a seaweed frond ahead, or whether the surface of the rock goes up or down – but also about the presence of edible things on the rock or in the water, and about dangers ahead and behind and above; about the presence and movements of other snails.  In short, you are receiving lots of information about whether you are “fitting in” to your environment, whether you are “in harmony” with the world around you.

            If we apply this idea to ourselves, first off, the world we affect and which affects us is vastly more complex than that of the periwinkle – even though we must admit immediately that the periwinkle is part of the world we affect and which affects us!  But the idea that we can be “in harmony” with our world, and somehow know it, brings us a little closer to an appreciation of what it is like to communicate with God, to feel the motions of the Spirit.

            Let’s look at a particular example of being in harmony with the world:  for years, we humans threw our trash wherever we wanted.  When I was a child, one of my chores was to take the household kitchen garbage (including tin cans) out into the middle of the Damariscotta River and dump it!  This may be what folks have done and perhaps still do to some extent out here on Matinicus, where the sea is large and the population small, and the challenges of trash disposal on island are all but insurmountable.  On the mainland, we began to run out of suitable land for dumps; we realized that improperly constructed dumps contaminated our drinking water; we realized that much of what we were throwing away could actually be reused, and, in fact, would have to be reused if our resources were going to cover all the uses we had for them.  One could say that our practices had been out of harmony with our surroundings, and, because God lives within God’s creation, we were out of harmony with God.  As we sensed – sometimes through our feelings, sometimes through scientific investigation – that our practices were out of harmony with God’s creation, we began to make changes in the way we did things.  We began to recycle, construct sanitary landfills, conserve water and so forth – changes that are still developing and evolving, still going on, still affecting the harmony we seek with God’s creation.  Matinicus islanders face the same problems in the long term: on this finite piece of God’s green earth, there are limited places to put “stuff” – even useful stuff; for the island’s volume of soil, the disposal of septic waste (along with any other toxic fluids such as oils, fuels, paint, cleaners, and so forth) will always threaten the supply of drinkable fresh water.  

            Some weeks ago, as we observed the Jewish festival of Pentecost in its Christian form as the recognition of the presence of the Holy Spirit among the apostles, we recalled Jesus’ promise that he would not leave his followers alone after his death and resurrection, but that he would send the Holy Spirit as a Teacher, Guide, Light, and Comforter to be with us forever.  While the description of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts is dramatic, there have been equally dramatic scientific discoveries which have showed us that we were out of harmony with God’s creation: the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, for example, which has led to all kinds of restrictions in the chemicals we put in the air.  The Holy Spirit is the enlivening breath of God, blowing through our lives as much in the guidance of scientific discovery as in the interior guidance of our hearts, helping us to love our neighbors in practical ways that reflect God’s presence in the creation.  In our religious life as a worshipping community, the Holy Spirit constantly renews within us the spiritual vitality in the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  

It might be helpful to look at some of the names Jesus gave the Holy Spirit:  Teacher, Guide, Light.  A teacher transmits a body of knowledge, but it is always based on the past, and it is always incomplete – there is always more to be learned, and some of what we took for fact from the past may have to be modified by future discoveries.  A guide may show us the way, but it will not be the only way, and it may be a general indication rather than a detailed prescription or roadmap.  Light illumines both what we learn and our pathways, but light also casts shadows, making what is in the shadows more difficult to see.  Not only that, but the illumination that comes from light is only useful as far as we can see – which is usually not very far.  All of these metaphors for the Holy Spirit – teacher, guide, light -- suggest some limitation in our ability to perceive and apply the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  These thoughts also suggest that we need to look for God’s Spirit at work in more than just what we commonly relegate to our “Sunday lives” or our “church lives”: if we believe that this is God’s world, and that God is everywhere present in it, then we must be open to finding evidence of God’s Spirit at work everywhere we look.

Very seldom will we experience the smoke and the angels and the thunder of a theophany – an encounter with God Almighty, such as the reading from Isaiah today describes.  And, even if we did, we could not be certain it is the Holy Spirit touching us rather than an over-active imagination.  Our response to God’s call will be conditioned by our readiness and our willingness to do what we perceive to be God’s direction in our lives, our readiness to answer, “Here I am.”  Our response will also be conditioned by our willingness to test our call against our religious tradition and the experience of the congregation among which we worship, as well as our more general sense of “harmony with the world.”

One wonderful resource that we have for testing the presence of God’s Spirit in our actions is each other.  We can ask one another whether what we are doing is consistent with the best guidance we can find.  That is something we do in a communal way here each Sunday: we gather as people who know one another more or less well, reaffirming each time we gather here the importance of God in our lives, and reaffirming the importance of each other in seeking God.  It is possible to seek God alone: many have done it.  But the truth one finds will always have to be tested among other human beings.  The Hebrew Scriptures give us two overarching commandments, summarized by Jesus:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  These commandments make it clear to us that discernment is to be exercised in community; that seeking to recognize God’s Spirit at work – wherever that happens – is a communal activity. 

When I officiate at a wedding, one of the things I almost always do is to point out to the couple the wealth of human experience they have gathered together in their guests:  40 guests with an average age of 25 represent one thousand years of human experience in relationships – good ones and bad ones – all of which can help a young couple negotiate the challenges of marriage. 

The same is true here:  the thirty or so of us in this sanctuary, with an average age of, say, 50, represent 1500 years of human experience in encountering God and the Holy Spirit, illumined by the life and teachings of Jesus – not only in our spiritual lives, but in every corner and facet of our lives in the world.  That’s a lot of experience!  We have in this church plenty of resources for testing the promptings of the Holy Spirit among us.  As we reach out to other churches through the visits to the main, or through the boat ministry of the Maine Seacoast Mission, through visiting clergy, or by listening to visitors here among us, we widen even more our circle of experience of the Spirit.

May we continue to be faithful worshippers of God; may we continue to seek God in each other and in our friends and neighbors and enemies outside this church and community, that we may be ready to receive the Holy Spirit when it blows through us and through our church, as it blows through the world.  The Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus, our tradition, our human experience – all of these are tools available to us as we seek God’s guidance for this church, and for our lives.  Amen.

Allen Myers