"Can Science and Religion(s) Be Reconciled?"

A Sermon by

Clay Farris Naff

Delivered at the First Unitarian Church of Omaha

November 27, 2005



Good morning. Earlier this month, the Lied Center in Lincoln presented a vivid recreation of the Scopes Monkey Trial. I don't know if any of you were there, but it was really something to see the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, author of that immortal tract, the Menace of Darwinism, brought to life by Ed Asner. Here's an outspoken opponent of intelligent design, one of Hollywood's best known liberals – and it's hard to stand out as a liberal in Hollywood – throwing himself passionately into a role defending fundamentalism. I guess about the only thing more astonishing would have been to see Pat Robertson playing Clarence Darrow.

The play showed me two things: first, the motives and arguments of creationists have hardly changed at all in the eight decades since the Scopes Trial. Second, those defending science have all too often been arrogant toward their religious opponents. Let me share a few bits of contemporary evidence:  

Here's a recent letter to the editor from a rural Nebraskan: "I have a new theory, and here it is. Darwin’s theory of evolution … is a faith-based religion and should be taught as such in a religion class. No more can you prove to me we evolved from two gases that came together somewhere out in the universe, than I can prove to you that God created everything that you see. …"

We now leave that poor, confused soul, and turn to University of Kansas professor Paul Mirecki. He declares: "Creationism is mythology … Intelligent design is mythology. It's not science."

And here is a snippet from a recent rant by the physicist Victor J. Stenger: "I am a scientist and no one is going to restrict me from applying my scientific knowledge to the question of God. The God hypothesis has observable consequences. If religious people don't like it, so much the better."

As a defender of science I'm sure I've been guilty of arrogance and contempt myself. But through three years of constructive engagement with people on the other side of the fence I've gained some insights that I want to share this morning. Let me lay them before you and invite you, whatever your worldview may be, to consider the possibility of rational reconciliation.

First, the dividing line is not simply between religion and science. Rather, it's between those who aim to dictate the nature of reality and those who seek to discover it, whether through science, philosophy, or faith.  

This is an ancient struggle, one that spills far beyond the "culture war" over evolution and the borders of science itself. Socrates was no scientist, but when he taught the young men of Athens to question the official wisdom of the day, the city fathers condemned him to die. Giordano Bruno was a priest who disputed Catholic dogma about the universe. He championed a Copernican solar system, an infinite universe, and an early version of relativity. The Church fathers drove a spike through his tongue and burned him alive.

There was nothing uniquely harsh about the Vatican. For most of history, those in power have claimed the right to determine, like the king of Siam, that "What is so is so, what is not is not." Those who dared to disagree risked being hanged, stoned or burned as heretics.  

Of course tolerance has a long history, too. In the third century B.C.E. King Asoka of India declared: "It is forbidden to decry other sects; the true believer gives honor to whatever in them is worthy of honor."

Yet, the authoritarian impulse remains strong today. Rising from the ruins of fascism and Stalinism, its wraith has flitted through the night and entered the fundamentalist soul.  

And that brings me to my second point. Religion, as the noted scholar Philip Jenkins observes, has replaced politics as "the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs." And authoritarian versions of Islam and Christianity  are the fastest growing ideologies in the world.  

Against this threat, people of good will, whether secular or religious, must band together. To do this, we need a new vision of tolerance. Now, for Unitarians, tolerance comes easy. But to spread the vision, we need a rigorous, rational, defensible theory of worldview tolerance.   

So here is my third and final point: it can be done.  

Not so easily as you might think, however. Here's the dilemma: the more we learn about our world through science, the less reason we seem to have to accept differing worldviews. For example, knowing what we do about plate tectonics, can we remain silent when some preachers blame gay tourists for a tsunami? I think not.  

Reality is neither a sacred text to be interpreted by the sanctified, nor a democracy to be decided by majority vote. Letting such false beliefs go unchallenged would be condescending or worse. When New Age tolerance proclaims, "Reality is whatever you want it to be," we have a moral duty to respond: if that were true, we'd all be rich, thin, and good-looking.  

