Science and Sanity

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

www.secondparish.org

February 7, 2010

READING

 

David Wolpe, “Does Science Disprove Religion?” Why Faith Matters, pp. 81, 88-89.  David Wolpe is an author, public speaker and rabbi of Sinai Temple (Los Angeles, California).[i]

A thousand years from now when scientists have solved all the questions that plague humanity, they are finally ready for the ultimate challenge. They elect a representative to address God.

"God," says the scientist in charge. "You are no longer needed. You served a function in your day, but that day is gone. We can do everything that You can do, so goodbye."

There is a moment of silence. Then a voice booms out of the sky: "Everything?"

"Yes," answers the scientist, "everything"

"Can you make a human being from dust?"

"Absolutely."

"OK" says God, "let me see you make a human being"

The scientist reaches down and digs his hands into the earth.

"Oh, no," says God. "Get your own dust."

Science is a discipline that works on cumulative in­sight; we know more today than we did yesterday. Religion's approach to knowledge is to assimilate modern discoveries into ancient insights. The miraculousness of existence, its wonder and joy, are religious insights. As we know more about the world, that knowledge informs our response to the miracle of what exists. The Psalmist who wrote, "the heavens declare the glory of God" (Ps. 19:1) did not actually understand how vast and intricate those heavens were. Astronomy has en­larged our appreciation of God's universe. In so doing, sci­ence augments faith; it does not diminish it.

Religion is helpful in reminding us of the truth that sci­ence, for all its virtues, is one stage of the human journey.... Awe and reverence are not less central to human insight than microscopes and telescopes. Scientific theories do not remain static and what we believe we know today may prove wrong or incomplete tomorrow. Truths of faith, our moral responsibility to one another, and our purpose as stewards of God's world are doctrines that endure.

The wise man, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane taught us, regulates his conduct by the theories of both religion and science. I learned to live by Haldane's lesson. [When I was diagnosed with cancer, I did not treat it] with prayer alone and disregard the accu­mulated wisdom of modern medicine. Nor would I regard my body as nothing but an animate mesh of gears and wires. I took medicine and prayed; submitted to tests and believed that there is a purpose to things, intelligible or mysterious. Cancer and its treatment were to be not only endured but also explored. I knew that creating meaning was as impor­tant as submitting to the medicinal regime, and that mean­ing is a gift of increased sensitivity, understanding, and compassion. Science and spirit are not opposed. They join hands in our lives, often to save them. They did in mine.

SERMON

Evolution Sunday will be honored in many churches on February 14^th, Valentine’s Day.  It’s an opportunity for congregations across the theological spectrum to consider the relation of science and religion, especially in light of some of the more painful conflicts in the culture wars over what should be taught to children in our public schools.  I decided that it was better to talk about Love than Culture War for Valentine’s Day and chose instead to speak on Science and Sanity this week.

Evolution Sunday came about over the past few years in response to local actions by some conservative Christians to prevent or undermine the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools.  In the fall of 2004, Dean Michael Zimmerman of Butler University in Indianapolis circulated a letter to a group of clergy in response to a series of anti-evolution policies passed by the school board in Grantsburg in my home state of Wisconsin. In a few weeks, nearly 200 clergy signed the statement, which was sent to the school board along with letters from groups of educators and scientists.  In response, the board retracted their policies.  A decision was then made to make expand the clergy letter nationwide, prefacing the campaign with these words:  “For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science.”  In 2006, over 450 congregations from every state participated in Evolution Sunday; this year, the observance has gone international, and so far 830 congregations from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the US Virgin Islands and twelve other  nations will be participating in Evolution Sunday 2010.  By now, more than 13,000 ministers, myself included, have signed the Christian Clergy Letter, which reads, in part:

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator....  We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.[ii]

As Unitarian Universalists, we come from religious traditions which are deeply grounded in reason.  William Ellery Channing in his sermon at the founding of Unitarianism in this country in 1819 said, "Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it. We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril.”[iii]  Our fourth principle calls us to affirm and promote “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” and among the six sources of our religious tradition are “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.” 

