"Science and Religion"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
March 20, 2005

"Long ago, it seemed so simple. The universe was a three-storied apartment house, with heaven on the top floor, full of gods and stars: earth in the middle, full of people and animals and plants; and hell in the basement, full of terrible and scary things. God had nothing to do but sit up there watching us. We were the center of attention. We were his people.

Then came Copernicus. He said that the sun did not move around the earth at all, but was a fixed star. He said it was the earth, and us on it, that did the moving, and, worse, that the earth was just one of the planets that so moved, one among many, and not at the center of anything at all." (The Rev. Judith Walker-Riggs, quoted in "A Chosen Faith," by Buehrens and Church) Galileo Galilei invited the Church Fathers to look through his telescope and see the truth of what Copernicus found, but they refused, and sentenced him to lifelong imprisonment.

Others came too, but few as shocking as Charles Darwin with his theory on the evolution of life and the origins of human beings. His 1859 work "On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection," pushed us human beings off the pedestal of uniqueness that we thought we occupied as a higher form of life than mere animals. Darwin said that far from being something special and different; we were just the same as the animals, subject to the same "blind interaction of law and chance that govern microbes, slugs, and sloths." (The Rev. Amanda Aikman)

And then of course there was Albert Einstein, whose since-proven hypothesis was that all matter intrinsically represents a specific amount of energy. E=mc2 -- the "c" that is squared in this formula is the speed of light! Squared it is huge. Thus the amount of latent energy – E, contained in eve a small amount of matter – m – is huge. Einstein's discovery taught the world that every … plant and person and star in a galaxy is a form of condensed energy. (Adapted from pp. 5-6 in "The Hidden Face of God," by Gerald L. Schroeder.) We are all, as the transcendentalists liked to say, made of star stuff.

Einstein's work, of course, paved the way for quantum physics, which revealed that every particle – protons and neutrons and electrons, even – is actually also a wave. Science writer Mae-Wan Ho says each subatomic particle exists as a wave, an almost dream-like state with access to limitless possibilities, until observation, which seemingly collapses all possibilities into a state of definiteness. (Ho, Mae-Wan, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms London: World Scientific, 1993, pp. 142-145.) And at this level, the particles/waves do not behave predictably according to the laws of physics. Thus the divisions between mass and energy break down, and both are "expressions of some deeper reality in which particles and fields of energy and even time blend," to quote Gerald L. Schroeder, and MIT-trained physicist and biologist who also is a deeply religious Jew.

In his book, "The Hidden Face of God – How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth," Gerald Schroeder quotes physicist Freeman Dyson, who received the million dollar Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities a few years ago. "Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances," said Dyson. "They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom."

Dyson goes on to say, "The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and god. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." (p. 7)

Scientific findings – from Copernicus onwards – have been difficult for religions to countenance, indeed, some never have. Biblical literalists still insist that only their sacred texts tell the truth, and others say that the findings of science can all be construed to prove the veracity of scripture.

Some religions, however, notably Unitarianism and some other liberal Protestant faiths have adapted well to new knowledge science has revealed over the centuries; first seeing, in the Darwin days, new possibilities in Scripture as metaphor, and the mind of God reflected in the laws of nature, including human nature.

But it is also true that, as Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote, "the expansion of human knowledge with science and technology, especially neuroscience, genetics and evolution, renders traditional religious belief less and less tenable, more and more difficult to justify and argue logically. The more we understand from science about the way the world really works, all the way from subatomic particles up to the mind and on to the cosmos, the more difficult it is to base spirituality on our ancient mythologies." (1/1/2000 Wall Street Journal)

Wilson, who helped popularize sociobiology, the study of social organization in animals including humans, especially with regard to the genetic basis and evolutionary history of that social organization, also wrote a book called "On Human Nature," published in the 1970s. In that book, he wrote, "the predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind." At the turn of this century, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, he speculated that, "the search for spirituality is going to be one of the major historical episodes of the 21st century. We realize that we are going to have be proactive in seeking it and defining it instead of reactive in the traditional manner of taking the sacred texts and beliefs handed down to us and trying to adapt them to an evolving culture. That's just not working anymore."