Science makes it hard to dodge unpleasant facts. Evidence shows that "out there" lies a natural, impersonal reality. Zoologist Richard Dawkins starkly sums it up: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

Are we stuck, then? Must we choose between a rational acceptance of the scientific worldview or an emotional embrace of theology? Again, I say no.  And  curiously enough, science provides the starting point for reconciliation.  

We begin our journey with Einstein. His astonishing theories of relativity have many weird implications. Some have grown familiar over the last century. We all know that mass and energy are equivalent. We've learned to accept that time is not absolute. We have heard that lightspeed is the universal speed limit … though Star Trek fans are still not convinced.

However, there are many other implications of relativity. Here's one: In a potentially significant way, reality differs for each and everyone one of us. The laws of physics may be the same everywhere and always, but from each standpoint the "narrative" of existence unfolds somewhat differently. Like many discoveries in science, this one is strongly counterintuitive. Ordinary experience seems solid, coherent and unified.  

Imagine we are at a baseball game. The batter slaps a line drive down the third base line. The infielder picks it up bare-handed, pirouettes and throws to first base. "Out!" roars the umpire. The home team's manager, backed by most of the crowd, violently disagrees. The fielding team backs the umpire to the hilt. Now, such disputes are part of the drama of sport, but mark this: no one in the stadium believes that two versions of that situation can both be true. The runner was either safe or he was out. No two ways about it.

In the "real world" of high energy physics, however, there can be two ways about it. In a famous "thought experiment" concerning moving and stationary observers, Einstein showed that a single set of events can be simultaneous for one observer but consecutive for another. Safe and out, depending on your frame of reference.

Extend this knowledge over the canvas of the Universe, recall that the speed of light limits how fast information can travel, and a startling fact emerges: the world you experience differs from mine.  

We already know that when it's day here, it's night in China. We vaguely understand that an astronaut travelling at high speed to the nearest star and back would return to find that her twin sister is now several years older than herself. But still we fail to see the full implications of relativity.  At this moment, there is information streaking across the universe that will reach a lady in China but arrive too late for a dying man in Boston. Their realities differ.

To any residents of Proxima Centauri, the Iraq war hasn't happened. It's not just that they don't know it. For our nearest stellar neighbors, 4.2 light years away, the invasion of Iraq is simply not a reality. Scale up a bit, take account of  the accelerating expansion of the universe, and you have events taking place in various regions that will never be part of the reality of other regions. As the physicist Lee Smolin observes, "the birth of the worst poet in the universe, on a planet … thirty billion light years from us is, fortunately, outside both our future and [our] past."

Friends, there is no universal calendar of events. The present happens only where you happen to be. The farther from you an event occurs, the deeper it lies in the past.  

Relativity and its unruly brother-in-arms, quantum mechanics, convey a wonderful message from Nature: There is a great deal more to reality than meets the eye. Now, this is not a license for mystification, but it does have blossoming implications for faith.  

Think about it: Science itself suggests that reality as we each experience it is neither unique nor uniform. Rather, it is multiaxial.  We each tread a unique path that runs through the common ground of Nature. On that common ground, where the laws of nature rule, we are able to share the intersubjective experiences that give rise to science.  

But where does the other end of that path lead? Does it simply dead end in the subjective experience of our minds? I think not. For if we want to justify the claims of science, we must accept that at least some things are metaphysically real. Consider: Science is more than systematic observation. It needs reasoning. Without a  logical explanation for the data that nature provides, a scientist is just another shaman. But what is logic? Is it real in some sense, or is it merely a symbolic language? The issue is highly controversial, but I believe we have reason enough to accept a platonic view: Math and logic are metaphysically real. I wouldn't ask you to take this on authority alone, but I can't help noting that my stance puts me in good company.  

In a 1940 "apology" for his profession, Cambridge University

mathematician G.H. Hardy said, "I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it …. 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so… "

The 1982 Fields Medal winner Alain Connes writes, "I hold on the one hand that there exists, independently of the human mind, a raw and immutable mathematical reality; and, on the other hand, that as human beings we have access to it only by means of our brain…"

That is precisely the position I defend, except that I would add that if math is real then so is logic. The two are as inseparable as electricity and magnetism. Of course, mathematical realism is denied by many scientists, philosophers, and even some mathematicians. So who am I to choose sides?  

