12 February 2023
Faith and Science Sunday
1 Corinthians 13:9-12
The visiting scholar asked us to engage a question at the intersection of faith and science. Essentially, it came down to this: what changes, if any, would be required of our theologies if life was discovered elsewhere in the universe, if there were extraterrestrials?
Now let me just start by saying that I am agnostic when it comes to extraterrestrial life. I have read explanations saying it is mathematically inevitable and others saying it is mathematically improbable, but most days I’m just focused on more mundane matters, like getting that last bit of toothpaste out of the tube… I never got to galaxy-level math in school.
But yes, life elsewhere in the universe would certainly challenge the claims of traditional Judeo-Christian theologies, that center this planet, this species, one single tribe of our species, and one household in that tribe.
It was a breakfast gathering for interfaith clergy at Kol Ami, and the conversation was lively and informed, until… Well, you know humans! We suddenly found ourselves being scolded by a store-front preacher for misusing the term “fundamentalist.” The term, according to him, referred to a desire to read and interpret scripture in the original or fundamental languages.
Those who know me well may be surprised and maybe even a little disappointed that I managed to keep my mouth shut, leaving this unchallenged, but everyone else at the table already knew it was untrue, and the one who said it, who was reprimanding the professional clergy at the table, wasn’t capable of hearing the truth.
The reality, the real reality, is that Fundamentalism took its name from a series of tracts published between 1910 and 1915, reprinted endlessly, and funded by the California oil baron Lyman Stewart and his brother Milton. They were the early 20th century version of David Green and family, the treasonous owners of Hobby Lobby and funders of the Jesus Gets Us ad campaign, for like Hobby Lobby, Lyman Stewart used religion as a cover for an agenda that ultimately served to protect his wealth and power.
The Fundamentalist tracts were written by conservative Protestant clergy. As far as I can tell, of the sixty-four authors, sixty-four were white, and sixty-three were male.
The project denounced anything that might offer an alternative way of seeing the world, that de-centered white males or privilege and power, things like the Social Gospel of our progressive Christian tradition, scripture scholarship and historic context in the interpretation of the Bible, organized labor, which Stewart considered socialism, and of course, science, especially Darwin’s articulation of natural selection and evolution.
From the start, Fundamentalism was at war with science, scholarship, truth, and justice. Things haven’t really changed.
But opposing knowledge wasn’t enough. Several of the pamphlets targeted non-Protestant forms of Christianity, including Great Awakening innovations like Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as the Roman church, so there’s religious intolerance too.
In all, over a quarter million sets of the dozens of pamphlets were sent out to ministers and missionaries and Sunday School superintendents and YMCAs, all funded by Stewart’s oil profits.
The fact that you know the term “fundamentalist” is testimony to the ability of wealth and power to distort religion and culture, to obstruct the spread of knowledge.
It was just a few years later that John Thomas Scopes was tried for violating a Tennessee law that barred the teaching of evolution, a law not unlike those in Florida these days, the state of hate, where teaching a wide range of subjects related to minority communities and history is banned.
But Lyman Stewart and his continuing legacy of ignorance and greed was not the first conflict between science and institutional religion. Just ask Galileo, who spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest, sentenced by the Inquisition for the audacity of declaring that the sun was, in fact, the center of our solar system. They did finally come around, admitting they were wrong, about the sun, about Galileo. He’d been dead for 350 years, but hey, better late than never!
For that matter, ask any number of public health officials in America about faith and science, those brave women and men who suggested that while we were waiting for Covid-19 vaccines to be developed, it might be best to stay at home, and to wear a mask when in public. Many public servants left their jobs because of harassment and death threats targeting them and their families, domestic terrorism fueled by misinformation and manipulation by billionaires like Wisconsin’s Richard Uihlein and former President Donald Trump, misinformation often spread by Fundamentalist Christians.
And it would be easy to stop there, blaming the powerful for promoting ignorance as a way to preserve their own power, which they do, but ignorance can emerge like a novel virus without warning pretty much anywhere, and almost always finds a willing host in the human species, a species we should note that falls for the latest Tik-Tok challenge, like toppling from mountains of milk crates and munching on laundry pods, that bought pet rocks and burned witches long before the dawn of social media.
It is amazing our species has survived this long. When those aliens do finally arrive, forcing on us an unwanted humility, they may well just pack it in and fly home.
The problem, of course, is that we are excessively bright primates, and somewhere we reached a tipping point where we didn’t just want to know how to escape the predator at the entrance of our cave, we also wanted to know why the predator was there and what we might do to prevent it from coming back. And that “why,” explanatory and anticipatory, thought changed our relationship with the world around us. We don’t simply act on biological impulse. We are creatures who seek meaning, constructing it based on our experiences and transmitted knowledge, and then, God help us, we make plans. We respond as much to what is going on in our head as we do to what is going on around us.
And when we simply don’t have the data we need to understand something, when the system is beyond the scale of our understanding, too great or too small or too distant, it has been our practice to just make stuff up, because pretending to know is more comfortable for most people most of the time than not knowing. Then we cling to those made-up meanings, even in the face of contradictory evidence, confusing what we think with what is real.
It is as if reality is bound by the borders of our brains. We don’t need AI to imprison us in the Matrix. We are self-shackling creatures.
In our opening reading, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman speaks of seeing the flower, the wonder of deep seeing, seeing beyond the surface, of understanding the systems at work, and remaining open to the mystery that is still there, even with all of our knowing. These were not the words of a poet. His prize was in physics, not literature.
Things are mysterious. Classic physics, the physics of Newton, is true. Quantum physics, the physics of Heisenberg and Schrödinger, is true. And so far, no human has been able to reconcile the two systems, not even with the discovery of the Higgs Boson, also called the God-particle. And that’s okay. Have we learned nothing from relativity, incompleteness, and uncertainty?
We are provisional creatures, a beautiful blip of miracle and mystery in a time-space continuum that is beyond our understanding. Of course everything we think we know is provisional! Most good scientists begin any answer with something like “Given the data that is currently available,…”
And this isn’t just about the empirical realm. The same goes with our theology, with the big “why” at the heart of all, the something instead of nothing, for every single statement we make about God is a dart thrown into the ocean, swallowed and disappearing into the deep, deadly seas in the midst of the storm and gentle waves on a quiet beach, a rocky shore with a cacophony of gulls and the blobby luminescence of strange creatures in the inhospitable deep. We are wrong before the last syllable is spoken, the last punctuation in place, and that okay.
We come closest to the truth when we say “God is” and stop right there, and then only if we don’t try to define God as more than a placeholder for what is beyond knowing. After all, God is not bound by our knowing, chained by our theologies, existent only within our brain borders.
Faith and science are only in conflict if we deceive ourselves, if we believe reality is as tiny as our understanding of reality.
The religion we need does not make ultimate claims, but embraces the unknown, revels in its ephemeral nature. It must be so packed with exuberance, must embrace the world so wildly, must love and connect so selflessly, that we have no time to construct false certainty.
Any good theology, any attempt to understand and name holy mystery, is like the reel-to-reel tapes containing Jim’s missions in the original 1966 Mission Impossible series, wired for self-destruction in five, four, three, two, one… amen.