I just got back from the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which is doubtless of little interest to lots of visitors to the VTH. But, as is my wont, I began to ponder things as I was returning home. Even in the Episcopal Church it turns out that there are at least a few people who still feel the need to pit scripture against science, that is to say there are those who really truly believe that there is some kind of battle going on in this world between the bible and what we can discover by observation, testing, retesting and confirming. And in that battle, faith means siding with what we read in the bible over against what we can see, test, retest and confirm. And that made me think.
And mostly it made me think that this is a great pity. For it wasn’t always this way. In fact it wasn’t this way until quite recently in our history. For most of human history religious insight followed very closely what we could observe of the world, and our ideas about the gods and how they worked emerged directly from what we knew of the universe we inhabited. It was not, for example, that the ancients discovered Apollo and so believed the sun moved across the sky. It was that they saw what appeared to be the sun moving across the sky and so came to believe in Apollo. And again, they didn’t discover the river gods and then come to believe that the Nile rose and fell seasonally, they saw that the Nile rose and fell, and so came to believe in the river gods. For a very long time this was how we worked, and it made perfect sense. As a pre-scientific person you look at the world, both the exterior world and the interior world, and you develop stories, myths, legends, sagas, that help make sense of that world and the transcendent dimension of it that you can intuit but not really explain in mere prose. So religious and spiritual insight follow what we see, feel, taste, touch, experience, it follows what makes us happy and sorrowful, awestruck and bored. That is the way it was with humanity for, I don’t know, from the dawn of recognizably human endeavor until five or six hundred years ago.
At that moment something went haywire and ended up making us all crazy. At some mysterious point that I can’t identify the religious imagination of the western world ossified; we lost the ability to learn about God from the study of our environment and began a process of separating these stories from their very sources, our observation of the world. This was probably due to an effort to make these religious stories fit into the category of science, which was even as early as the fifteenth century beginning to make real inroads into the intellectual history of humanity, but I don’t know that for sure. What is clear now is that this deracination of our myths and legends and stories and sagas was devastating to our religious imagination. So much so that by 1633 Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was condemned as heresy, he was forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest, all for the “crime” of telling us that in fact Copernicus was right, the sun is the center of the solar system, and the earth, along with the other planets, revolves around it. Imagine what might have happened if the pope had said: “Tell me more of this, this is wonderful, for it teaches us more about how God works and how wonderful is this universe.” That kind of response would have been in perfect keeping with the entire intellectual and spiritual history of humanity to that point. But because in that strange moment of confusion we lost the connection between our stories and the motives that caused us to invent them, we could not see that, and so it made perfect sense to the pope to declare that heliocentrism is “false and contrary to scripture.” NO IT IS NOT! Had we not gone mad we would have seen that heliocentrism could have led to new and wonderful spiritual breakthroughs, and the infant study of the world through the methods of science could have brought forth ever new insight and spurred the religious imagination of the western world in ways that we are only now beginning to recover. But the damage is done, and it has nearly destroyed the ability of religious people to talk about evolution, sexual orientation, genetic engineering, birth control and a host of other things without getting into a big fight. And the big loser in this fight is not science, but religion.
Fortunately, at least from my point of view, there are hopeful signs. Some spiritual people are once again learning from the world. The view of the universe from the Hubble telescope has left most of us utterly overwhelmed as we see star clusters larger than this galaxy spawned from giant gaseous clouds. Chaos theory and the Uncertainty Principle have begun to inspire a number of religious thinkers to the same kinds of insights reflected in scripture, and once again we are able to link stories like Job in his existential conflict to our own stunned silence at the utter unknowableness of the universe in all its fantastic vastness. This is good, it is very good. We made a big boo boo several hundred years ago, but we are beginning to recover from it. I won’t live long enough to see the fullness of that recovery, but the signs that it is there are encouraging. I still lament what we did to ourselves, and I lament the damage that continues to be done because of that boo boo. But I rejoice that we are beginning to understand anew that spiritual insight grows with our knowledge of the world we inhabit, not against it.
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Eppur si muove!
Yes! yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
I cannot agree more (shocking, I know) that it’s a shame that people still need to think there is a contention between science and religion. In addition to people who worship religion (note that I did not say ‘worship God’), I think that perhaps part of the problem lies with those people who think that science is the only arbitor of truth. This is known as scientism, which is essentially a worshipping of science. Many of these people do think that believing in God or a supreme being/force is delusional. But what I have observed is that people who subscribe to scientism are rarely scientists themselves. As a matter of fact, most of the scientists I know believe in a supreme being/force of one kind of another. Now, admittedly my data is skewed because I tend to hang out with people who have a spiritual bent, but that’s what I see from my own point of view. So it’s not science that’s the problem. Science is about meaning-making just like religion is. We’re actually partners in the whole mess.
Thank you Bill!
