This morning we have heard from a working laboratory scientist. Then a physician spoke to us from his perspective in the health sciences. Now I stand before you prepared to offer theological reflections.
Nice, neat categories. Biologist, physician, theologian. Unfortunately, those categories do not hold. They hide almost as much as they reveal. Gray Crouse is not just a biologist who publishes research that most of us could barely understand even if he gave us the Cliff Notes version. He is a person of faith, a committed member of this covenant community—someone that until this morning, at least, most of us thought of as the leader of our Patchwork class. Our physician, Dave Hilton, is the chair of our deacons, and used his skills as a missionary, serving around the world, sharing the good news in the same way Jesus often did—through healing.
I might seem to fit the category a bit more neatly. But my college degree was in chemistry and math, with a minor in biology, and after completing two years missionary work in Japan and my seminary degree, I worked for the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.
This slippage between categories—the diffuse boundaries illustrated by the lives of Gray, Dave, and me—exists because theology and science are not always separable. At times they are quite distinct, and that can be a comfortable relationship—or non-relationship, if you will. Ian Barbour calls this view of science and religion "Independence." They have different questions, domains, and methods, and that renders science and religion distinct and autonomous fields of inquiry. Francisco Ayala, a Dominican priest and evolutionary biologist, adheres to this view that there are vital questions about life and meaning that science will never be able to address. Like Gray, he rejects explanations of God's action in the world which depend on gaps, or uncertainties, in scientific knowledge. As he said,
"What if tomorrow some physicist finds out that Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle actually can be done away with? Say a deterministic explanation is found. Would we then reject the presence of God in the world? . . .
"Science can now approach the entire natural world, and seek to describe it with the methods of science. But the questions that science asks are not the only questions of interest in trying to understand the world. . . .
"Arts are a valid way of acquiring knowledge . . . trying to apply scientific standards to Shakespeare would be silly. It would be making what scientists call a category mistake. Say that in a sonnet Shakespeare refers to his beloved as a rose. A scientist could say, "This guy is an idiot. A woman is not a rose." Of course the idiot would be the one who made that comment. Of course Shakespeare knows she is not a rose! But that doesn't mean that a man describing his beloved as a rose is not telling the world something meaningful about her, about his feelings, and about what love is like."
Yet from the time of Copernicus and Galileo, scientific progress has often been perceived not as independent of faith but as the enemy of faith—or at least as a threat to religious doctrine. Steady-state cosmology, evolution, deterministic Newtonian physics—all have been (and still are) denounced by believers, most often Christian believers.
A-ha! Conflict! That's another possible way to understand the relationship between science and religion, according to Ian. We think right away of religious literalists who reject scientific theories such as evolution. But scientists like sociobiologist E.O. Wilson respond with an equal and opposite reaction: for them, religion is an artifact of evolution, and will disappear from our culture when the origins and genetic structure of the human brain are fully understood. I hope that no one is hoping for me to argue that point of view this morning.
More productive, from my point of view, are two other possible ways to relate religion and science. Ian Barbour calls them Dialogue and Integration. Where Independence, often appropriately, as Gray has shown us, emphasizes difference, Dialogue emphasizes similarities between science and religion in a constructive relationship. Science and faith come together in the boundary questions which science raises but cannot answer. Science cannot explain why the universe is intelligible. Nor can it explain the sense of awe the physical world can elicit from us—the awe that Einstein said is the mainspring of science. There are other boundary questions between religion and science: How can we have faith in God's love and goodness when we stand against the backdrop of nature "red in tooth and claw," and a world filled with brutality and pain? When we observe the regularity and determinacy of nature, how can we understand our own experience of freedom? Why is there a universe at all? Why is there something and not nothing? When we think about the way the universe was formed and the way it may end, how do we make meaning of this world?
These can be difficult questions with which to grapple. I often heard Bob Russell, who founded the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, talk in lectures about the possibility of a collapsing universe. What if it's true, as some cosmologists think, that the expansion of the universe which started at the Big Bang is slowing down, and that soon it will stop, and begin to shrink, to eventually collapse in on itself? Does that render our lives meaningless? I used to think he was getting awfully worked up about something that was unproven and at least a few billion years in the future.
Barbour and others find Dialogue between Religion and Science useful when it focuses not so much on limit questions but on methods. Theologians and scientists in dialogue have found rich material in examining structures of thought common to both, such as the use of myths, models, and paradigms, or taking into account the status of the observer, or analyzing the communication of information. These can be explored without compromising the integrity of science or faith.
Integration makes heavier demands on our religious beliefs to interact with science. In Natural Theology, people of faith draw upon science for evidence of God in the design of the natural world. For example, the Anthropic Principle is how scientists refer to the idea that the universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. The smallest change in the rate of expansion of the universe, the smallest change in some law of physics and whoops! no universe, or no life in the universe. This does not prove the existence of God; it is, however, "consistent with the hypothesis," writes physicist Freeman Dyson. Integration also occurs in a Theology of Nature, which reformulates some religious ideas in light of scientific findings. Both science and faith, for example, are needed to weave a new environmental ethics adequate to the needs of our world. For a more systematic synthesis, process thought integrates science and religion by viewing God as the source of novelty and order.
So are faith and science enemies, strangers, or partners? Are they battling it out in a magnificent duel, swords clashing, stepping back and forth in a ballroom of ideas? Are they sitting on opposite sides of the ballroom, backs to one another, refusing to speak? Are they dancing a sedate fox trot—or enmeshed in a seductive tango? And will I have my ordination removed for using a dance analogy in a Baptist pulpit?
Many individuals draw upon more than one approach. For this congregation, there will be no single approach to living out our faith in a world we know through science as well as religion. Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, Integration. We know in part, and we see in part. And we must be humble about our claims to know, when we are seeing through a glass dimly. But someday we shall see God face to face. I, for one, will have a lot of questions. What will yours be?
Throughout this reflection I have relied heavily on Ian Barbour's When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? and Richardson and Slack, eds., Faith in Science: Scientists Search for Truth.