© Davidson Loehr
February 25, 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Sermon: The Religion of Science
There are a lot of ironies in the topics of science and religion. Among them is the fact that many of the ideals prescribed by religions have actually been accomplished by our sciences. You could argue that while religious wars keep breaking out all over the world, our sciences have made us healthier, let us live longer, given us hope, life and good news, begun to establish a world community, even given us the only universal language we have. Think about some of the things that our sciences have brought to all of us, regardless of whether we believe in them or not:
– Diseases once considered death sentences have been cured. Even AIDS, which was pronounced an unsolvable killer fifteen years ago, is beginning to be understood, and may well be cured or arrested.
– Surgeries that were unthinkable 100 years ago now routinely save thousands of lives every day.
– The only really universal language we have is mathematics. While Western religions teach the story of the Tower of Babel, and how we are cursed with never being able to communicate with people of other languages and cultures, Chinese mathematicians communicate with mathematicians from Africa, Europe and every other continent routinely.
– The impact of computers is still growing. But already e-mail connects people from all over the world, trading the same stories, jokes, and creating a kind of culture of commonality which religions have preached but never created. I was forwarded an e-mail this week that originated as a middle school project (in Virginia, I think). The class sent a note to friends, asking them to forward it to their friends, etc., to see how many people they could reach in how many locations in two months. The automated reply I received said that in the first six weeks, they received over 300,000 responses from about 100 countries. Never before in history have we been able to communicate with that many people and cultures.
– The laws of physics, chemistry, the principles of mathematics and the languages of computer science are universal. They structure our world and arrange our thoughts whether we believe in them or not. That too is something religions have never been able to achieve, even with their history of bloody wars.
The sciences have done this by strictly limiting the kinds of questions they consider proper scientific questions. They deal with questions of fact, not questions of meaning. They deal with objective questions that can be answered the same by scientists all over the world, not subjective questions. If you want to know the height, weight or behavioral characteristics of another person, scientists can answer your questions. If you want to know whether you really love them, whether they make you happy and vice versa, you’re not asking the kind of questions with which sciences were designed to deal.
These questions about what science is, what religion is and the clear differences between them are huge vast questions. I have an eight-hour program I’ve done on this for adult education classes, so it’s a little frustrating to fly over this in just these few minutes. I’ll be trying to find some patterns that are clear enough that it won’t be frustrating for you. It’s a fascinating story, how Science became the dominant religion of our culture. I want to tell this story in just a few parts, which I’ll try to bring full circle.
The pre-scientific world view
First, I want to sketch a picture of the world of intellectual and religious belief of 200 years ago. It is always a little shocking to realize what intelligent people believed in Thomas Jefferson’s time, as it will probably be shocking for people 200 years from now to realize what we believed. But here are some of the things that most educated people believed when our country was being born, just a few decades before the dramatic change:
The whole universe was about 6,000 years old, a date arrived at by adding up all the time periods listed in the Bible.
Everything in the universe was created by God, who was our loving heavenly father. And we were still pretty near the center of God’s creation, and of his concern.
All forms of life on earth were created at about the same time, and no species could ever become extinct. I have a story about this. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson inspected a huge fossilized bone, a bone too large to belong to any known animal. Jefferson wrote that such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct. And one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark out west to explore was to find the animals from which that huge bone came, for Jefferson was sure they must still exist somewhere.
Reality, in other words, was a static picture rather than a moving one. The species were fixed, everything was created by God according to a plan of his, and would remain so until the end of time.
Most people believed that the only major geological upheaval there had ever been happened about 4,000 years ago, during the Flood.
Most importantly, we humans were at the very center of God’s concern, and his whole plan for the universe gave us a special and cherished place in it. This was our home, made to serve all of our needs by our heavenly father. We were loved: loved by the maker of heaven and earth, loved by the God who created the whole shebang. And as a television beer commercial puts it, “It doesn’t get any better than that”!
