The Evolution of Faith

Anders Liljeholm

Wy'east Unitarian Universalist Congregation

Call to Worship
#445 from the UU Hymnal

Opening Hymn - #343 - A Firemist and a Planet

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr

Readings

"Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods--in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations." -Albert Einstein

#654 from the hymnal

Sermon

I believe in God. I believe in evolution. Science and Faith are two separate ways of understanding the world. They complement each other, but they deal in separate domains. Science describes how the world works. Experiments can be used to detect different features of behavior. Faith is a way to understand morality - why we do things, and whether they are right or wrong. Its justifications are philosophical, spiritual and ethical, not empirical. Both science and faith are good, and make our lives better.

Well, that's taken care of. I'm very proud of myself for that excellent sermon I just gave you. I expect I'll feel great until Tuesday when I face some people who believe that the Reason good exists in the world is that Jesus died for our sins. Specifically, that he died for the original sin of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden 6000 years ago. It's hard to reconcile that viewpoint with the scientific evidence that the world is a million times older than that, and that the plants and animals around us were not created as laid forth in Genesis but evolved from single cells that may have self-formed out of nothing. So of course there are parents who take their children out of the godless public schools, and teach them at home. But they want them to know some science, so they bring them to the science museum every Tuesday.

So here we are, with scientific understanding constantly challenging religious faith, and our culture locked in a battle over knowledge. People sincerely believing that if we give in to science our morality will be lost. And others like Richard Dawkins arguing that religion is nothing but hubris and a completely destructive force in the world.

I love both these institutions. I love science, and I love religion. And I hate to see these two things that I love fight. Just as much as I hate it when the state legislature makes the arts and schools fight for money - but that's a whole other speech. Science and religion are two important ways of looking at the world and finding truth. And they're separate, but not mutually exclusive. I can enjoy chocolate and I can enjoy garlic, although almost never together and definitely not in the same way. So too with Faith and Science.

So what is Science? It's white men in white coats pouring liquids in glass beakers, using computers (or slide rules, depending on how old you are) to do complicated mathematics, figuring out the inner workings of the universe. Building fantastic new technologies like rockets to space and antibiotics and the ShamWow.

For this discussion, one of the most important things to me about science is that it explains the natural world. The German word for science, naturwissenschaft, means natural knowledge. Understanding Nature. Science is a process of looking at the world and asking "Why?" over and over again, guessing at the inner working of things and then poking it to see if you're right. Testing ideas through experiment - testing the predictions that your theories make - is essential to being scientific. And all these ideas and theories are fundamentally tentative - fundamentally tentative - they are provisional ideas always ready for new evidence that will require a more sophisticated idea. Science is ALWAYS a rough draft.

In news stories about science, this fact is often misunderstood. You'll read about this particle collider or that space probe measuring some extreme thing, and how 'this could destroy the theories of Einstein and send scientists back to the drawing board'. They say this like it's a bad thing. But scientists live at the drawing board. If you're not working at the edge of human knowledge, pushing into areas where you are ignorant, you're not a scientist.

Many religions are threatened by this modern-day priesthood in part because science has taken on many of the functions of religion, and not just explaining natural phenomenon. A chosen few are allowed to enter the hallowed temple, and the rest of us are left to be told to take it on faith that's how Science works. That's a failure of scientists. They need to be intelligible and accountable to everyone. Science needs to be guided by ethical concerns, and not just build any possible invention because it CAN be done. As exciting as I find the possibility of genetically engineering pigs so their organs can be transplanted into people, there are issues surrounding that idea that go beyond the technical challenges. The institutions of science have room to grow in being the best institutions they could be.

But religion is often hostile to science for bad reasons, too. Many religions are built upon a belief in a God or gods that controls the natural world. Wherever human knowledge has a gap, fails to explain why something happens, God is called in to fill the void, an intellectual "here be dragons". Whether it's the motion of planets or lightning or earthquakes, or even where life comes from, if no one has figured out the reasons, God did it. Then, when science advances and fills that gap in knowledge, those who have believed God to be responsible for the workings of the world are outraged that science is attacking their faith.

Nicolaus Copernicus was so afraid of the reaction of religion to his ideas that he didn't publish them until after he died. It took almost 400 years for the Catholic church to admit that Galileo was right in arguing that the Earth goes around the Sun. Even after these scientific discoveries were made, people still gave God credit for making the planets move. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists of all time, when encountering planetary movements he couldn't explain with his mathematics, said that God reached down with His hand and adjusted the planets from time to time.

Evolution is an idea that has threatened religious groups since it was first thought. The idea that our ancestors were monkeys can be repulsive (not to mention the much older ancestors that were fish. Or bacteria.) And if your faith is built around a story describing how the natural world came to be, then another story that contradicts your story is threatening indeed.

The front lines in this battle are in our public schools, and the conflict is shaped by our country's excellent principle of the separation of church and state. Religion is not permitted in school, but science is. People whose faith is threatened by science object to this arrangement, and concoct various odd schemes to try to change it.

Their objection is that the government is interfering with their religion, by allowing schools to teach ideas that conflict with their religious teaching. And I think this argument is worth considering - the burden of proof is on the government that interfering with religious practice is necessary. But sometimes a religious practice is unacceptable and should be stopped. Some forms of animal sacrifice are banned in this country, because they would expose everyone in the area to the risk of disease. Here in Oregon the practice of faith healing has been in the news lately. I believe that if an adult chooses faith healing over doctors, they should be allowed to make that decision. But if a child is sick, parents should be required to seek medical attention, until the child is old enough to truly choose that religious path for themselves. This does interfere with the parents' rights of freedom religion, but the harm that comes to the child outweighs that right.

