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© Davidson Loehr
11 May 2003
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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Prayer
It is Mothers’ Day. Let us give thanks
– For mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;
– For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.
– For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;
– For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;
– And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.
It is Mothers’ Day. Let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in deep gratitude and prayer.
Amen.
SERMON: Science, Religion and Life
We’ve come a long way since the Middle Ages, but we’re only halfway home. If you want a picture of people living in an integrated world where everything was really interconnected, just go back a thousand years. It was a very small world then. 99% of the people lived their whole lives within two or three miles of the place they were born.
They worked on the same farm, served the same prince or his successor, drank in the same tavern their whole life. There was only one religion. They attended the same church where they were baptized, married and buried. Many had just one or two priests in a lifetime. Virtually everyone but the priests was illiterate and the invention of the printing press was still four and a half centuries in the future, so there weren’t book discussion groups where intellectuals gathered to ponder disturbing ideas.
The people didn’t think about whether the world was flat or spherical, because either way, what difference would it make? They didn’t think about solar systems, galaxies, the speed of light or the ozone layer because those concepts hadn’t been invented yet. They didn’t think much about abstract concepts like knowledge or wisdom, though medieval theologians did. And what medieval theologians thought about knowledge and wisdom is still instructive for us today. Knowledge was called “scientia” in Latin, the word from which we later got our word science. Wisdom was “sapientia”; it’s nowhere near as famous as science.
They knew that knowledge made you certain, and could make you smug. Wisdom, on the other hand, could make you whole, help you integrate what you knew and who you are into a character who might live happily and well, a blessing to yourself and others. So the only knowledge they thought really important was the kind of knowledge that might lead to wisdom.
Knowledge made them certain, wisdom made them whole. It was a wonderful distinction that would play a bigger role after the medieval world came apart. And the medieval world started coming apart during the 12th and 13th centuries. By the 16th century, the Church had split. There were Lutherans, Calvinists, Reformed preachers, Mennonites, and by the end of the 16th century there were Unitarians as well.
Now your religious certainty extended only as far as the walls of your church. The people in the church across the street were equally certain, but about different things. Books were being printed, people were reading them and getting all sorts of new ideas about God, life, the world, everything.
And in the infant sciences – the new disciplines arising to seek knowledge – Copernicus and Galileo were shattering the certainty about the earth, the universe, and our place in it. They said the earth moved; what a crazy idea! It certainly didn’t seem like it moved. You could live a whole life and never feel it move. But these early scientists said it moved because they had knowledge of things that didn’t come from the concerns of everyday living, but from an intellectual curiosity. It was an early sign that knowledge was becoming unhooked from wisdom.
Of course the leaders of every church thought that what was proclaimed in all other churches was also knowledge coming unhooked from wisdom, and they yearned for a simple world again, one that fit within their understanding. That’s a strange idea: wanting a world that’s no bigger than our understanding. It’s like carrying around one bucket of ocean water and pretending it’s the whole ocean. But it was all they could carry. They weren’t so different from us there. Even today, I’m not sure any of us is carrying more than a few bucketfuls of the universe’s truths.
Some of this new knowledge threatened so many old certainties you could be killed just for believing it. Catholics and Protestants didn’t agree on most sacraments – Catholics said there were seven, Protestants had dropped all but two, communion and baptism. But they all agreed that infants must be baptized or they would go to hell. In the middle of the 16th century, the Mennonites said that infant baptism wasn’t mentioned in the bible, and that adults must be baptized again as a sign of their affirmation of the right religious beliefs.
This sounds pretty ho-hum today, if not just downright boring. But Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and the rest thought it was a capital crime. They hunted down Mennonites everywhere and killed them for being certain about the wrong things.
Religious warfare was breaking out all over. It wasn’t safe to be sure unless your certainties agreed with the church’s.
When others could shrug off the beliefs you were certain you needed to live, and yet they lived quite well, it was a sign that maybe your own certainties weren’t grounded in truth after all, but only in old habits and small visions. And few people can live with that fear. In August of 1572, it boiled over in France in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, where French Catholics tried to provide the Final Solution for the Protestant Problem by killing 30,000 of them in one day and about 100,000 of them in one week.
And this bloody and barbaric state of affairs, odd as it seems, was the manger in which our modern sciences were born.
In the early 1600s, a young genius named Descartes, thinking he was saving Western civilization, came up with a new definition of knowledge, to make it safe from the churches by separating it from the kind of knowledge religion cared about.
Religion cared most about personal and subjective knowledge. Who are we, how are we to live, what’s the meaning of life, how should we treat one another – that sort of thing.
Descartes’ new kind of knowledge was much more restricted. It excluded all the personal and subjective questions about life’s meaning and purpose. He defined a new territory for knowledge, which included only impersonal, objective, factual things. Not how to live, but how to understand objective things like numbers, rocks, trees, bridges, and the laws of nature. Knowledge, in other words, was separated from wisdom, and exalted in its own right as “science.”