That is a quick sketch of a world which is, for most of us, long gone except, perhaps, as a kind of romantic nostalgia. The biggest differences from our modern world were the deep sense of unity, the static nature of it, and the unquestioned belief that the glories of the earth were the glories of God’s handiwork and the evidence of his love for us. Those ideas are so foreign to many of us today that it is hard to remember that they were simply assumed, and by even the best minds.
The scientific revolution
Now let’s go to the second stage in this drama, and look at a more exciting part of the story, the scientific advances of the nineteenth century, where we can see the birth and rise of what I think I can persuade you is the religion of Science.
The advances made by the sciences during the 19th century were absolutely explosive. They changed our way of thinking of ourselves and our world. Beginning in the 1790’s, geologists began to show that the earth had to be very, very old. Not 6,000 years, but millions and millions of years, maybe even more. James Hutton, the father of modern geology, wrote in 1795 that he had studied the facts of geology for fifty years, and was led to a shocking conclusion: The result of this physical inquiry, he wrote, is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. The world was bigger, and different, than the Bible said it was.
The next shock came almost immediately. By 1801, sixteen years after Thomas Jefferson had said no species could ever become extinct, a French paleontologist named Cuvier had assembled the skeletons of 23 extinct animals from prehistoric times, which were placed on public exhibit, and later toured this country in both museums and carnivals.
In 1830 another geologist, Charles Lyell, published a book called Principles of Geology, which delivered a crushing blow to Biblical literalism. Lyell convincingly demonstrated that millions of years of slow workings of natural forces had shaped the present face of the earth. Geology suddenly obsessed American theologians, and they began to backpedal on the issue of biblical literalism. It’s hard to believe this today, but by 1860 rigid literalism was largely left to the uneducated or the arrogantly obstinate, as most preachers and teachers of religion were willing to admit that the bible was not, after all, completely factual.
Lyell’s book went through many editions, and helped to educate a whole new generation of scientists. One of those young scientists who read Lyell’s book in 1830 was a naturalist named Charles Darwin. Two years later, Darwin had the second volume of Lyell’s work sent to him while he was on his historic voyage aboard the ship The Beagle.
Biblical criticism arose from within religion, presenting itself as a scientific study of the Bible. It began in Germany in the 1820’s and 1830s, and by 1840 students at Harvard were learning that the Bible had been written by many people over many centuries, rather than falling from the hand of God in a black leather binding and the King James translation. The conspiracy of silence among both preachers and teachers of religion still angers me; scholars have known for 160 years basic facts about the bible that people in the pews and the streets still aren’t being told! This is somewhere between an outrage and a sin, and shows that preachers and teachers of religion seem to have a terribly low opinion of ordinary people. I digress.
And then came the year 1859. In that year, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and what was left of the old world picture came crashing to the ground. While there are many reasons that Darwin’s discoveries were so destructive to the old religious picture which in some ways is still the religious picture for millions of people the most famous is that Darwin’s discoveries destroyed what had been called the Design Argument for the existence of God. The Design Argument was kind of a last-gasp effort of theologians to hold on to the picture of a personal God who had created everything according to a divine plan. They could point to little birds and say “Look: these little birds have little beaks, and guess what they like to eat? Little seeds. They don’t want to eat watermelons, they want to eat little seeds that fit into their cute little beaks. That proves that an intelligent God designed all of this.” After Darwin, there was an even simpler explanation: “Heck, maybe there once were little birds that only wanted to eat watermelons. If so, they all starved to death.” There is no need for a “design” argument; natural selection keeps the animals that fit their environment, and the rest die out. Darwin, along with the other natural scientists, painted us a picture of our world that no longer needed a God to make it run.
After all the advances made by the sciences, the church began losing its hold on colleges. You may not know that it ever had such a hold, but it did. Harvard had always had a minister as its president, and one had to have the church’s endorsement to get a college degree at both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as many American universities. But by about 1870 religious tests were no longer required at British universities, and the president of Harvard was a chemist. Harvard has never again been led by a minister.