Evolution is the central idea behind all of modern biology. To not teach our children this would do them serious harm. It would close off a huge part of understanding to them, and give ignorance a place of honor. This is a good enough reason to override the objections of those whose beliefs are threatened by these teachings.

Ironically, these religions have themselves evolved, although in response to court rulings rather than the weather or volcanoes. What once called itself creation science, claiming that the story that God created the world in six days was a scientific one, now has adapted to a new legal climate. It calls itself Intelligent Design, and says that simply some intelligent creator made life on earth. Who that might be besides a Christian God, who can say? Luckily, the courts have adapted as well, and declared that this religious idea has no place in the science classroom.

Believers of this kind of religion attack science because they see religion as a kind of science, a way of understanding the natural world. But - there are questions of faith that science does not answer, and can never answer. The existence of God, the nature of the afterlife, the morality of our actions - these are things that science cannot help us discover. There is no experiment that can be done to determine whether an action is ethical. There is no way to prove that God does or does not exist. These are questions which belong to faith.

Now just as the finches of Galapagos evolved from a single common ancestor into multiple species adapted to different niches, so religion has also evolved multiple denominations in response to changing knowledge. There are several religious groups who have emerged in reaction to the scientific revolution, but who also stand counter to scientific progress. Christian Scientists are most certainly not scientists in the way the term is used today. Scientology is a destructive cult built on the ravings of a megalomaniacal second-rate science fiction author. They use fancy technological devices and big science-sounding words to lure people in, but Scientology spurns modern scientific discoveries about how the brain and mind work. They are one of the most anti-science religions out there, if you're willing to call it a religion.

And there are people like Ramtha, the cult leader and producer of the movie "What the Bleep do we Know?" People like her claim that modern science like quantum physics reveals spiritual truths, and justifies their claims that wishing can make things come true. This shows a profound lack of understanding of quantum physics. It is true that observation does deeply strange things in quantum physics. The act of measuring something changes it. Left to itself, a particle exists in a bizarre state of possibility, both left and right and yet neither. And when you observe it, it somehow makes up its mind and becomes one or the other.

But while these behaviors can bewilder and amaze us, and allow us to do some pretty amazing tricks like teleport an atom across miles of space, it is all science. There is nothing of the spirit in quantum mechanics, just a bunch of randomness that is very hard to understand. When physicists talk about this amazing phenomenon of observing, they don't require the observer to be a conscious being. "Observation" is a technical term, and it can be performed by a computer or a piece of polarizing plastic or even a rock.

I despair at the charlatans who spin fantasies about the quantum power of your mind, but this phenomenon is nothing new. Quacks 100 years ago sold magical electricity machines that would cure all manner of ailment with a "scientific" electric shock. Magnets have been sold as magical cures for centuries, and I expect hucksters will claim magical powers of them for centuries to come. There is plenty in science that can inspire - the amazing pictures of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope, the wonders of the workings of a cell - but if you're going to invoke science you have to play by science's rules. And the experiments of physicists show that we cannot make things happen by thought alone. To sell this idea to people is to sell a lie.

There is hope, however, in the conflict between scientific understanding and religious understanding. Religion has mutated and grown into many forms, and we are one of them. I believe that liberal religions like ours are the answer to the argument of science vs. religion.

Our religion does not try to explain the movement of atoms or planets, but we do strive to understand the workings of the heart. We grapple with difficult moral questions, and support each other in searching for answers. Ours is a faith that rather than defining strict moral rules teaches us how to think critically and contemplate moral questions for ourselves. A faith that is not threatened by scientific discovery but inspired by it.

We can meditate, pray and argue about philosophical and ethical questions here, and we can reach conclusions that we would never find with science. And there are ethical questions that concern science itself. We need ethical institutions like religion to constrain scientists, because they won't do it themselves. We need to hold the reins of science, so that morality is used to decide whether to build a super-duper atom bomb. Or whether to build a computer virtual reality system like the Matrix, which scientists think will be possible in the next 50 years, and which will make our cell phone and email etiquette issues today seem quaint.

Faith gives us a way to understand how we should act. We learn to live better in ways that create love, compassion and justice. This is the sort of religion that will thrive for years to come, because new discoveries - and new questions - will be exciting to us, rather than threatening. Our faith is designed to adapt with change, rather than oppose it. And this is in perfect harmony with the constantly changing state of scientific knowledge.

I am most surely not the first person to believe this. Among my predecessors is Oregon's first state geologist, Thomas Condon, who was also a minister. He founded the Congregational church in The Dalles, and was a professor of geology for decades. He wrote in 1902: "That these periodic conflicts between theology and science have been entirely harmless, no well informed person will claim. The church cannot put herself in a position of chronic antagonism to science without harm." We must continue to keep the faith growing and alive, celebrating scientific discovery while simultaneously reveling in the unexplainable beauty of the world - in a leaf, a snowflake or a supernova.

Those who fear science tell amazing stories, and their stories capture the imaginations of many. So we must tell our story. We must tell people the good news of liberal religion, how we belong to a church where scientific discovery is listed alongside the ancient canons as one of our sacred texts. How we live in a faith of change, ever growing and changing and above all Thinking, trying to learn more about ourselves and how we can be good to each other.

Closing Hymn #193 - Our Faith is but a Single Gem

Benediction

"God wants, commands you to use your own judgment in the light of this twentieth century, to tell you what is right and beautiful and true." -Thomas Condon