Science and Religion:
On Convergent Paths or Forever Parallel?
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
May 3, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
There is often tension between science and religion. For example the
story is told about a celebrated minister who, many years ago, was
working hard on a sermon. As part of his research he sent a telegram
to a noted astronomer. The telegram said: "Wire collect immediately
five hundred words on whether life exists on Mars." The astronomer
dutifully replied: "Nobody knows, nobody knows, nobody knows,"
250 times.
Are science and religion on convergent paths or will they remain
forever parallel?
Science is defined as "the observation, identification, description,
experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural
phenomena."
On the other hand religion is defined as "an organized system of
beliefs and rituals centering on a supernatural being or beings."
At first glance these definitions do appear incompatible. However,
the question invites a closer examination.
The tension between science and religion began with Copernicus.
Around 1512 this Polish astronomer sent a paper about the structure
of the planetary system to several acquaintances. The earth, he wrote,
orbits around the sun. It was a revolutionary idea, which questioned
the foundation of religious teachings. One hundred years passed
before the Catholic church became aware of the threat. Then the
church leadership directed their full force against the man who was
at the time the strongest advocate of the new astronomy: a teacher
named Galileo.
Following Copernicus's lead, Galileo presented increasingly
indisputable evidence supporting the view that the earth orbited the
sun. A highly respected celebrity, Galileo sometimes gave lectures
to more than two thousand students. His fame reached new heights
when, in 1609, he built a telescope and made sensational observations
with it. He showed that Jupiter had four big moons and these moons
change their positions every night. Therefore one could conclude
that they moved in orbits around the planet, which meant that smaller
likenesses of our solar system existed in space. Even stronger
evidence that the earth orbited the sun was found in the fact that with
a telescope it was possible to see the phases of Venus. To the naked
eye Venus had always presented itself as bright and unchanging.
However, looking through the telescope, one could see that Venus,
depending on its position to the Sun, passed through various phases
of different brightness, from a narrow crescent to a full disk.
Catholic Church leaders compelled Galileo to journey to Rome in
1633 to stand trial. He was found guilty of having "held and taught"
the Copernican doctrine and ordered to recant. Galileo recited a
formula in which he "cursed and detested" his past errors. The
sentence carried imprisonment, but the Pope commuted this portion
of the penalty to house arrest. Galileo remained under house arrest
for the last eight years of his life.
Ironically the men who created this split between science and
religion, astronomers like Copernicus, and Galileo did not believe
that their discoveries contradicted theologies' ultimate goal, which is
to prove God's existence. For these scientists, a world with the sun
at its center was no less godly than one centered around the earth.
- Copernicus believed he had discovered evidence if God's
divine harmony.
- Galileo believed his new knowledge ultimately gave people
a new understanding of the divine order of the universe.
Isaac Newton, who turned the universe into a smoothly functioning
machine was still convinced that it was God who put this machine in
motion.
Newton wrote in his Principia Mathematica:
The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and
comets could only proceed from the counsel and
dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
Church leaders were slow to update their theology and adapt it to the
latest scientific findings. However, for those educated people who
had become disillusioned with the church, the new scientific
discoveries inaugurated the age of enlightenment. This rejection of
religion in favor of science found its strongest manifestation in the
work of Charles Darwin.
The Darwin family hoped Charles would become a clergyman and
sent him to Cambridge University. However, after graduation he
accepted as position as a naturalist on a ship named the Beagle. As
he studied the plants, insects and mammals, he slowly abandoned the
tenets of Christianity. When he published The Origin of the Species,
many religious leaders were not pleased. A bishop's wife was said to
remark to her husband, "Oh my dear, let us hope, that what Mr.
Darwin says is not true. Nevertheless, if it is true, let us hope that it
will not become generally known."
Although he abandoned Christianity, Darwin never became an atheist.
A year before he died, he wrote to a friend:
My judgment often fluctuates . . . In my most extreme
fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense
of denying the existence of God. I think that generally
(and more and more as I grow older) but not always,
that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
The greatest scientific challenge to religion in this century has come
from physicists such as Albert Einstein. However, like Copernicus,
Galileo, Newton and Darwin, many of these physicists see a connection between science and God.
Einstein believed that an inner harmony supports the world. He felt
that the laws of physics can describe this harmony. However, to
simply observed and described was not enough for Einstein. He
regarded this harmony as something that pointed beyond the purely
physical, something that was the manifestation of a higher reason.
He believed science and religion were not opposed but could be
combined to form a single universal way of thinking. Einstein wrote:
A scientist's "religious feeling takes the form of a
rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law,
which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that,
compared with it, all the systematic thinking and
acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant
reflection."
