Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
February 28, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“You’re not a real church!”
That was the charged leveled at me, the people I was with and indeed our Unitarian Universalist faith by a couple of teenagers who approached our booth at a gay pride celebration in Hartford, Connecticut a number of years ago. At the time, I was the chairperson of the Welcoming Congregation Committee in my congregation.
We were set up in a row with other GLBTQ affirming churches. These teens came by and, having never heard of Unitarian Universalism, asked some questions about it. At some point one of them asked, “Do you believe in the Bible?” I’m always fascinated by this question, in no small part because those who typically ask it seem to be under the impression that it is a simple yes or no question. My answer to such questions is never yes or no, but usually begins with something like, “Well, it depends on what you mean by that...”
To their credit, the teens heard me out until I started to talk about religious scripture as a means of conveying deeper than literal truths rather than being themselves literal accounts of human history. When I suggested, for example, that the story of Noah was not entirely historical fact but a story conveying truth about the consequences of an entirely egocentric existence. That was enough for the teens to write us off.
I’m always puzzled by people who equate or confuse facts and truth, or need them to be the same. This tendency to equate or confuse the two, would appear, a perpetual stumbling block in the sometimes very public debate about religion and science, or as it is usually framed, religion versus science. (Makes it sound like a boxing match you order on pay-per-view).
It is often said or assumed, at least in the media, that religion and science are in conflict with once another, that they can’t coexist. Now, I attended a Catholic high school where everyone is required to take fours years of religion and four years of science. Not once did my teachers in either discipline whether they were a lay person, priest or nun, ever present religion as scientific fact, nor science as religious truth.
Indeed, they seem to have adhered to an understanding of religion and science posited by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, that religion and science occupy “two non-overlapping magisteria.” Gould’s theory essentially claims that science concerns itself with establishing facts about the physical universe, while religion is concerned with spiritual matters or truths, thus, the two cannot be in conflict with one another. While initially an attractive approach, Gould’s theory can also be seen an exercise in conflict-avoidance.
This seems to be the charge of evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, who, in his book, Faith Versus Fact, writes religion’s “combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic.” Science, on the other hand, he suggests, is more humble and less certain, thus its truth claims are “provisional and evidence-based”. The implication being that unlike religion, science self-corrects, points out its errors, and tries again. (“Can Science and Religion CoExist?”The Atlantic, July 4, 2015).
To bolster his argument, Coyne points to the story of a young girl who died when her parents, following their particular Christian beliefs refused medical treatment for their daughter and instead turned to prayer. Coyne posits that had the girl’s parents been atheists, she might have lived because medicine, as a science, is based on objective, provable observations and facts. Prayer isn’t.
It is a heart wrenching story that for some clearly illustrates the arrogance or folly of religious belief, or at least belief in one narrow understanding of the power and purpose of prayer. Yet, as a chaplain I have seen science act as arrogantly and provide as much false hope as he seems to suggest religion did in the example cited and with tragic consequences as well.
Gould’s theory would suggest religion and science are like guests at hotel. Renting separate rooms in the same building, perhaps aware of even politely acknowledging one another in the hallway, but otherwise not really having much to do with the other. Coyne seems to suggest religion and science are poorly matched roommates, suspicious, if not utterly disdainful of one another and equally convinced of their own superiority over the other.
So where does that leave us?
I don’t know about you, but for me, neither view is particularly satisfying or true for that matter, in my experience. I would tend to agree with Gould that religion and science pursue different kinds of knowledge and use different methods to arrive at their respective claims. Yet I also believe their findings can and do overlap. Consider again words from our first reading,
“ Ashes to ashes, dust to dust –
We here are descended from stardust... Created of carbon...
We carry the memory of the cosmos...The evolution of our cousins...
The encoding of our kin...The adaptations of our cultures....
From the plan and planes of the astral and ancestral
We transformed, and are transforming still.”
Still, I do sympathize with Coyne’s ideas. I’m offended when people, particularly people entrusted and empowered to act for the common good, abuse religion and disparage science or conflate the methods and claims of each to advance Creationism in public schools, discriminate against sexual and other minorities, justify war or promote irresponsible environmental policies.
Yet science alone offers no more a guarantee of peace or progress as any religion or life philosophy might strive toward. The scientific advances seen in the last five to ten years, never mind my lifetime or yours, is astounding.
