|
| |
Science and Religion
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
February 1, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
In 1905 Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon published their
intelligence test, which became the basis of the IQ test. Although like
all tests, the IQ test is bound by the culture of the test creators, in this
century it has become the most widely used measure of intelligence.
An organization called MENSA has been created, made up of people
who scored in the top 2 percent of the population on their IQ test. A
few years ago MENSA surveyed its members regarding church
membership. Counting 100 as the expected value based on the
reported national church membership, forty-nine members were
Roman Catholic, 533 were Jewish, 501 were Episcopalian, 214 were
Presbyterian, seventy-nine were Methodist, eighty-six were Lutheran,
seventeen were Baptist, sixty-three were Mormon, 1,051 were
Quaker, and 7,199 were Unitarian Universalist. This leads to the
dubious conclusion that Unitarian Universalists are seven times
smarter than the Quakers, fourteen times smarter than the
Episcopalians, one hundred fifty times smarter than the Roman
Catholics, and four hundred times smarter than the Baptists.
In truth I think this suggests not so much that Unitarian Universalists
are smarter than others, but that we have an intense devotion to
gathering knowledge. I believe that one purpose of human life is to
learn. What sets off this century, what defines it uniquely, and what
has made it so exciting, has been the astronomical growth of
scientific knowledge. The sciences have transformed the way we
perceive the world, the nature of the questions we ask, and our view
of religion.
For example, back in 1905, the same year as the first IQ test, Albert
Einstein was living in Bern, Switzerland where he worked in the
patent office. Twenty-six years old, Einstein had dropped out of high
school and had squeaked through college with a B average. However,
in 1905 he wrote six papers that transformed the scientific landscape.
Two of those papers were on relativity, suggesting that space and
time are not fixed concepts. Classic physics assumed that all
observers anywhere in the universe, whether moving or not, obtained
identical measurements of space and time. According to the relativity
theory, this is not so. The results of the measurements depend on
relative motions of the observers. These ideas about space and time
suggested new ideas about the origin of the universe and the nature
of God. However, nearly 100 years after they were first put forth,
theologians still are unsure how to connect the theory of relativity
with a theology.
While Einstein was transforming physics, technology was making
major advances in communication, transportation and food
production. In 1906 the American Lee de Forest invented the vacuum
tube that amplified weak electric messages. Only two years later, in
1908, the German Ludwig Prandtl developed a mathematical formula
that explained air circulation around the wing of an airplane. A year
later in 1909, George Shull established the basis for hybrid corn. The
average yield of corn increased from twenty-two bushels per acre to
ninety-five bushels per acre.
Science directly challenged traditional religion in 1924 when a
professor of anatomy studied a skull discovered near Taung, a town
two hundred miles north of Johannesburg, South Africa. Thirty-one-year-old Raymond Dart
determined that because of the shape of the
head, the skull filled the missing link in the evolution between apes
and human beings. 500,000 years old, the skull was the first scientific
proof of the evolution of humans. It was a major breakthrough in the
search for our ancestral roots.
Meanwhile, in physics, quantum theory came of age in 1926.
According to quantum theory streams of particles make up waves
such as light waves. The more we magnify this stream of particles and
try to observe the particles' position the less we can accurately
establish their speed. Physicists call this the uncertainty principle. The
closer we try to observe the position of atomic particles the less we
can accurately establish their velocity. This uncertainty principle led
to the development of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics
provides a mechanism of calculating and predicting, within the
uncertainty limits, the behavior of all particles and forces in the
universe. Like the theory of relativity, quantum theory suggested new
ideas about the nature of the universe. Nearly seventy-five years after
the ideas were first developed, theologians remain unsure about how
to connect quantum mechanics with the study of the existence of God.