My reasons are simple. I believe the question is underdetermined. That is, no one has  evidence that could decide it one way or the other. All other things being equal, then, it makes sense to accept mathematical realism.  

Here's why. If we were to take the constructivist view of math and logic, we would be unable to refute the charge that science is merely another brand of rhetoric. And believe me, both the Left and the Right attack science on just those grounds. Postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty writes, "Truth neither comes nor goes … because it is not an entity at all." On the religious right, Philip Johnson accuses scientists of being clerics in disguise. "Naturalism is their vehicle to replace the religious clergy with the scientific … professionals" he claims.

In defense of science, we can presume not only a physical world of objects to discover, but also a metaphysical world of concepts to employ in making the discoveries. But this naturally raises the question of other concepts that might also be metaphysically real.  

For instance, does God exist?  

Here, at last, I think we have an opportunity for genuine rational reconciliation. For starters, people of good will can stop bickering over whether God is real: the answer, either in the first, second, or third person, is yes. Undeniably, God exists as a powerful concept in the minds of a great many people. What's more, it is equally evident that God, like math, exerts a powerful influence in the world through the actions of his followers.

What is God like? A multiaxial view of reality tells us that there is no single, correct answer. Rather, it depends on what metaphysical axis the speaker occupies. Along some axes lies a world in which God is perfect; along others he does not exist at all. For the Pope, there is one answer, for the Ayatollah another, and for the Dalai Lama a third.  

Now it might seem to you that I have brought us to the brink of that New Age "anything goes" view of reality, which I myself mocked. No so. Rational reconciliation is necessarily constrained by reason. And reason tells us that evidence supports the scientific narrative of creation, existence, and life.  

However, rationality allows for other, nonconflicting explanations to obtain. I spoke before of underdetermination. Here I would like to bring in the concept of overdetermination. Sometimes multiple causes apply. For example, the death of a suicidal person who suffers a heart attack at precisely the moment he pulls the trigger and is struck by lightning is overdetermined. According to intellectual historian Louis Menand, virtually all human behavior is overdetermined. Now, there's a thought.  

But I would ask you to consider that the entire Universe may be overdetermined. Perhaps undetectable theological causes underlie natural phenomena – quantum indeterminacy, or evolution, for example. Such causes would have no observable effect on the natural explanations science provides.

Now, theological overdetermination may amount to a burden that a nonreligious agnostic (such as myself) feels uncompelled to carry. However, nothing in science can rule out such claims. Acknowledging this makes it possible to fully embrace the findings of science and still be believer. Just as important, it makes it possible for nonbelievers to lose the contempt they all too often show toward the religious.

That is good, but I want to push rational reconciliation still further. Many scriptural literalists are people of good will. In my experience, we have much in common. But our worldviews seem to divide us. Can we find a rational means of mutual tolerance? I believe we can.  

Let me show this with a hard case: the biblical account of creation. Consider the challenges of an honest program of "creation science" to establish just one biblical claim: the age of Universe. When the Bible was written, some 2,000 stars were visible. Now, with billions of galaxies documented, can anyone imagine that they were all packed together at the Big Bang just 6,000 years ago? With continental drift measured at an inch or so per year, can anyone argue that Africa and South America split up just 6,000 years ago? They would now be separated by less than a quarter of a mile. Can anyone buy that the astounding variety of human features evolved in a few hundred generations?

Not if we restrict ourselves to the natural world. However, so long as we do not contradict the findings of science, it is not necessary to divide the world into facts and myths. In the scientific spirit of never claiming more than provisional truth, we should concede that, appearances to the contrary, for some the Genesis story may be metaphysically true. Along some axes, it may be that Adam and Eve were ejected from a metaphysical Eden and landed here on Earth. For others the Navajo narrative of a magic reed may connect the metaphysical underworld with the natural world. So too can Muslims, Hindus and Jews align their narratives with nature as science describes it. If such religious narratives are real, however, they must become apparent at a metaphysical depth of reality penetrable by faith alone. Let us note that for Christians who heed the words of Saint Paul, 'by faith alone' is no bad thing. I hope the same may be true for all believers.

Would adoption of this view mean the end of ideological conflict? Obviously not. But it just might be that a multiaxial perspective on reality can heal old wounds without giving fresh injury to reason or faith.