We Unitarians and Universalists have been firm supporters of public education since its foundations in this country.  Horace Mann, the “Father of American Education,” was a lifelong Unitarian, and many of our number over the centuries have been teachers, librarians, professors and scientists.  The study of science is important in our faith tradition, because it is one of the ways that we approach Truth.  At the same time, we also honor as one of the sources of our tradition “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life,” so we also recognize that science and the use of reason don’t provide the answers to all of the mysteries of life.

It’s easy enough to defend the teaching of the theory of evolution in our public schools.  We understand that science is primarily a matter of method rather than a source of absolute truth.  Progress in science occurs not simply through the accumulation of facts but through their progressive interpretation in the context of hypotheses and theories which can be proved or disproved by subsequent experiments or accumulations of evidence by a community of scientists.  Skepticism in the absence of proof is at the heart of scientific progress, and the certainties of one generation of scientists can be overturned or radically modified by a new generation of scientists.  The most obvious example most of us are familiar with is this:  Newton’s Theory of Gravitation stood as the foundation of the science of physics from the end of the 17^th century to the beginning of the 20^th.  Then, it was radically modified by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  Each of those theories represented the best framework then available for understanding the physical universe and each was highly productive of research, insights, laws and technologies.  Each has been revised and to a degree superseded as new facts have been found and new experiments have been carried out.

There is a popular misapprehension of science which holds that it is completely factual—true in some absolute sense—but this is never the case.  People who worked for me in my former life would gather information about the bugs they had found in a computer program they were working on and I would ask for their understanding of the meaning of the information they had gathered.  They would say, “Well, it’s not scientific, but….”  I had to point out, over and over, that science is precisely about gathering data, interpreting the data, coming up with theories, and then seeing if further data proves or disproves our theories.  Our scientific knowledge is constantly expanding and undergoing change.  What doesn’t change is the method of science—the willingness to ask questions as more information becomes available and to revise our theories as we accumulate more and more information and insight.

Darwin provided in the theory of evolution through natural selection a framework for understanding biological change over time.  Like all good scientific theories, it is fruitful of new insights, it helps to guide experimentation and discovery, and it is subject to revision and extension in the light of new information.  The Cobb County, GA, board of education approved placing a sticker on biology textbooks which reads:

    This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.[iv]

Strictly speaking, the sticker is accurate.  In fact, that’s exactly what all of science is about.  On the other hand, why single out evolution?  As one wag suggested, we might as well also have stickers that say:

This textbook contains material on gravity. Gravity is a theory, not a fact, regarding a force that cannot be directly seen. This material should be approached with an open mind, etc.

Or

This textbook contains material about special relativity. Special relativity is a scientific theory, and very few scientists fully understand it. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.[v]

      Why is it that the theory of evolution in particular is so hotly contested?  My own exposure to this controversy started when I noticed tracts in our church titled “Was your Grandmother a Monkey?” with a picture of a fairly ugly monkey looking vaguely human.  Part of the point of the tract was that Darwin was an atheist and that he was using science to undermine religion.  Actually, Darwin was Unitarian, but I didn’t know that at the time.  I remember the thrill of reading Inherit the Wind, that wonderfully iconoclastic play which fictionalizes the encounter between Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney and already one of my heroes, and the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925.  By that time, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I was pretty clear that I was on the side of the scientists, the good guys of the piece, and I loved the way Darrow’s character cut Bryan’s down to size.  It was personal for me, because it was part of the process of distinguishing my own beliefs from those of my family and it involved a wrenching break—not that we ever discussed the theory of evolution a great deal.

At the time, I was given to believe that either the Bible is true or the theory of evolution is true—there could be no compromise.  The Bible says that God created human beings and the theory of evolution says that humans evolved from lower life forms; given a choice between the constricting religion of my childhood and the wide-open possibilities in the world outside, there was no question in my mind that the religion of my childhood would have to give way.