That’s why to this day the only time sciences get attacked by churches is when their knowledge has implications for who we are and how we are to live: evolution, birth control, cloning.
To put it another way, Descartes succeeded so well he helped create new problems we still haven’t solved. Knowledge and wisdom have been so successfully separated that today we struggle with how to forge a new synthesis of sciences and religions, facts and values, objective truths and their meaning or use in personal, subjective living. That’s what I meant when I said we’ve come a long way from the Middle Ages, but we’re only half way home.
Last week, Cathy used a wonderful phrase from Emily Dickinson I want to use again. Our souls, said Dickinson, must stand ajar if we are to let the world in. Descartes taught us to seek objective certainty rather than personal wholeness, and nearly all of our sciences have followed him. Our sciences have succeeded spectacularly within this narrower and more impersonal definition of a knowledge that’s been separated from questions of how we should live, how to bring our heads and hearts together in an integrated life lived with hope and trust.
The sciences have now defined what count as facts, what counts as knowledge and truth. And their success undermined and discredited the orthodox claims of religion. This would have broken Descartes’ heart, though it was he who defined this new kind of knowledge that left the concerns of our hearts out.
Many, many people have left the religions of their childhood after becoming bored or disgusted with their religion’s teachings about heaven, hell, miracles and a capricious God who was alternately and unpredictably loving or vengeful. Many of those people feel so deeply betrayed it will be years, if ever, before they will be willing to take something called religion seriously again. We have some of those people in this room. And some who are here have partners they love who won’t come because, after all, this is a church, and they think all churches lie.
Some studies have been saying for over sixty years that 40% of Americans attend church regularly. Other studies say the numbers are faked, that the real number is more like 20%, one in five. This means that 60-80% of Americans don’t think the messages heard in churches are worth getting out of bed for.
So religion, which is supposed to be speaking about who we are and how we should live to make our lives most fulfilling, stammers because while it has some wisdom hidden in its myths and stories, it can’t do knowledge as well as the sciences, so we don’t trust it. Our doors are shut.
But while sciences have knowledge, they are not about finding wisdom. They can say the earth is 4-5 billion years old, that we evolved over millions of years, that there’s neither a heaven above the sky nor a hell below the ground. But sciences can’t tell us why or how that needs to matter to any of us. What would make any of that important or necessary knowledge? Most people in history lived their whole lives never knowing any of it, and they lived full and happy lives.
If someone lives well believing they have a guardian angel or that a god or goddess is watching over them, and it dispels their fears and lets them live in peace and confidence, what difference could it make whether it’s true? Is it a contest? Is there a prize involved? Scientific knowledge may make us smug, but smugness isn’t really what we’re after, is it?
Aren’t we after different questions, that aren’t scientific at all? Questions like:
What should I serve with my life?
How do I balance greed and fairness?
How should I live so I’ll be proud to have lived that way?
What do I owe to myself, to those I love, to my community, to history?
What are the moral responsibilities of power?
What does survive after I’m gone, of the things I loved?
Please understand that I’m not against sciences; I’m for them. Good sciences can save us from bad religion. No religious teachings should be protected from any and all critical scientific questions. We seek a peace that passes understanding, not that bypasses it.
And good religion can and should save us from bad science. No scientific assertion should ever be protected against questions like “So what? What does this have to do with me, who and what I love or serve with the days and years of my life? Maybe in a narrow sense this is true, but so what?”
The attitude of certainty that we have been trained to seek for almost 400 years has become, ironically, the enemy of both honest science and honest religion. It’s not that all certainty is bad, only that certainty which is about half-truths, about facts unhooked from values, data divorced from human meanings.
An example, for this Mother’s Day, is the recent attempt by some groups in Texas to prevent gay and lesbian couples from adopting children. These people are certain that “parents” must mean always and only one person of each sex, that it’s about the sex of the people playing the roles of parents, rather than the roles they are playing.
They’re saying that bad parents of mixed sex would be preferred to good parents of the same sex.
But no. That’s too ignorant of nature to be good science, for Nature’s God created many species in which both homosexuality and bisexuality are found. And it’s too hateful to be good religion.
It’s the role of mothering and fathering that defines mothers and fathers, not what sex they happened to be born.
But we can’t learn it when certainty has slammed our minds shut, or slammed our hearts and souls shut. We cannot learn either truth or love with our minds and hearts shut. Unless we want to dwell in yesterday’s ignorance and bigotries, both our minds and our souls must be left ajar.
Now you may wonder: Can we be certain of this? Yes, we can. Because that’s the one kind of certainty that can get us closer to honest science and honest religion, the kind of knowledge that can lead to wisdom. It is the certainty that we cannot hold the ocean in our buckets, cannot restrict life to the horizons of our own understanding, can not imprison love or parenting in our own small habits and biases.
That’s what we can always be certain of: that there is more. There is always more. More than we know, more than we dare to hope. There is more. There is always more. You can count on it.
