Sermon: Both Science and Religion

[ previous | index | next ]

Both Science and Religion

By Charles Rush

September 24, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 8.2Mb) ]

day, we embark on one of the many reasons, that I am a pastor in New Jersey and not Oxford, Mississippi. Three decades ago when I made that fateful decision to attend Divinity school rather than Law School, I knew that I would leave behind my ancestral homeland in the manner of Tomas Wolfe's Look homeward Angel, ‘you can never go home again.' It was mainly for intellectual reasons.

I understand the motivations of the well meaning Christians around our country that would like to see the teaching of Intelligent Design in our schools. They believe, and they are not entirely wrong, that our country has gradually and significantly become more and more secularized in our approach to education that we are eroding the spiritual foundations upon which our country was built. They see the teaching of evolution as implicitly contributing to this in its axiom that our present state of evolutionary history could have been much different but is what it is because a variety of specific conditions encouraged the expression of genetic traits that ultimately mutated in symbiosis with changing environmental conditions and in competition with adversaries, producing what we see before us today. There is a radical openness implicit in that axiom as well and our students would be forgiven for concluding that there is also a randomness that would suggest that our world is an accident, a happenstance.

Intelligent Design offers an alternative view, supposedly of the same evidence, that sees purpose and direction to the structure of the universe, opening the possibility of understanding the role of God in the scientific study of our world.

From college, you may remember this argument in from Philosophy 101, put forth most eloquently by the Natural Theologian William Paley. Paley argued that if you were to examine a collection of rocks in the field- and let us remember that he made this argument in 1800 when our study of geology was not yet begun- that you couldn't tell much about the creator. But if you were given a fine Swiss watch with it's precise rotations and interlocking gears that produce a nearly exact chronometer to measure the passing of time, you could infer quite a lot about it's designer because you could extrapolate out exactly the kind of rationality that it took to produce this instrument as well as something about the rational structure of the universe itself implied in the sheer fact that time is measurable in the way we measure it. Paley went on to suggest that this is the way that we can know the Creator of the Universe, through the inference of the rational design that is embedded in the created order and that this suggests not random chaos or arbitrary happenstance, but a purposeful, logical designer.

Unfortunately, the advocates of Intelligent Design do not actually stop there because they actually have a larger agenda and a good deal of that agenda is to show that the Bible is true. What they mean by that is that when the bible makes scientific or historical observations that these are accurate.

I saw a bumper sticker a few years ago that said, "The Bible says it, I believe it, that Settles it". I genuinely wish the world was that simple, but it isn't.

In fact, you would be surprised how much preaching down in Texas is predicated on this basic approach to religion. When I am back visiting relatives, I like to watch a lot of TV preaching- don't ask me why, it causes me nothing but pain and incredulity like a bad addiction but I do it. I am always amazed at the number of sermons that show that some obscure prophecy in the Old Testament actually came true or that some odd little observation in the bible has recently been shown by scholars to be actually true after millennia of curiosity and speculation. The implication seems to be that if the Bible can be trusted on these peripheral things, then it can be trusted with it's central claims that through Jesus death and resurrection, the gates of salvation have been opened to us all.

There are huge intellectual inadequacies in this approach that we usually carefully unpack over an entire semester of the Introduction to the New Testament or the Introduction to the Old Testament. They revolve around the type that accords different forms of knowledge.

In the broadest terms, it is important to remember that when the Bible was written many of our intellectual disciplines were not yet invented. History, all scientific disciplines, economics… so that the way that they thought about the world, the way that they interpreted what they saw, not only had much less sheer knowledge than we do today, it lacked modern categories of understanding and interpretation. We cannot just impose modern categories on the ancient world, nor should we expect that they would be concerned about what we are concerned about. For instance, we want to know who was Pharaoh when Moses confronted the Pharaoh but the ancients were not particularly concerned about that because they weren't recording history like we would record it. We want to know if the town of Jericho was really occupied when the Israelites surrounded it and had a so to speak miraculous conquest when the walls came tumbling down, but the ancients give us very little evidence to actually support the case one way or the other. It was a pre-scientific age and a pre-historical age.

I've heard religious leaders in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all use arguments that the Bible or the Koran, even though it wasn't scientific or historical, nevertheless remarkably anticipated later advances in knowledge, and are accurate on some issues nevertheless, like odd astral movements. Again, the assumption is that the Bible or the Koran would be more true if veracity in unintended areas were proven true.

But the question that must be posed in return is 'what kind of truth does the Bible offer us?' What is the scope of the insight that it offers? What degree of authority should it be accorded?