And still, the cries of the spiritually and physically hungry, the oppressed, the forgotten rise up each and every day the world over. I suspect without religion, or at least attention to religious questions, these cries would only increase under the footsteps on the march to greater progress.
This is precisely the point and warning of the Promethean myth from our second reading, that incredible progress in science and technology, defiantly unmindful of the nature of our humanity, is itself a source of unimaginable suffering. (E.H. Peterson, Working The Angles pg. 29)
Eugene Peterson writes, “The power of this (the Prometheus story), is the realization that there is no solution. Progress in technology is inevitably connected with an increase in anxious suffering.” “But we have no stomach for tragedy”, he notes. “We want solutions.”
I think the debate about religion versus science is not really about religious truth versus scientific fact or even equating or confusing facts with truth, but a reflection of our reluctance to speak honestly about the human condition and our stubborn belief that some solution to the Promethean dilemma exists if we only retreat to the ways of past or stampede toward the future.
For some religion is the sole way back toward the place we need to be, for others science is the only way out of the bonds of the human condition. But, to my mind, this is not the purpose of either religion or science. Religion and science are, for me, tools. And tools can be misused with tragic or comic results, as any of us who have ever tried to use a stapler as a hammer have found out. And often, complex jobs, require more than one tool working together.
Returning to my earlier metaphor where I had earlier likened Gould and Coyne’s views of the relationship between religion and science as guests at a hotel and poorly matched roommates, respectively, I see religion and science more as dance partners. Each has a role to play. When those roles are poorly understood or executed, toes get stepped on. However, when well coordinated their efforts act in service to something greater than either one of them, be that God, humanity or life itself. This provides not a solution to the anxiety of progress or the human condition, but a way to more fully engage and humanize it.
I think back now to a patient of mine when I was a hospital chaplain. She was barely fifty and terminally ill. I met her during the last three months of her life, which were spent entirely in the ICU. Science had given her the machines that helped her breath, fed her and the medications to alleviate her physical discomfort. Science pursued and provided the knowledge that made it possible for medicine and technology to keep her alive or at least extend her life beyond what would be possible without them while various treatment options could be explored and tried.
Science could keep her alive, for a time, but it couldn’t give her what most us of would call or recognize as life, that is, a way to express and process the hopes, fears, joys and sorrow of her experience as a human being so keenly confronted with her own mortality. This was where religion came in. And by religion I don’t mean talk of specific doctrine, I mean religion as a means to engage, reflect upon, and reconcile what it means to be human...to be finite in this world...to face the ultimate limit every living creature shares and none so defiantly as the human being.
In this world of rapid progress, where limits are viewed as something to be broken, if not blatantly denied, Religion calls us, in the words of the Psalmist, “...to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Ps. 90:12) Not to discourage, depress or suppress us, but to keep us connected to that most universal experience of life, its finitude, that we might pause with some regularity to ask ourselves if the life we are living is worthy of the time we have been given. In so doing we provide ourselves the ongoing opportunity to listen to the life within us, learn what feeds us spiritually, and live deliberately and thus help humanize a world that increasingly encourages us to live reactively.
Both science and religion are concerned with the human condition, which essentially is a matter of limits. Science perceives limits and pursues paths through them. This has led and continues to lead to great advancements in virtually every aspect of human life. But it has also led to humankind to the precarious state of possessing increased technical knowledge absent a corresponding measure of perspective and humility a healthy awareness and respect for limits provide. The sometimes heard in statement, “Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.” is an expression of that concern or lament.
Religion’s concern in relation to the human condition is one limit in particular, the big one...our mortality. Indeed, the late Forest Church, defined religion as “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”
Religion thus invites us to be mindful of this dual reality that the time we have is well spent. However, when religion, as it sometimes does, reduces this life to a mere litmus test for another or the next, it dishonors our humanity and denies the value of scientific knowledge and progress.
Science and religion do coexist and have for a long time. Thus, humanity would be better served if the debate about their compatibility with its attendant arguments where both side oddly seem to equate or confuse facts and truth, became instead a conversation about the human condition and how religion and science might together inspire and inform our desire and need to break and observe our limits as finite beings, dancing among and with the stars.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
February 28, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“You’re not a real church!”