Bible fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who hold that there is a strict choice between religion and science, between the book of Genesis and the theory of evolution.  Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have recently been making just as strenuous a case for a forced choice from the other side.  Moreover, they advocate precisely the sort of intervention in the rights of parents to raise their children according to their own beliefs so feared by conservative Christians.  For example, an article in Wired magazine notes that Richard Dawkins believes the atheist movement ought to evangelize aggressively, including preventing parents from teaching their beliefs to their children:

"How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"[vi]

It seems to me that this viewpoint represents the opposite extreme of those crusaders who wish to prevent or dilute the teaching of the theory of evolution in our schools and in particular points up an over-inflation of the capabilities of science in our living.  The notion that everything of value can be learned from science is as absurd as the notion that everything of value can be learned from the Bible.  I learned years later that William Jennings Bryan was rather different than the silly fundamentalist of Inherit the Wind.  He represented the interests of farmers and workers in his three campaigns as Democratic nominee for the presidency, starting with his “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896.  He was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson until 1915 when he resigned in protest over the way Wilson dealt with the sinking of the Lusitania, one of the few cabinet officers in our history to resign on a point of principle.  His biggest objection to the theory of evolution lay in its extension into social ethics in the form of Social Darwinism—the notion the only the fittest ought to survive in human societies, and that those too weak to fend for themselves deserve to be eliminated.  This illegitimate extension of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in support of a heartless social policy is a prime example of the danger of assuming that science can tell us not only what is but also what ought to be.  Darwin himself would not have approved of such an extension of his theory.  As he put it,

“Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of man’s nature is concerned, there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through natural selection.”[vii]

If the Social Darwinists were right to extend Darwin’s theory beyond the facts of biology into the practice of human society, who would then care for the widow and the orphan, the hungry and the naked, the blind and the prisoners?  Yet Jesus calls on us to do exactly this, not because it is in our own self interest or because it is thus in the animal kingdom, but because it is right.  Bryan was wrong to assume that this undermined the theory of evolution in biology, but he was not wrong to reject the extension of that theory into the realm of morality and religion.

We don’t and can’t run our lives by science alone.  Science does not give meaning and purpose to our lives.  Those who oppose teaching the theory of evolution in the schools fear that if the literal creation story of Genesis is not true then nothing is true.  They are wrong.  They fail to understand that we are rarely given to receive assurance of absolute truth either in science or in religion, in business or in love.  We human beings must make choices on insufficient data and then act upon those choices.  We do not fall in love because science tells us it is right, and when we mourn we do not turn to science for comfort.  We also don’t design nuclear reactors by a plan laid forth in the Bible.  These are different realms of knowledge, different magisteria, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, and allowing one to control or dominate the other is neither wise nor sensible.

We as Unitarian Universalists correctly include both mystery and wonder and the results of science in our search for truth, and we also wisely recognize that our lives are a journey toward truth, never the absolute possession of truth. 

The theory of evolution continues to stir controversy in our schools because some people of faith have incorrectly rejected the results of scientific inquiry, and some scientists have incorrectly extended the realm of scientific inquiry beyond proper boundaries.  Finding purpose in our lives does not depend upon believing in a particular literal account of how humankind came into existence, nor does the pursuit of scientific knowledge answer all the aching questions at the heart of our living.  Religion addresses the tender parts in us.  We as Unitarian Universalists have the task of defending our public schools from zealots on both sides of this issue in order to promote, as we always have, education for the common good.  Our task is to look for reason in religion, science and spirit. 

As we live our daily lives and as we raise our children and grandchildren and influence all of those for whom we care, our task is to find a fully embodied way of living which listens for the sacred while also embracing the call of reason.  May we be blessed to embody that difficult balance, and to pass it on.

Amen

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