Religion has also had difficulty dealing with the discoveries of Edwin
Hubble. In 1923 Hubble discovered that other galaxies exist beyond
our Milky Way Galaxy. Six years later, using the newly completed
100 inch reflecting telescope on Mount Wilson in the then remote
mountains of southern California, Hubble established that the
universe is expanding. This suggests that sometime in the distant past,
all the matter in the universe must have been together. The theory is
that about fifteen or twenty billion years ago when highly compressed
and intensely hot material started expanding. Somewhere in this
primordial mass was the potential matter for all the galaxies and stars,
all the solar systems and planets and everything that lives on the thin
crust of earth, including all Unitarian Universalists, whatever their
IQs.
In some theoretical models of the future, the expansion will continue
forever. In other models, the expansion will be slowed and eventually
gravity will reverse it. The universe will then collapse upon itself and
we will all fuse again into the primordial mass. Obviously Hubble
ideas raise fundamental issues for religion. What happened at the
moment the universe began to expand? Did an intelligent force play
a role in this moment of creation? Is life on this earth a very small
part of a giant plan or are we the random result of an enormous
expansion? These issues mark the place were theology and physics
and astronomy come together, each asking the same questions.
For the historians of modern science the 1940s saw many
breakthroughs in technology.
In the 1940s British mathematician Alan Turing developed the first
computer, to crack German codes. Military analysts say that this first
computer was a pivotal factor in Hitler's defeat. Tragically nine years
after the war Alan Turing committed suicide, after being forced,
instead of going to prison, to undergo medical treatment intended to
"cure" him of homosexuality.
In 1947, three American physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories
invented the transistor. This solid-state device replaced vacuum tubes
in radios, TVs, hearing aids, communications, medical electronics,
and computers.
Today computers with millions of transistors are everywhere,
including churches. Using computers and software programs, students
of the Bible can put the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek text on
the screen. A Bible student can wave the mouse over the text and a
little window gives the student a complete parsing of the words and
excerpts from biblical vocabularies.
However, more important than computers and transistors were the
breakthroughs in medicine and physics. In 1941 the first antibiotic,
penicillin, was mass produced. In the 1930s, before doctors used
antibiotics, the fatality rate from pneumonia was as high as 85%;
today it has dropped to 5%. The number of persons who die of
chronic infections of a heart valve has dropped from 100% to 5%.
Spinal meningitis once killed up to 90% of its victims; antibiotic
treatment has reduced the fatality rate to 2%. The death rate of
typhoid has dropped from 10% to 2%.
The science in the 1940s gave us the power not only to save life but
also to cause death. The first human-made nuclear chain reaction
occurred on December 2, 1942 in a squash court at the University of
Chicago. Today nuclear power produces about 13 percent of our total
electrical energy. And in spite of the end of the cold war, the United
States and Russia still possess thousands of nuclear weapons. We also
know that Britain, France, China, India and Israel have stock piles of
nuclear weapons, raising moral issues for religion.
The 1950s produced many major scientific breakthroughs.
For example, in the field of mental health, two French psychiatrists
showed that a psychotherapeutic drug was especially effective in the
treatment of schizophrenia. Psychiatric disturbances were virtually
untreatable before the 1950s. Psychiatric illnesses doomed some
individuals to live out their lives in institutions. However, because of
psychotherapeutic drugs, by the late 1960s the populations of mental
hospitals declined by hundreds of thousands. Mental health
professionals began to understand that chemical problems in the brain
cause illnesses like schizophrenia. People whom clergy thought were
possessed by the devil, now receive more humane treatment.
In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick explained the structure of
DNA. They combined insight, hunch and analysis to build a model of
DNA's structure that was consistent with what X-ray images showed.
What they discovered was a double helix of two intertwined strands
that contain the blueprints for the construction of our bodies. In a
direct challenge to religion, Frances Crick believes that DNA shows
there is no such thing as a soul. Crick writes that "Your joys and your
sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal
identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
Historians of science list two breakthroughs in the 1960s. Russell
Marker discovered that sex hormones were particularly abundant in
certain types of yams that grow wild in Mexico. Although in the
1940s he established that he could extract the hormones cheaply from
Mexican yams, Marker lost interest in the project. He quit chemistry
and went into the business of commissioning Mexican-made replicas
of European silver works. Others built on Russell Marker's work and
the first oral contraceptive, the first birth control pill, went on sale in
the United States in 1962. Some 100 million women have used or are
using oral contraceptives. The pill has resulted in the liberation of
women from traditional roles, and in a new confusion over the roles
of men and women. Studies show that 75% of Roman Catholics use
some form of birth control, including oral contraceptives. They do so
although the Catholic church teaches that using artificial
contraceptives is a sin.