I'll come back to that in a moment… But the other broad observation is that the Bible doesn't contain one type of literature but many types. We have letters that St. Paul wrote to the church, the Gospels which give us the teaching of Jesus in narrative form, we have psalms, which was the early Jewish hymnal, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that give us wisdom sayings like one would find in a fortune cookie, the prophets which are an early form of social justice speaking truth to power. The Bible even contains a play, the book of Job. Each of these speak a different order of truth, but their primary purpose is not to accurately record factual information. Their primary purpose deals more closely with the insight of poetry, the nature of meaning, of developing significance.

And the Bible even has forms of literature that no one creates any more. One of our readings this morning falls in this category, Genesis 1. Genesis 1 is 'mythopeoic saga'. It is a genre form regularly used 4000 years ago but we don't use it anymore. It tells us of the meaning of creation, namely that humans are the product of God's intentional design, that we have moral and spiritual faculties that mirror the higher order of the universe so we are 'created in the image of God', that men and women are meant to be companions with each other and for each other, that we are stewards of the earth and have to be environmentally responsible for the less rational animals that are around us. These insights are told in a grand narrative that begins with the sweeping observation. "In the beginning…" or "When God began creating"…

You have probably noticed that at one point, in Genesis 1, God says, 'Let us make humans in our image'. What is the 'our'? This story form is so old that it harkens back to an earlier era still when we believed in a multiplicity of gods and this the writers of the Bible decided to retain, despite the fact that they believed that God was a single, unitary source of power for good by the time the Bible was written. They were Monotheists.

We no longer use this genre form. Like legends and fables, they have been superceded as a way of communicating meaning by philosophy and theology. Today, if we have a discussion about the meaning of the universe and our place in it, we would be much more likely to reflect on our common understanding of our scientific world-view of the Big Bang, the evolution of our species, and the fragile nature of our earth's future in light of human impact on it.

And one of the principal mistakes that proponents of Intelligent Design make is that the insist that we must read the Bible not according to it's literary genre, but as though it were a simple text of history and science that is immediately accessible to everyone. But the Bible is not a simple book like that. Sometimes, when I listen to evangelical preachers in the heartland of our country, it seems like they believe that the Bible has fallen to us like a great computer manual which contains every answer that we need if only we could just figure out how to dissect it and glean these truths for us. And that is what these preachers do, for they have you flipping through your bible from this verse in I Timothy to a verse in Deuteronomy to a verse in Revelation. And suddenly it all comes clear.

But the Bible is not a computer manual and it was never meant to be read like that, despite the fact that people still do. I occasionally have someone from an AA meeting that will stop me and tell me, in all earnestness, that they needed a word of inspiration for the day, so they closed their eyes, opened the pages of the Bible and found this verse that was very, very helpful.

Yes, that can happen, but this is 'in spite of' this method not 'because of. Can you imagine your investment advisor needing some inspiration and opening the pages of the latest Goldman Sachs economic forecasting newsletter and stabbing the text? Indeed, my portfolio appears to have been invested using just such a method… but I am not pleased.

So that is one issue, that of biblical interpretation. Is it just immediately accessible and immediately applicable or does it have to be read according to the rules that dictate the literary forms that guide it. Is it a simple? Does it contain verifiable history and should it be assessed authoritatively in that way? Or does it raise questions of meaning and the issues of history and science are not immediately relevant? I oppose the advocates of Intelligent Design most of all right here. I believe that the Bible is much more sophisticated than they would have us believe and that it is not immediately applicable to questions of science and history. That is not the way you should read it.

But just as obvious to me, is the necessity of reflecting spiritually on our whole world and trying to make coherent sense out of it cosmologically. You may recall Albert Einstein's reaction to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg new work on subatomic physics and the random character that was implied in the structure of subatomic particles. Someone asked Einstein whether that might suggest a random character to our macro-physical universe. Einstein gave a gut reaction and said, 'God doesn't play dice with the universe'. He thought that ultimately, the world cohered, that it was sensible, even if we couldn't ourselves understand it entirely.

Since the 20's when Einstein made that remark, we have been searching for a unified field theory which has proved elusive.

But, I want to just make a single observation about evolution on the broadest level, an observation that I first got from Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest who was also a paleontologist. He discovered Peking Man, one of the missing links in the evolution of hominids. When he did his work in the 50's, he reflected on the nature of evolution and what that would mean for us spiritually, though at the time, he was worried enough that his ideas might get him de-frocked from being a priest, that he didn't publish them until he was dead.[1] Must evolution be a threat to religion? Teilhard answered 'no'. And must our understanding of evolution necessarily be atheistic. Again Teilhard answered 'no'.

Spiritually speaking, theologically speaking, it is a profound insight contained in Genesis 1: "In the beginning God…" Also in the beginning of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made through him and without Him was not anything made that was made." The Greek word for WORD is 'logos' and it is also the word for 'reason'. In the beginning, the world unfolded through reason. It is coherent. It may be radically free, having numerous possible outcomes, but it is also reasonable.