For some people, the world of science and the world of religion will always clash, will never reach across the gap of methodology and intent that separates them and grasp each other's hand, or exchange vital information. Generally speaking, we Unitarian Universalists don't buy that point of view. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "the religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide." (From "A Chosen Faith," Buehrens and Church) We tend to believe, like Edward O. Wilson, that religion rises up in us as a deep response to our human lives – which we live, knowing we are alive and at the same time, knowing that we will someday die. We believe that science can tell us a lot about how to be and how to live.

As many of you are aware, there is a heated debate cropping up in many places across this nation of ours regarding the teaching of the theory of evolution by natural selection and something called "intelligent design."

Basically, "intelligent design" theory holds that the universe, including our earth and all the life on it, is so complex that it could not have emerged by chance, and must have been created by some intelligent being.

Unlike what we are accustomed to calling creationism, intelligent design does not contain direct references to God or to the account of creation in the Biblical book of Genesis. It argues, instead, that because some structures in nature are so "irreducibly complex" they could not possibly have been able to evolve on their own, or that the incremental stages an organism would have had to evolve through would have served no benefit to the organism and thus would not have been selected to survive by nature. Thus, an "intelligent designer" must have been involved in the formation of those natural structures.

Back in mid-December, in Dover, Pennsylvania, the debate over intelligent design erupted into a lawsuit against the public schools by eleven parents of Dover school children because the district's policy mandates that the public schools balance their science curriculum by treating "intelligent design" as a bona fide scientific theory competing with the scientific theory of evolution. The parents, and the ACLU, which is backing them up, feel that "intelligent design" represents the insertion of religious belief into the school science curriculum.

It is terribly hard to view intelligent design as valid science, for what science relies on is methodological naturalism. Science doesn't allow us to invoke the hand of an unseen agent to explain what we see in a telescope or a microscope, only naturalistic explanations are allowed. Science, in the words of Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, Inc., “has to hold variables constant…. How do you hold supernatural forces constant?” (From UUA General Assembly presentation What's "Intelligent" About Intelligent Design, as reported by Jone Johnson Lewis on www.uua.org) One explanation of why science operates this way is that explanations relying on unseen agent are ultimately untestable: they can never be proved wrong. And for any theory to belong in the realm of science, it must always be testable when new knowledge becomes available; it must always be subject to being proven false.

Many scientists feel intelligent design will collapse under the weight of its own flaws, but that does not mean we can ignore it, indeed, we do so at our peril. Ever since the famous 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," in which the ACLU defended a Tennessee teacher convicted of teaching evolution, those religious conservatives who believe that the scientific theory of evolution is atheistic and erodes Christian moral values have attempted to forbid, limit, or otherwise undermine the teaching of it in public schools. The Dover School District case is the first suit to challenge intelligent design, but it will not be the last.

It will not be the last, for these are interesting times in which we live. Interesting and dangerous, for those of us who value freedom of religion and thought. There are forces in our culture which would impose a certain fundamentalist Christian view upon all of us by striking at the roots of science and making free thinking a crime. We need to actively oppose these attempts to shift the foundations of science (which is why I signed the letter to the Grantsburg School District, even though I am not, by some definitions, a Christian minister).

Let's return now for a moment to the discoveries of quantum physics. This is the scientific stuff that has always fascinated me, because of the way it has been captured in the popular imagination. What we have heard is that physicists, by breaking down matter into its smallest components have found there, as Gerald Schroeder put it, "expressions of some deeper reality in which particles and fields of energy and even time blend." This arrives in the ears of a non-scientist like me that physicists are doing as Einstein longed to do – they are reading the mind of god. And they have found in the interstices between matter and energy evidence of god – if not evidence of intelligent design in the universe – evidence that there is a quality of wholeness or holiness in every tiny particle of matter.

Some of these scientists of course, are deeply religious people, and perhaps have a vested interest in finding god through empirical methods. Others perhaps find that conventional language does not contain words to describe what is present at the microlevel of existence, and thus they revert to the traditional name for the ineffable, for mystery: the name "god."

Indeed, this urge is easy to understand. In Tikkun magazine (March/April 2000 issue), Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro writes, "Biology no less than physics … reveals .. such intricacy and wonder as to be a source of mystic amazement…." He quotes Ursula Goodenough, professor of biology at Washington University… who said, "Our story [of nature] tells us of the sacredness of life, of the astonishing complexity of cells and organisms… Reverence is the religious emotion elicited when we perceive the sacred… And so, I profess my Faith: For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value." (From Goodenough's "The Sacred Depths of Nature," 1999, pp. 170-1, quoted in Rami Shapiro Tikkun article.)