I found no consensus among scientists concerning the greatest
discoveries in science, technology and medicine since 1967. To judge
a discovery as truly great, the discovery must stand the test of time.
Perhaps in thirty years we can look back and say that the claim of the
discovery of life on Mars was a major breakthrough, or that the
cloning of sheep was a major breakthrough. However, it is too soon
to know. We need time to put these events in perspective.
The discoveries of science that I have described offer major
challenges to religion. For some people the scientific discoveries of
the twentieth century have created great fear. Evidence from
anthropology that we are descendants of apes, evidence from
astronomy that the beginning of the universe was twenty billion years
ago, evidence from biology that there is no soul, all this has unsettled
traditional religious beliefs. Such claims by science frighten people
by suggesting that we are small insignificant beings in a vast
universe. In 1920 conservative Christians created the Fundamentalism
movement. Committed to the truths of the past, fundamentalists resist
the growth of human knowledge.
Others have taken a different direction. Traditionally Unitarian
Universalists have tried to weave a path that does not deny the
discoveries of science and does not deny the value of spirituality or
prayer. One role of religion is to ask ethical questions: What is
amoral, of the many discoveries of this century? Are there ethical
guidelines that apply to the use of the IQ test, or plant breeding, or
airplanes, or nuclear fission, or pesticides, or birth control, or
television, or computers, or drugs, or genetics, or the laser? One
responsibility of religion is to ask these ethical questions.
These ethical questions lead finally to questions about the meaning
and purpose of human life:
- What does the evidence that we humans evolved from
primates in Africa tell us about the purpose of human beings
in the Universe?
- What does the evidence that the universe began in a single
event called a big bang tell us about why we are here and how
we should live our lives?
- What does the discovery of DNA say about the religious
belief in a soul that is more than the interactions of our cells
and the molecules associated with them?
I claim no final, absolute answers to these questions. However, I do
believe that one purpose of human life has something to do with the
evolutionary process. Features in a 500,000-year-old skull pointed to
brain advancement in a human direction. That African ancestor of
ours was growing a bigger brain, generation by generation so that we
today have brains that can better understand the nature of the
universe. I believe that we humans are here in part to learn to build
our understanding of the nature of the universe, generation by
generation.
Here the search for truth in science and the search for truth in religion
merge. A duty of both science and religion is to encourage curiosity,
wonder and excitement in learning more about the nature of the
universe. Whatever our IQ, each of us can do our small part in
furthering human knowledge and passing that knowledge on to the
next generation. This is not the only purpose of human life, but it is
one important purpose that can give meaning to our lives.
I am grateful to have lived through half the 20th century, a time of
exploration, of discovery. Our lives have meaning in part because we
participate and support the growth of human knowledge.
In the often repeated words of T.S. Eliot,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploration
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
At the service Roger invited the congregation to vote on what
scientific, technological and medical discoveries made since 1900
have changed our lives today. Here are the results:
1. Antibiotics
2. Double Helix, DNA & RNA
3. Computers
4. Oral Contraceptives
5. Nuclear Fission
6. Power Controlled Flight
7. Relativity
8. Solid State Electronics (The Transistor)
9. Television
10. Hubbell's "Big Bang" Theory
11. Quantum Mechanics
12. Drugs for Mental Illness
13. Plastic
14. Networks such as the Internet
15. Blood Types
16. Plant Breeding
17. The Laser
18. Plate Tectonics
19. The Vacuum Tube
20. Pesticides
21. The Taung skull
22. Statistics, chi-square test
The IQ Test
Primary Source: Science 84, Copyright, 1984 by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C.,
November 1984 issue.
|
