First, a few words about our program cover. "First, fish emerged from the sea. Then, a few hundred million years later, they made it to car bumpers, as symbols of Christian faith. (About the same time, some Christians were slamming the theory of evolution pretty heavily.) Then, a few years ago, in a step as remarkable as that first one onto land, the car-bumper fish themselves began to evolve, growing legs and a resonant name." Chris Gilman of Evolution Design markets these bumper stickers and has witnessed proof that science and religion can co-exist. He's received some orders from a church - "Unitarian, of course."
One of the grand clichés of our age is "You don't have to be a rocket scientist..." The presumed intent here is to indicate that average intelligence, not the super-intelligence of a rocket scientist, is adequate for comprehension. Since when did the rocket scientist epitomize ultimate wisdom? No matter. You don't have to be a Unitarian Universalist minister to follow this, my annual attempt to escape spiritual claustrophobia by thinking of the big picture - our cosmic home - and how science and religion co-exist in it.
Last summer at the Chautauqua Institution I heard world religions scholar Huston Smith tell us about a letter he has since written to the National Association of Biology Teachers stating that their policy on the teaching of evolution was essentially anti-religious. Developed to oppose teaching Creationism in the public schools, it described evolution as "unsupervised" and "impersonal." Smith argued that those two words constituted a theological judgment about the non-existence of God that went beyond the boundaries of empirical science.
After a ten-minute discussion at their 1997 annual meeting, the Association's board of directors first refused to drop the words. Then, after discussing the issue among themselves, and just before the meeting's conclusion, the board reversed itself and dropped the offending words with this explanation: "We decided that we had construed a meaning we had not intended. (The statement) was interpreted to mean we were saying there is no God. Absolutely not. We did not mean to imply that. That's beyond the purview of science.... We had only intended to say there is no evidence the process of evolution is directed from some source." Huston Smith was delighted: "Isn't that heartening? It restores one's faith in human nature and what reason can do .... It's not easy to admit one was mistaken. I take my hat off to them."
You may have heard "The most famous anecdote for Darwin's impact upon British society which recounted the tale of a bishop's wife who said to her husband after learning about evolution: 'Oh my dear, let us hope that what Mr. Darwin says is not true. But, if it is true, let us hope that it will not become generally known.'" I confess my own theological predilections lead me to side with the original statement of the biology teachers. I worry about American education if creationism and evolution get equal time. As it has been succinctly put, "Scientific Creationism is a self-proclaimed oxymoron."
I do not believe in a "personal" god who "supervised" evolution. Instead I believe reality to be a vast cosmic enterprise so far beyond our capacity to comprehend that the words "personal" and "supervised" are simply too pathetic and irrelevant to describe it. I take a "unitarian" point of view and side with Heraklietos of Ephesos that "Not I, but the world says it: all is one."
I am in good company here. Newton Mann, minister of this congregation from 1870-1888, was the first American minister to proclaim and promote evolution from the pulpit. Unitarian Universalists have been radically open to what science can contribute to religion, sometimes so enamored that we have made science itself a religion. We sometimes say that we reach our religious convictions by scientific method - a spiritual process of trial and error.
But then what are we to make of a current controversy that asks whether or not we are at the end of science, a thesis brilliantly expounded by John Horgan, senior writer for Scientific American, in his always fascinating, at times bewildering and often amusing book The End of Science.
He tells the somewhat apocryphal story of the head of the U.S. Patent Office in the mid-1800's who quit his job and recommended that the office be shut down because "there would soon be nothing left to invent." The real story is that commissioner Henry Ellsworth said in testimony to Congress, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Horgan then takes the reader through a veritable "Who's Who" of 20th century scientists, playing with the question: has science reached a limit in which the major discoveries have already been made and scientists are just filling in the details? Is the big picture basically over?
One scientist argues there are big discoveries ahead. "It's like the jazz musician who was asked where jazz was going, and he said, 'If I knew we'd be there by now."
Another writes that his fellow physicists "think they're still doing science when they're really just cleaning up the mess after the party."
Stephen Hawking doesn't believe he's just cleaning up the mess, however. The famed theoretical physicist is noted not only for his book A Brief History of Time, but also for the fact that he has a powerful mind in a paralyzed body. He was the first major scientist to think physics might develop a unified theory of nature and thus bring about its own demise. He concluded that book with this sentence, "If we get a final theory it will be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God."
Yet Hawking believes that it is meaningless to talk about the beginning or end of the universe any more than talking about the beginning or end of a sphere. Despite his closing - almost theological - statement, Hawking has no place for a creator. A final theory would exclude God and mystery from universe. Incidentally, Hawking is separated from his wife Jane who is a devout Christian; she has become increasingly upset by his atheism.