Einstein spoke of religiousness and avoided speaking of God. For
him, the term God was too closely linked to the idea of a personal
God with human features and human mentality. Such a idea of God
was, for Einstein, incompatible with scientific knowledge. He saw
the personal God as a relic from medieval times. For him, the age-old
conflict between science and religion was mainly based on this
religious notion of a personal God. He believed that if we finally say
farewell to the old man in the clouds, we eliminate any reason for
hostility between religion and science. He wrote:
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot
penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest
reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only
accessible to our reason in their most elementary
forms -- it is this knowledge and this emotion that
constitute the truly religious attitude: in this sense, and
in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
Einstein was not the only distinguished 20th century physicist to be a
deeply religious person. Erwin Schödinger a quantum physicist,
turned to eastern religion. Schödinger believed that by questioning
the classic laws of space and time quantum physics opened the door
to the spiritual. Schödinger quoted a passage by a 13th century
Persian mystic who wrote:
On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to
the spirit world, the body to the bodily world. In this
however only the other bodies are subject to change.
The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like
a light behind the bodily world and who, when any
single creature comes into being, shines through it as
through a window. According to the kind and size of
the window, less or more light enters though world.
The light itself, however, remains unchanged.
Just as scientists like Schödinger have been willing to look at
religious language, some religious leaders have been willing to look
seriously at the new physics. For example, Pope Pious the twelfth
publicly declared in 1951 that the big bang model agreed with the
Bible. Jesuits invited the physicist Stephen Hawking to the Vatican
in 1981 to give a lecture at a conference on modern cosmology.
Hawking wrote:
At the end of the conference participants were granted
an audience with the Pope. He told us that it was all
right to study the evolution of the universe after the
big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang
itself because that was the moment of creation and
therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did
not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the
conference -- the possibility that space-time was
finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no
beginning, no moment of creation. I had no desire to
share the of fate of Galileo, with whom I felt a strong
sense of the identity, partly because of the coincidence
of having been born exactly three hundred years after
his death!
Hawking's book A Brief History of Time was on the best seller list for
many months after it was published in 1988. I do not think this
popularity reflected a sudden awakening of public interest in physics.
Instead, I suspect the interest in Hawking's book expressed a religious
longing for a new world view. Hawking believes physics can develop
a unified theory of nature. He concluded his book with this sentence,
"If we get a final theory it will be the ultimate triumph of human
reason for then we would know the mind of God."
Part of Stephen Hawking's celebrity no doubt derives from his
strength in the face of physical adversity. When he was a graduate
student at Cambridge in 1963, doctors predicted an early death from
the incurable neuromuscular disorder commonly known in this
country as Lou Gehrig's disease. He has since lost the use of his legs
and arms. He cannot feed himself, and an operation in 1985 to help
his breathing cost him what little remaining use he had of his vocal
cords. Only the flicker of energy in his hands allows him to operate
the motorized wheelchair and to communicate ideas and lectures with
a computerized voice synthesizer. Hawking prepares his lectures in
advance on the computer and then from his wheelchair on stage,
controls the delivery by the voice synthesizer. Because of his own
physical survival, a hint of a miracle surrounds Hawking.
Today at Hawking's public lectures people gather in overflow crowds
to hear the thoughts from this mind inside this disabled body. He
symbolizes our hope that with all our limits, we might comprehend
the universe. We are fragile creatures who have only existed for a
short time. Life confines us to one small planet and it's immediate
environs. However, we dare to hope that we have the intelligence and
the imagination that can grasp the physics of some fifteen billion
years of space and time.
Are science and religion on convergent paths or will they remain
forever parallel? In the end the answer depends on how we choose to
define the words science and religion.
Dictionaries say religion is "an organized system of beliefs and rituals
centering on a supernatural being or beings." However, that is not
how I define the word. I prefer to define the word religion by harking
back to its Latin root: religare, to tie or bind back. I define religion
as the attempt to tie together all the various elements of our lives in
to a meaning whole.
Dictionaries say science is "the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of
natural phenomena." In other words science is the search for patterns
in the cosmos.
When I define religion and science in these was, they are closely
connected. The better we can see and understand the patterns in the
cosmos, the better we can tie together all the various elements of our
lives in to a meaning whole. Therefore I believe that:
- Four hundred years ago, when two thousand people came to
hear Galileo lecture about the wonders of the universe he was
engaged in both science and religion.
- One hundred and fifty years ago when lecture halls filled to
hear Darwin speak on the origin of the species, he was
engaged in both science and religion.
- Fifty years ago when overflow crowds gather to hear Albert
Einstein explain his theories, he was engaged in both science
and religion.
- And two months ago when the President invited Steven
Hawking to lecture to a distinguished gathering of scientists
at the White House, Hawking was engaged in both science
and religion.
Some will say that "science is science, and religion is religion, and
never the two can meet." But I believe that the deeper scientists
probe into the nature of ultimate reality, the more mystical they
become . . . and the more poetic . . . and the more religious . . . such
that the distinction between science and religion ceases to exist.
Primary Source: God's Laughter, Physics, Religion and the Cosmos
by Gerhard Staguhn.
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