Reconciling Science and Religion

This past Saturday, I was delighted to see so many clergy participating in the March for Science in downtown DC.  It is vitally important for the credibility of a 21st century church for people to see the church supporting the work of science.  For far too long, people – for a variety of reasons, many of them deeply suspect – have played off science against religion, as though the two were in conflict.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  As a person of faith, I believe that God’s work is at the heart of creation, and therefore to understand creation better is to understand God better. 

For some, this may be an interesting juxtaposition to my last post on the reality of the resurrection.  But in asserting that there is no conflict here, I am actually reflecting centuries of orthodox church teaching.  For many centuries, prior to the Enlightenment, what passed for science was actually called “natural theology” (or natural philosophy) – a term used to differentiate it from “revealed theology.”  Revealed theology, of course, deals with what we understand about God through the witness of Scripture and the experience of God in the life of the Church (which itself drew on the experience of God in the history of Israel).  The early theologians of the Church would largely argue that both of these ways of understanding God – natural and revealed -- must be in harmony, since they both pertain to the one God and creator of the universe.

This is not to deny, of course, that there haven’t been significant tensions at various points between the understandings of scientific and religious thinkers (the trial of Galileo and the Scopes “monkey” Trial – though separated by centuries – come quickly to mind).  It is to say, however, that the best and healthiest aspects of church tradition have been flexible enough to incorporate truths from other disciplines.

In fact, we (as the church) have a moral obligation to maintain the flexibility to incorporate insights from other disciplines into how we understand God.  From a theological standpoint, this is important for a number of reasons:

·       It is always important to be mindful of the fact that whenever we contemplate God, we are in the presence of a vast mystery, and that the reality of God will always exceed the scope of our understanding.

·       Analogously, we need to recognize -- humbly -- that we are limited beings and that our ability to understand both God and God’s world (and ourselves!) will always be limited.

·       We also know that growth is part of life, and that our perceptions of God and the world will evolve as we gain more knowledge and more wisdom.

·       Interestingly, there are theologians who argue that God also changes and develops over time (an insight that is at the heart of the school of Process Theology).

·       Faithfulness to God’s call demands that we adhere to truth, as we understand it.  God is truth, and we cannot pursue God without pursuing the truth (and vis versa!).

Science is a great gift in helping us understand and control the world around us.  And while it is a profound source of truth, it is not the source of all truth.  Artistic and aesthetic truths, moral truths, psychological and sociological truths (to some degree), and certainly philosophical and theological truths all fall outside the bounds of the scientific endeavor; and all are essential aspects of the human experience just the same.    

Additionally, absolute truths about even the physical world will lie forever just beyond the grasp of science (as any scientist worth their salt will acknowledge).  Science is a process that explores the truths of the physical world that are reproducible through the rigors of experimentation.  Through that process, scientists test hypotheses about the physical world, some of which are disproven, while others gather support.  But scientists always recognize that they never capture the absolute truth of the physical world.  They develop paradigms that allow us to better understand and control our environment; but those paradigms only hold sway until enough new accumulated data cause a “paradigm shift,” which invites us to look at the physical world in a dramatically different way. 

Many scientists (particularly in the various fields of theoretical physics), are clear about the fact that the more that they learn about the mysteries that they are exploring, the more impenetrable those mysteries often become.  They will additionally acknowledge that the very process of studying natural phenomena can impact the phenomena they are studying (a dilemma known as the “observer effect”) and that there are inherent uncertainties in the process (a concept generally called “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle).   

On the religious front, we also need to acknowledge the Bible is not a history or science text book, nor was it ever intended to be.  The Bible is a book about theology; it is the story of our community’s life with God.  What that means is that we should not look to the Bible to tell us the physical details of how creation evolved: evolutionary biology and related disciplines do a good job of that.  What the Bible does is ground that process in the action of a God who is simultaneously transcendent and imminent: who both commands creation with a word, and who nurtures our own creation with God’s life-giving breath. 

So, what does that mean for a 21st century Christian?  It means that we have an obligation to honor and incorporate truth – wherever it comes from – into our understandings of God and God’s world.  It means that we dig into Scripture with curiosity and integrity, as well as into the insights of science, and then explore ways of integrating those.  For me, it means that evolution is truth.  It also means the resurrection is truth. 