That was the charged leveled at me, the people I was with and indeed our Unitarian Universalist faith by a couple of teenagers who approached our booth at a gay pride celebration in Hartford, Connecticut a number of years ago. At the time, I was the chairperson of the Welcoming Congregation Committee in my congregation.
We were set up in a row with other GLBTQ affirming churches. These teens came by and, having never heard of Unitarian Universalism, asked some questions about it. At some point one of them asked, “Do you believe in the Bible?” I’m always fascinated by this question, in no small part because those who typically ask it seem to be under the impression that it is a simple yes or no question. My answer to such questions is never yes or no, but usually begins with something like, “Well, it depends on what you mean by that...”
To their credit, the teens heard me out until I started to talk about religious scripture as a means of conveying deeper than literal truths rather than being themselves literal accounts of human history. When I suggested, for example, that the story of Noah was not entirely historical fact but a story conveying truth about the consequences of an entirely egocentric existence. That was enough for the teens to write us off.
I’m always puzzled by people who equate or confuse facts and truth, or need them to be the same. This tendency to equate or confuse the two, would appear, a perpetual stumbling block in the sometimes very public debate about religion and science, or as it is usually framed, religion versus science. (Makes it sound like a boxing match you order on pay-per-view).
It is often said or assumed, at least in the media, that religion and science are in conflict with once another, that they can’t coexist. Now, I attended a Catholic high school where everyone is required to take fours years of religion and four years of science. Not once did my teachers in either discipline whether they were a lay person, priest or nun, ever present religion as scientific fact, nor science as religious truth.
Indeed, they seem to have adhered to an understanding of religion and science posited by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, that religion and science occupy “two non-overlapping magisteria.” Gould’s theory essentially claims that science concerns itself with establishing facts about the physical universe, while religion is concerned with spiritual matters or truths, thus, the two cannot be in conflict with one another. While initially an attractive approach, Gould’s theory can also be seen an exercise in conflict-avoidance.
This seems to be the charge of evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, who, in his book, Faith Versus Fact, writes religion’s “combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic.” Science, on the other hand, he suggests, is more humble and less certain, thus its truth claims are “provisional and evidence-based”. The implication being that unlike religion, science self-corrects, points out its errors, and tries again. (“Can Science and Religion CoExist?”The Atlantic, July 4, 2015).
To bolster his argument, Coyne points to the story of a young girl who died when her parents, following their particular Christian beliefs refused medical treatment for their daughter and instead turned to prayer. Coyne posits that had the girl’s parents been atheists, she might have lived because medicine, as a science, is based on objective, provable observations and facts. Prayer isn’t.
It is a heart wrenching story that for some clearly illustrates the arrogance or folly of religious belief, or at least belief in one narrow understanding of the power and purpose of prayer. Yet, as a chaplain I have seen science act as arrogantly and provide as much false hope as he seems to suggest religion did in the example cited and with tragic consequences as well.
Gould’s theory would suggest religion and science are like guests at hotel. Renting separate rooms in the same building, perhaps aware of even politely acknowledging one another in the hallway, but otherwise not really having much to do with the other. Coyne seems to suggest religion and science are poorly matched roommates, suspicious, if not utterly disdainful of one another and equally convinced of their own superiority over the other.
So where does that leave us?
I don’t know about you, but for me, neither view is particularly satisfying or true for that matter, in my experience. I would tend to agree with Gould that religion and science pursue different kinds of knowledge and use different methods to arrive at their respective claims. Yet I also believe their findings can and do overlap. Consider again words from our first reading,
“ Ashes to ashes, dust to dust –
We here are descended from stardust... Created of carbon...
We carry the memory of the cosmos...The evolution of our cousins...
The encoding of our kin...The adaptations of our cultures....
From the plan and planes of the astral and ancestral
We transformed, and are transforming still.”
Still, I do sympathize with Coyne’s ideas. I’m offended when people, particularly people entrusted and empowered to act for the common good, abuse religion and disparage science or conflate the methods and claims of each to advance Creationism in public schools, discriminate against sexual and other minorities, justify war or promote irresponsible environmental policies.
Yet science alone offers no more a guarantee of peace or progress as any religion or life philosophy might strive toward. The scientific advances seen in the last five to ten years, never mind my lifetime or yours, is astounding.