Unitarian Universalist astronomer John Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole" in the 1960's, says "the universe must be as it is because if it were otherwise, we might not be here to observe it.... We're just children looking for answers.... As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance." At the heart of everything is a chilling paradox, not an answer but a question.
As Horgan puts it, "When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled faces looking back at us."
Richard Dawkins, who was recently named "humanist of the year," is a biologist and author of The Blind Watchmaker. An unapologetic atheist, he feels that "Christianity, like all religions, is an extremely successful chain letter." Dawkins writes, "Our existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries but ... it is a mystery no longer because it is solved... though we shall continue to add footnotes ... for a while yet."
Stephen Jay Gould is another biologist who believes evolution does not exhibit purpose or coherent direction. However, he thinks the quest for knowledge is open-ended and infinite. Nevertheless, he has challenged some aspects of Darwinian thought. Gould says evolution is not one long, gradual process; instead evolution goes in jerks, relatively rapid events. Furthermore, if we played the "tape of life" a million times, "this peculiar simian with the oversized brain might never come to be." An agnostic biologist tending toward atheism writes that "...the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going." In his autobiography, he writes about his fear that everything would be discovered before he grew up, "I confided my fears to my mother, who reassured me. 'Don't worry, Ducky,' she said. 'There will be plenty left for you to find out.'"
The debate within the scientific community rages with no resolution. At one scientific conference someone asked, "Can we simulate the whole universe, and if so, can we make one better than God did?" To which a colleague quipped, "And, can we move there?"
Have we reached the end of science? Is the great party over? Are scientists left with the rather unexciting task of cleaning up the mess left by the great minds - like Darwin and Einstein? Clearly, it matters greatly to scientists if they think they are on the clean-up committee rather than in the middle of the party.
But what of the rest of us? So what? Why do I, whose last science courses were taken 40 years ago and about which I remember little, read such a book? I do it because there are times I think I suffer from a kind of spiritual claustrophobia. Caught up in the day to day of getting and spending, I sometimes forget the cosmic context in which I live out the brief interval that is my life. This exploration of the philosophy of science helps me to break through the routine and marvel at what is mine to experience.
I am intrigued to read about scholars who unabashedly say that science is fun. As one says, "Science is too much fun to sit around wringing our hands because we're not certain about things." It would be sad if a final theory explains it all, because it will end the grand quest for fundamental knowledge. "I see (the scientific quest) as part of the growing up of our species, just like the child finding out there is no tooth fairy. It's better to find out there is no tooth fairy, even though a world with tooth fairies in it is somehow more delightful."
Sometimes it can be fun and other times profitable. Physicist Paul Davies believes there is an underlying plan in the great scheme of things. He won a million dollar prize for "advancing public understanding of God or spirituality." A colleague responded to the news, "I was thinking of cabling Davies and saying, 'Do you know of any organization that is willing to offer a million-dollar prize for work showing that there is no divine plan?'"
What strikes me about these scientists who explain their understanding of the truth is their resort to poetry, metaphor, religion. There is the "blind watchmaker." There is the image of God as a cosmic rock 'n roller, bringing the universe into being by flailing on a 10-dimensional guitar, either improvising or following a score. Or consider the science fiction comedy, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, in which scientists discovered that the answer to the riddle of the universe is ... 42. Or the scientist's exclamation when the quark, the smallest measurable unit of matter was isolated under the micro-telescope. What did he say, "My God, it's beautiful!"
It seems to me that the deeper scientists probe into the nature of ultimate reality the more mystical they become. And more poetic. And more religious. They begin to sense, as I sense, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, however we may label that whole. When Einstein of E equals MC squared fame was asked whether science was exhausted, he answered, "Possibly, but what's the use of describing a Beethoven symphony in terms of air-pressure waves?"
Do the big questions really have no answers? Can we ever know the ultimate truth? Have we reached the end of science? My answer is the theory of the infinite onion - from inside or out - we peel away layer after layer discovering ever new truths. Sometimes we laugh; sometimes we cry. But if we never find THE TRUTH, it is clear to me that pursuit of truth matters, and it matters very much.
The true mystery is not so much how reality is ordered, but that it is at all - that we are in the midst of this. Perhaps we'll never understand this mystery of the universe because we are the mystery. It is possible that at the center of things is not an answer, but a question.
And so I live contentedly in the mystery of the known and the unknown - like a child at the seashore with the great ocean of truth stretching out before me - knowing I can and will know only a fraction of it - but grateful beyond all expressing that I am allowed to play on the shore for yet a little while.
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