During this time, Science slowly but surely became a religion, even the most influential religion in our culture. I know you’re not convinced of this yet, but I think you will be in a few minutes. It happened the way a hermit crab makes its home in the shell of another animal. I’ve identified at least ten dimensions of religion that were taken over, or at least copied, by Science in the 19th century. It’s hard to think of a list of ten things any more without being reminded of the “Top Ten” lists we see everywhere. So here is my list of the Top Ten things that Science took over from religion in the 19th century:
10. Salvation was replaced by Progress. Christians work on earth to reach a future ideal state in heaven. Scientists work here to contribute to Progress which, they believe, will lead toward an ideal state here on earth in the future.
9. Revelation was replaced by Discovery. For centuries, the churches had been where you went to find revelations of God’s word, the ultimate Truth. Now revelation began losing intellectual respect, as we trusted the discoveries of sciences more than the revelations of priests. We still do. Yet if you look up those two words, revelation and discovery, you’ll discover that they mean the same thing. To reveal is to remove a veil. To discover is to remove a cover. About 150 years ago, the job of removing that veil or cover was transferred from religion to science, where it remains today.
8. The priest’s black robe was replaced by the scientist’s white lab coat. Both are costumes, but for over a century we have regarded the people in the white costumes as more authoritative than those in the black costumes. Even if preachers dress up in wild maroon gowns with hoods and stripes, we’re not likely to convince you that we know more about facts than a scientist. (And, of course, as the costumes were changed, so were the characters in them, as priests were replaced by scientists as sources of truth.)
7. Reverence for the past was replaced by reverence for the future. To every traditional culture in the world, the phrase “the new improved model” is simply insane. Cultures are grounded in the wisdom of their elders and their sacred past. With the myth of Progress, ancient truths (and the wisdom of old people) were and are shrugged off in the faith that “newer” means “better” and the future will be superior to the past. It has robbed us of much wisdom of the ages and the aged, making our superficiality especially poignant.
6. Religious rituals were replaced by scientific rituals. For centuries, churches and synagogues here had gone through the same motions in the same ways in their worship services, and those in the tradition saw the rituals as the path toward a kind of truth or peace. Now it seems more important that scientists go through the same procedures when conducting the experiments that will, we believe, lead us toward the discovery of facts.
5. Churches were replaces by laboratories. At least as the places where one expects to find out what’s really true.
4. Symbols and metaphors were replaced by literalisms and facts. This one is especially devastating, I think. Last week I read to you from some ancient Christian theologians who explained that religious writings don’t really mean what they say, but must be interpreted by methods apparently available to a few. If scientists had nothing more exact than symbols and metaphors, they could never build a bridge, a rocket, or make reliable diagnoses and prescriptions for diseases.
An unfortunate but probably unavoidable side-effect of the scientific culture is that it has made us all much more literalistic, more concerned with cold hard facts than with warm rich meanings.
3. Beliefs became intellectual. This may sound odd, because all our lives we have been taught to think of beliefs as things we assert to be true. But it isn’t what the word used to mean. The word “belief” comes from the German word “belieben,” which means “beloved.” Religious beliefs were, and I think still should be, understood as things we trusted our hearts to. But since knowledge has been replaced by science and facts replaced symbols and metaphors, the “beliefs” now mean a set of intellectual assertions rather than a set of existential allegiances. Once spiritual seekers might have said “I believe this because it warms my hears, because it is profoundly revelatory of the human condition.” Now we have now been taught to say “I believe this because it is factually true.”
2. Wisdom was replaced by Knowledge. Even in the Middle Ages, theologians knew the difference. They wrote often of the categorical distinction between sapientia and scientia. “Sapientia” is the Latin word for wisdom, as in our self-flattering species name, homo sapiens. “Scientia” is the Latin word for knowledge, which has come to mean a web of facts. Seven centuries ago, theologians taught that the only knowledge that really mattered was the kind of knowledge that leads to wisdom, that tells us who we most deeply are and how we should live, the demands of love and the nature of allegiance and responsibility. These aren’t scientific statements.