How do I justify that latter claim, when that seems decidedly unscientific?  In part, because scientific understanding is always evolving; in part because science can only comment on physical realities that are repeatable, not those that are unique.  And in terms of the other arguments in favor of the resurrection, you’ll just have to look at the last blog for that.

Lastly, again, it is deeply important for all of us to explore the truth of God and God’s world andourselves, with a profound sense of humility and openness, as we seek to know a mystery that we can never fully understand.

In Defense of the Resurrection

One of the interesting dynamics of Easter is the tension between this glorious celebration of the resurrection and the ongoing struggle that so many people have with the reality of that miraculous event.  Much of the scholarship that dominates the reading in our Metropolitan community comes out of what is called the “new quest for the historical Jesus” – academics from groups like the Jesus Seminar and the like -- who spill an enormous amount of ink trying to demonstrate how the resurrection did not happen and how later Christian writers (often for the purposes of maintaining their own power) inserted these narratives into the texts about this wonderful teacher from Nazareth.

The problem with these theories is that they ignore the fact that the earliest witnesses in the New Testament had very little interest in the teachings (or the life!) of Jesus.  What we see in the writings of Paul and the earliest sermons from the book of Acts, is a relentless proclamation of one thing:  the resurrection of Jesus.  This proclamation – the Greek word (often used in academic works) is kerygma – is the gospel declaration that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.  For the earliest Christians, that message changed everything.  Everything they knew about the world – the nature of power, what God was like, how we are called to engage one another and the world – everything was changed.

This fact, was no less startling to a first century audience than it is to us; and we delude ourselves, if we believe that the early Christians were simply more naïve and credulous than we are.  Again, the early Pauline epistles, and the stories of Acts, show an audience to this proclamation as cynical as our own.

I wonder if it could be the case that our struggles with understanding the reality of the resurrection have more to do with us, than the radicalness of this idea.  Anglican Bishop and Theologian N.T. Wright, in his magisterial work The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, suggests that our intellectual difficulty with the resurrection is a reflection of our post-Enlightenment desire to keep God out of human affairs.  In other words, it has to do with our need to be in control, rather than what God might or might not be capable of doing. 

If the resurrection actually happened, then the world is a very different place than we generally understand it to be.  An actual resurrection would mean that God is at work in the world in ways that we don’t expect.  It would mean that as powerful as our nations and national leaders might be, ultimate power does not reside with them.  It would mean that relationships can be healed.  It would mean that justice will prevail.  It would mean that death really does not have the last word.  Resurrection changes everything we think we know about the world.

This is not to say, of course, that doubt is an inappropriate response to the proclamation of the resurrection.  The Gospel stories of that first Easter day, contain both the proclamation that Jesus was alive, and the simultaneous skepticism – even on the part of Jesus’ closest disciples – that such a thing could happen.  The cloud of that doubt lifted as the followers of Jesus met their resurrected Lord and began to understand that in his life and death that God had acted decisively in the world.

To all of those in our Metropolitan community and elsewhere who are wrestling with the reality of the resurrection, and what faith looks like for you: thank you.  Thank you for your intellectual honesty and for your willingness to engage in this work.  Nobody has all the answers, and there is no quest that is more important.  And the reason that we gather together Sunday after Sunday is so that we engage in this quest together.  Don’t ever feel as though your questions, or what you perceive to be a “lack of faith,” keep you away from doing this work together.  The fact that you are seeking the truth about God is all the faith that is required.

As a Christian and a pastor – while I have a deep appreciation for the work and wisdom of the Enlightenment – I wonder if we sometimes let our worldview get a little over-constrained by it.  There are powerful truths in science, and it is a compelling paradigm through which to understand the world.  But it is not the only lens through which the world can be viewed; and often our scientific worldview contains its own myopia.  I wonder if rather than trying to figure out how to fit the resurrection of Jesus Christ into our intellectual constructs of the world, if we could let the idea of the resurrection broaden (or shatter) the ways in which we see the world, and open up new vistas to our imagination.  That would be good news indeed.  Happy Easter!