Science and Miracles

Science and Miracles

A great sermon by Rev. Victoria Weinstein (just to put some of her comments in reference, I think she's Canadian) on December 11, 2005 that you need to take the time to read. Some quotes:

"For some people, Truth is a material thing you can find by working hard in a lab or studying the stars, and truth is something you can eventually find and prove. For others, truth is more of a moral reality; something you find by an interior process of seeking and reflecting on, for instance, the teachings of spiritual leaders. In my experience, most religious people accept that you can never have a final report that proves the reality of this kind of Truth once and for all. Religion gets into trouble when it tries to pretend it is science, and science get into trouble when it tries to pretend that moral, spiritual truths aren' t just as important to the human endeavor as provable, scientific truths.

When Einstein said, "science without religion is blind, and religion without science is lame," he may have been kidding. But facetious or not, I think he was suggesting an important idea. Although he was not a traditionally religious man, Einstein was a reverent man, and I like to think of reverence as the bridge that can connect the aims and methods of science and religion. I don' t think Einstein meant it at all sarcastically when he said, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." When we think of what Einstein comprehended – cosmic equations that no one else had ever fully grasped before – it' s easy to see how he felt that something miraculous was being revealed through the laws of science. He probably didn' t believe in a supernatural origin for the realities he was uncovering, but he was deeply awe-struck by them nonetheless. Belief in supernatural causation is not a prerequisite for reverence. A person can be both reverent and religious without believing in a supernatural being. For some people, the merely natural is miraculous enough. It was for Einstein. It was for Walt Whitman.

Both science and religion have their prophets, both have rituals, both have fanatics, both have skeptics. They are often in such tension, I think, because they mistakenly believe that their worldviews are inherently opposed. To me, science and religion are no more naturally opposed than cooking and poetry. Cooking is about earthy transformation, alchemy and practical application, but still requires vision and creativity. Poetry is imaginal and emotional, intangible in the ways it connects human beings, and nourishes the human organism in a different way, but no less valuable, than cooking."

"...science handles the ‘how' questions of nature, and religion handles the ‘why' questions of existence..."

"Until this past few weeks, I have never understood why the teaching of evolution so upsets people even as late as the year 2005. It can' t just be that the Bible tells us that God created the world in six days and that science flatly denies this: there are plenty of things taught in the Bible that are contradicted in the textbooks of the average public school kid. What is it about evolution that so particularly upsets these people?

I think what most upsets them, frankly, is the possibility that human life arose out of a random accident of genetic mutation and natural selection, and not out of a divine plan, where we are the fulfillment of God' s dream. Not only is this a scary thing for some people to contemplate, as they believe it leaves the whole human species floating alone in the cosmos, utterly alone in creation, but it' s ego-smashing -- and human beings are nothing if not creatures of great ego. Darwin' s work, and the work of all evolutionary biologists, asks us to consider that humans are not the apex of all creation and are, in fact, just a group of primates with really advanced consciousness who are truly sisters and brothers with all other living organisms. For some people, that' s a beautiful invitation. For others, it' s an insult, and perhaps worse than that, it' s just not miraculous enough.

It' s not miraculous enough that we should have this extraordinary mechanism called a brain, and an opposable thumb, and the ability to ponder our own existence and to yearn from our souls for someone and something to love, that we can' t live without Love even though it has nothing to do with our physical survival. It' s not miraculous enough that we should have survived lo these millions of years, moving our way up from blobby sea things to weird bird things to hairy primate things to upright human things who fly around the world, and even to other planets, in enormous machines contrived by our own unquenchable curiosity.

That' s not miraculous enough, and I don' t know why. I don' t know why, especially at this time of year, why it' s not miraculous enough for one of us – one of those very advanced primates—to come along and try to totally re-order society based on the values of justice, radical hospitality and love -- instead of the values of power-over and competition and suspicion that we still live by today -- and to risk his life doing so, and to heal and inspire people just by his presence.

That' s not miraculous enough, so we' ve got to have his mother be a virgin and we' ve got to have angels singing in the skies at his birth, and we' ve got to give him a halo and put him on a throne in heaven instead of here among us. It' s not miraculous enough that this advanced primate felt close enough to the great "I Am" to call it Father, to pray to it as a beloved parent, to trust that this immortal, invisible, eternal presence he knew as YHWH wanted us only to love one another, to share what we have, to put away our swords, and to live by an ethic of love and brother and sisterhood. That' s not miraculous enough?"

"'How do you know God didn' t ‘spake' to Charles Darwin?'
I don' t. And the whole thing is still pretty miraculous to me, either way."