Michelle
Michelle,
Thanks for your thoughts. Science is not the problem here, though as you rightly point out "scientism" is part of the problem. It is the scientific counterpart to that narrow literalism that plagues the religious imagination these days. Indeed, I think true science is part of the solution. If organized religion is to survive this era it will have to be willing to express its images and metaphors in the language of that spiritually based scientific world view that has now become the way we all think about ourselves and the universe in which we live. That can happen, but religion will have to co-operate if we plan to continue to be bearers of the truth about ourselves, the universe, and God. If we don’t co-operate, if we continue to insist that the images and metaphors of 2,000 years ago contain the only and literal way to express Truth, then I imagine we will, as Richard Hooker feared "pass away slowly, as in a dream."
As for Tom, I love your comment, even though I haven’t any idea what it means. It just sounds good.
Eppur si muove – the words of Galileo after recanting in 1663 that the earth moved around the sun, literally – Still it moves.
This is so true… we need to learn how to express truth in ways that speak to how we see ourselves now and how we are starting to see ourselves evolve. Hebrew scripture holds wonderful examples of how this was done as people learned about themselves and their relationship with God over centuries. Many folks don’t like to read the prophetic works but as I really dig into them, I have started to see how people’s understanding of themselves evolved and how their understanding of God evolved (the book of Jeremiah is a wonderful, yet unpopular, example). And from that comes tremendous hope… that God is the everpresent, the unchanging presence that compells us to Love, despite our best efforts to the contrary. When our understanding of God changes and our relationship to God with it, we have to be humble enough to realize that it’s not God who is changing, it is us. But since I also believe that God is intimately tied with creation, how can God avoid changing when creation changes and evolves?
M.
Dear Bill and Meech,
it seems about time I read some views that resonate with mine.
i started out Jewish, became Christian, became disenchanted, began to meditate, and recently have returned to the practice of Judaism because it just feels right to be praying with a roomful of people who don’t think i talk too much and like to argue about their beliefs…i mean it’s a GOOD thing to disagree, it means you care enough to think about the angles. That’s what Judaism is like, no one is even too careful about arguing with God. There is no assumption that the bible was ever really meant to be literal, after all it was written (Old Testament) in mostly all Aramaic and no one much seems to speak it anymore (root language of both Hebrew and Arabic) and for 5770 years last week the Jews have been arguing about what it all means anyway. You are supposed to. The general moral guidelines are there (there are ten
and most Jews today fit into the tradition it is one’s moral duty to figure out what that means in your daily real life. On Sunday night is the Day of Attonement where you fast and ask God for forgiveness, but to be forgiven you must first ask any PERSON you have wronged, if practical, and offer some kind of attonement. then God will think about it and decide if you should live another year. of course I am simplifying, but most Jews whether very traditional, religious, modern or even Humanistic (where the idea of God is even optional) have never even thought arguing about "Creation" vs "Science" would be an oxymoronic discussion. great scientists come from all kinds of Jewish backrounds. the fantastical knowledge we uncover and the desire to search and the Bible all came from God one way or another. it all boils down to lessons from God. life appears more and more divine the more that is revealed to us through creative thought. the more awe inspiring the more beautiful maybe the closer we are getting to God. i liken it to being a Graduate student in Biochemistry: the more i learned the more i defined the very edge between the known and unknown the less i seemed to know, the more simple and beautiful and divine it seemed. and of course with time this line retreats into the now unseen distance, like a horizon, like taking half of a fraction, like learning to love. when we sequence the entire genome THEN the mystery of all disease would be known and they would be cured simple, right? the only problem is we had at the ultimate count too FEW genes to explain our diversity and differences from not just our cousins the apes, but from even the plants as well, the sequencing was obviously not the whole story! Now it seems we are unraveling another level of DNA organization that accounts for much different kind of control as well as may cause disease states ; not just the "too simple" (elegant?) DNA, but many many different substances that bind to it and allow it to be transcribed into proteins in a beautiful dance of accessibility in time and space, not just sequence. so, Judaism allows for arguement, uncertainty, and gradual revealing of more Science and more conversation about the awe God AND His (Her?)Creation inspires. What’s the problem??? ;-)
oh! did you hear the one about the Buddhist Rabbi? this is not a Woody Allen joke: his name is Alan Lew and he has written some beautiful books about the inherent mysticism in Jewish prayer and how to experience it like in "One God Clapping"! ok go look it up if you don’t believe me….and while you are at it read it, it’s great!
PS i’m still talking…actually i did forget to mention if you want to take the bible literally that’s ok with Judaism too because you can always use it to find the City of David etc since the directions written result in great archeology. Conflict? No, not for a Jew. Why? Why do Jews always answer a question with a question? Why not? It’s kind of like that, besides we are just human, god must know so wjatvif we still don’t get it? Isn’t that proof that we are human?