Teilhard used to try to imagine our evolutionary world and his speculations are helpful. One that is most arresting was the very earliest form. There was a epoch in our early history that was defined by single-cell organisms. Teilhard imagines that they replicated themselves to the point that they became large seas, so to speak of single-celled organisms. He speculates that they became concentrated, super-saturated to the point that, in conjunction with other forces that we have never been able to duplicate, they 'involuted'.

I love that word. In this great concentrated mass, something happened that caused in a sea of single-celled organisms, for their to become a multi-celled organism. After millennia upon millennia of single-celled organisms, something happened that formed a multi-celled organism. He says, 'they involuted.'

It points up the central observation that Teilhard made, looking at the broadest possible spectrum of evolution and what it would mean. He says that there is a direction to the scope of evolution. And as it moves, it proceeds towards more sophisticated life forms, and these more sophisticate life forms have a greater concentration of interiorization. They have a more concentrated inner psychic life. They are more complex and more spiritually interiorized at the same time.

The scope of evolution proceeds from the inorganic to the organic. At its most fundamental level from elements to bios- from chemicals to enzymes, viruses, bacteria, to simple plants. Here there is a fantastic panoply of variety that comprises our Earth.

At some point, there was another important jump from life to consciousness. The animal kingdom that has awareness. With that came a profound spiritual interiorization. Animals are aware. They know. They communicate. They read signals in each other.

For the past couple of years, I've been reading around on this body of research that neurologist, psychiatrists and neurobiologist have been publishing on higher mammals that illustrate how much we all share in common because our brains share quite similar structure regarding our emotional life.

That is why you communicate so well with your dog, with your cat. They can read your emotional cues. Scientists call this 'lymbic resonance'. It turns out that all higher mammals share the exact same facial expressions for our basic emotions: fear, happiness, anger, sadness, joy, etc...

It facilitates a depth of communication with each other. It also is expressive of an internal spiritual concentrated psyche. We have an internal emotional life, not just responses to the ennviorment around us. We can know love, depression and these internal conditions dramatically shape how we interact with the external world.

And then with humans, we become self-conscious. We not only know, we know that we know. We are named Homo Sapien Sapien. What separates us from other higher mammals is the development of our rational faculty. We understand time, history. At some point, we became Man the tool maker Homo Faber. We make things and this production of artifacts gave rise to a spiritual concentration or involution, our life of culture. We create language and from that ideas, abstract concepts, and the collective ability to develop dynasties across multiple generations.

If you could graph this spiritual sophisitication individually and the progress towards sophisticated cultural civilization in terms of the history of the universe, the curve would be quite steep.

In our generation, we have lived through a seemingly small change as we complete the Genome project but from the point of view of the history of our universe, it is a Promethean leap. For the first time, in a very short while, we will have the ability to directly alter the course of our own evolution. We can shape our own destiny. This is a god-like function that will require a 'divine-wide' moral responsibility of all of us.

I only use that as an example here, to remind us that the direction of evolution from simple to more complex life forms, carries within it more sophisticated spiritual concentration a more compound transcendence. So often in the past when we have thought about God, we have thought of God as outside, as over against the universe. Today, I think we're more likely to understand God as the very energy of the universe itself. This energy concentrates itself, evolving toward more sophisticated spiritual forms that are more self-directed, more transcendent, more able to understand and plan for futures they will never live to see, dedicating their life energies to a comprehensive group plan that is able to accomplish geometrically more together than they ever could alone.

Evolution moves in a direction towards the life of the spirit. And if for a moment we could imagine other life forms in the universe that are more evolved than we are, we would have to imagine something that is not only more powerful technologically, but is also more spiritually interiorized and concentrated. And I would just make the observation here that our Sci-Fi people in Hollywood have not yet been able to make that leap. Right?

When you think about it in the broadest terms, it's not a question of science or religion, but evolution with spiritual involution. It's not ‘either…or', but ‘both…and'. Science asks questions of ‘how'; spirituality asks questions of meaning and purpose. And in higher life forms, you have to have both. As it turns out, we cannot find fulfillment just creating a perfectly comfortable physical environment. We also have to have substantive spiritual meaning, or else we find ourselves like Woody Allen, not able to find a reason to keep on living, despite the fact that we are surrounded by these great creature comforts. We need both.

The abundant life is not facts alone, it is also facts and meaning. Evolution might be a threat to certain aspects of revealed religion, like that text we saw in Joshua, but it is not a threat to spirituality. Spirituality is not a threat to evolution. Without spiritual concentration, we would never have been able to discover the elements that make up the theory of evolution as we currently understand it.

Our present impasse between science and religion of course is not helped by preachers who are hostile to science, neither is it helped, I might add, by science faculties that are generally indifferent or hostile toward spirituality. But I'm not too worried about this in the long run. A couple of centuries from now I believe that this will be common sense to see their profound interrelation. So let's look forward to that day. Amen.

[1] See his book The Phenomenon of Man