1. God was replaced by Science. People have always ascribed human qualities to God. We say things like “God says” and “God tells us” as though God were a humanoid who could speak. But now, in our newspapers and on television every day, we hear people saying “Science says” and “Science tells us.” Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as “Science” spelled with a capital “S.” There are many sciences, and many scientists. Scientists say things, but they don’t always agree. But when we construct a sentence that begins with the words “Science says” we have created a humanoid fiction, named it Science, and begun looking to it for advice and guidance the way we used to look to God for.
Let’s put these words together into sentences so you can hear how similar they are. Preachers and lay people say “In a church, through rituals and traditions, black-robed priests proclaim the traditions and the revelations of God, helping us to learn the beliefs and wisdom that can lead to our salvation.” Scientists and many lay-people say “In a laboratory, through following the rituals of the scientific method, white-robed scientists proclaim the new theories and discoveries of Science, helping us to gain the understanding and the knowledge that can lead us toward Progress.”
The achievements of our sciences have been spectacular. Religions couldn’t have put a man on the moon, done a kidney transplant or solved complex engineering problems through the interpretation of scriptures. I think the primary reason our sciences have been so successful is because they have, from the start, limited their focus to matters of fact rather than matters of meaning. (Though getting trillions of dollars in federal and corporate funding didn’t hurt.)
Sciences have intentionally ignored the existential and subjective questions. They may be essential to us, but they are not scientific questions. No one can make a scientific pronouncement on what we should love, how we should treat our neighbors, whether it is more moral to have an abortion or to bring an unwanted child into an uncaring environment, or a thousand other moral, ethical, subjective questions. And any scientist who tried to make such a pronouncement would quickly be denounced by other scientists for being unscientific. These questions are the questions we take up in religion, ethics, philosophy and the humanities, not the hard sciences. And the answers to these questions are, as any scientist can tell you, not precise, not the same in all contexts, not objective. Pascal once famously wrote “The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.” It’s pretty, but I think no one would claim that it’s scientific.
Pascal’s sentiments, however, remind me of some other very dark words penned by Charles Darwin late in his life. Darwin wrote in his private correspondence about what he called the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature. He believed in progress, but even his faith in progress was of little comfort to him, for progress, he noted, was painfully slow. Worse yet, even the hope of progress came up against an awful dead-end. This is how Charles Darwin described it: The certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi, with a vengeanceÉ.
Sic transit gloria mundi means thus pass the glories of the earth. Thus pass the glories of the earth, with a vengeance, Darwin said. Imagine that! A scientist who spent his life collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the glories of the earth, concludes at the end that the system of nature is clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel, and that its glories pass quickly, and with a vengeance. Darwin found, and helped establish, a new world but he couldn’t find a comforting home in it. And his problem is with us still.
When a God falls and crashes, that’s the kind of sound it makes. The curiosity of our minds was divorced from the needs of our hearts, and the one killed the other. And so God died. You can call it natural selection.
To live in the 21st century, we need to have a faith which is consistent both with science and with the demands of our hearts: a religion which can satisfy both our minds and our spiritual longings. We define ourselves and our world through the knowledge we have gained from our sciences. Our religious beliefs must evolve and grow in order to keep helping us make profound sense of who we are and what we are called to do. Preachers have to have one eye on the sciences, and I think that’s a good thing. If I can only preach messages that make you check your brains at the door, I have insulted you, and disgraced my own profession. It makes liberal religion harder, but if we do it right it can lead us to a kind of intellectual and emotional authenticity which may not be quite as available in any other way.
There is a great spiritual hunger today, and Pascal was right: the heart does have its reasons that reason doesn’t know. And also its needs and yearnings. Answering those needs, filling those holes, is not a science, it is an art. Without learning some of that art, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter how much knowledge, scientia, we have, we cannot feel fulfilled or satisfied. Indeed, we can hardly live at all. Now that, for the record, is a fact. And it’s a fact to which we will keep trying to do justice here, week after week after week.
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Endnotes
1 John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (Iowa State Univ. Press, 1959), p. 88
2 Greene, p. 78
3 Turner, p. 205
4 Greene, p. 336
5 Ibid.