Even as we honor reason and find a sense of fulfillment in the scientific methods that prove hypotheses and produce repeatable results, even as we might feel a mystic amazement and delight in what the growing frontiers of scientific research reveal, would we reduce the ultimate meaning and value of life to the complexity of cells and particles? Wouldn't this be a form of idolatry?

Let me explain what I mean by this. In our Unitarian Universalist principles, we have covenanted to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and we aver that our living religious tradition draws from, among other sources, "humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science." But in that same paragraph referring to that which humanist teachings contribute to our UU tradition, we also are warned "against idolatries of the mind and spirit."

According to theologian James Luther Adams, "idolatry occurs when a social movement adopts as the center of loyalty an idol, a segment of reality torn away from the contest of universality, an inflated, misplaced abstraction made into an absolute." We cannot make science or its results our god, for torn away from its cultural context, torn away from our human experiences of love, longing, and morality, science easily becomes a monster.

When I think about this, it always brings to mind J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist widely known as the "father of the Atomic bomb." He was often quoted as saying these words, "In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." This is why Oppenheimer pushed hard for international control of atomic energy – which, added to his ethical objection to the development of further weapons of mass destruction -- led to the crash of his career. He was painfully aware that the "A" bomb, no matter how beautifully derived in a scientific sense, no matter how awesomely amazing, was not morally neutral.

One of our best tools for not making science a god is religion's most important role: asking ethical questions. For example, we might ask, of the many scientific discoveries of the last century, which are morally neutral? Surely there are ethical guidelines that apply to the use of the IQ test, or plant breeding, or airplanes, or nuclear fisson, or pesticides, or birth control, or television, or computers, or drugs, or the laser, or cloning? (Many of these questions come from a sermon by my colleague the Rev. Gary Kowalski.)

Or perhaps even more importantly, religion needs to remind us that the materialistic methodology used by science is only one way to understand reality. Ken Wilber, philosopher and champion of direct, personal religious experience, challenges science to recognize the interior dimension of reality. That is, he challenges science to recognize that the sum of what each individual experiences as reality is greater than the sum of the molecules and synaptic impulses that are the physical, material building blocks of that reality.

As Rabbi Rami Shapiro wrote, "Religion and science are different lenses through which we can catch glimpses of [ultimate meaning which some call god] but to lay one atop the other is to distort them both. Religion will never discover [the] superstrings [of physics]. Science will never imagine loving one's neighbor as oneself." (From Tikkun article) Religion seeks to know our purpose in being; science seeks to know more about what is. Science wants to know what the evidence of the big bang tells us about the nature of the universe; Religion wants to know what the evidence of the big bang tells us about why we are here and how we should live. Science seeks to use the human genome to solve medical concerns via genetics; religion wants to know what knowledge of the human genome will mean in terms of what constitutes a human soul. Science proves via observable evidence; religion asks us to honor a different way of knowing.

I find the scientific evidence for the underlying unity of all things exciting – that we're all simply massless energy/matter waves expressing some kind of information at the particular level makes perfect sense to me – even though it does make me feel awesomely insignificant – the way I felt as a child lying on my back in the grass, looking up at the starry night sky.

But even though it is exciting to know myself as essentially of the same stuff as this lectern and the windows and the trees outside them and the coffee cups waiting to be filled in the Community Room, I still do not believe the existence of god can be proved by physics or biology.

But we can't prove god, or the great mystery with religion, either, even though some of us have intuited or apprehended something transcendent in our lives from time to time. And yet, as more and more scientific disciplines are reaching out and finding that the core of existence has an "emergent" quality, that is to say, a sum that proves to be more than the addition or combination of its parts would imply, we can find, in that emergent quality, that the search for truth via science and the search for meaning via religion or spirituality merge. For in recognizing that emergent quality, that suchness that is more than the sum of its parts, we understand that both science and religion have at their core a sacred call to curiosity, wonder and excitement in learning more about the universe and all it contains.

For as we heard in our chalice lighting words:

Life is a sacred journey of discovery, growth and transformation,
A journey that challenges and changes us as we take each step on the path,
As we stretch our hearts and minds and souls towards all the beckoning possibilities of human being.
And I say may it ever be so, and may we walk that path with all the curiosity and commitment we have.

Amen.