And still, the cries of the spiritually and physically hungry, the oppressed, the forgotten rise up each and every day the world over. I suspect without religion, or at least attention to religious questions, these cries would only increase under the footsteps on the march to greater progress.
This is precisely the point and warning of the Promethean myth from our second reading, that incredible progress in science and technology, defiantly unmindful of the nature of our humanity, is itself a source of unimaginable suffering. (E.H. Peterson, Working The Angles pg. 29)
Eugene Peterson writes, “The power of this (the Prometheus story), is the realization that there is no solution. Progress in technology is inevitably connected with an increase in anxious suffering.” “But we have no stomach for tragedy”, he notes. “We want solutions.”
I think the debate about religion versus science is not really about religious truth versus scientific fact or even equating or confusing facts with truth, but a reflection of our reluctance to speak honestly about the human condition and our stubborn belief that some solution to the Promethean dilemma exists if we only retreat to the ways of past or stampede toward the future.
For some religion is the sole way back toward the place we need to be, for others science is the only way out of the bonds of the human condition. But, to my mind, this is not the purpose of either religion or science. Religion and science are, for me, tools. And tools can be misused with tragic or comic results, as any of us who have ever tried to use a stapler as a hammer have found out. And often, complex jobs, require more than one tool working together.
Returning to my earlier metaphor where I had earlier likened Gould and Coyne’s views of the relationship between religion and science as guests at a hotel and poorly matched roommates, respectively, I see religion and science more as dance partners. Each has a role to play. When those roles are poorly understood or executed, toes get stepped on. However, when well coordinated their efforts act in service to something greater than either one of them, be that God, humanity or life itself. This provides not a solution to the anxiety of progress or the human condition, but a way to more fully engage and humanize it.
I think back now to a patient of mine when I was a hospital chaplain. She was barely fifty and terminally ill. I met her during the last three months of her life, which were spent entirely in the ICU. Science had given her the machines that helped her breath, fed her and the medications to alleviate her physical discomfort. Science pursued and provided the knowledge that made it possible for medicine and technology to keep her alive or at least extend her life beyond what would be possible without them while various treatment options could be explored and tried.
Science could keep her alive, for a time, but it couldn’t give her what most us of would call or recognize as life, that is, a way to express and process the hopes, fears, joys and sorrow of her experience as a human being so keenly confronted with her own mortality. This was where religion came in. And by religion I don’t mean talk of specific doctrine, I mean religion as a means to engage, reflect upon, and reconcile what it means to be human...to be finite in this world...to face the ultimate limit every living creature shares and none so defiantly as the human being.
In this world of rapid progress, where limits are viewed as something to be broken, if not blatantly denied, Religion calls us, in the words of the Psalmist, “...to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Ps. 90:12) Not to discourage, depress or suppress us, but to keep us connected to that most universal experience of life, its finitude, that we might pause with some regularity to ask ourselves if the life we are living is worthy of the time we have been given. In so doing we provide ourselves the ongoing opportunity to listen to the life within us, learn what feeds us spiritually, and live deliberately and thus help humanize a world that increasingly encourages us to live reactively.
Both science and religion are concerned with the human condition, which essentially is a matter of limits. Science perceives limits and pursues paths through them. This has led and continues to lead to great advancements in virtually every aspect of human life. But it has also led to humankind to the precarious state of possessing increased technical knowledge absent a corresponding measure of perspective and humility a healthy awareness and respect for limits provide. The sometimes heard in statement, “Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.” is an expression of that concern or lament.
Religion’s concern in relation to the human condition is one limit in particular, the big one...our mortality. Indeed, the late Forest Church, defined religion as “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”
Religion thus invites us to be mindful of this dual reality that the time we have is well spent. However, when religion, as it sometimes does, reduces this life to a mere litmus test for another or the next, it dishonors our humanity and denies the value of scientific knowledge and progress.
Science and religion do coexist and have for a long time. Thus, humanity would be better served if the debate about their compatibility with its attendant arguments where both side oddly seem to equate or confuse facts and truth, became instead a conversation about the human condition and how religion and science might together inspire and inform our desire and need to break and observe our limits as finite beings, dancing among and with the stars.
Amen and Blessed Be
Proudly powered by Weebly