We’ve seen two historical contrasting approaches to a religious viewpoint of the natural world, particularly the theory of evolution, from Rev. Jabez Sunderland and French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and now we come to the present.

The 2005 report from the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal, Engaging our Theological Diversity (very long PDF), also tackled this question. They took statements from current members of Unitarian Universalist congregations, conducted surveys, and looked at Unitarian Universalist publications, and came up with this summary of a typical Unitarian Universalist understanding of the universe.

How Do We Understand the Universe?

from Engaging Our Theological Diversity, the report of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal

One of the primary functions of religion is to provide people with a framework for understanding the physical world and their place in it. The Principle that most clearly expresses contemporary Unitarian Universalist cosmology is belief in the interdependent web of all existence. This guiding Principle fuels much of modern-day UU social justice and advocacy work related to environmentalism, animals’ rights, economic injustice, and homelessness, among other worthy and related causes.

The current UU understanding of an interdependent and interconnected cosmos has evolved from a theology that we can trace back through our Christian roots to the Old Testament book of Genesis. Genesis is the cornerstone for some of the basic cosmology evident in all three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam): specifically, Genesis 1:24-31 and 9:1-17. The most common interpretations of Genesis hold that human beings are the pinnacle of all creation. We are God’s favored creatures, with everything in creation—all the resources and all the animals—existing for our explicit benefit. Competing liberal interpretations hold that human beings are the custodians of creation, and that our role as custodians invokes great responsibility as well as privilege. Regardless of the interpretation to which one subscribes, both interpretations create a human-centered cosmology—humans are the centerpiece of creation.

(Read on … )

The Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich is the senior minister at the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City, and preached this sermon on June 3, 2007.

What I love about Rev. Guengerich’s approach to this topic of faith and reason and how they might come together is that he’s more interested in how our reason and faith cause us to live our lives in the world as we stand on the seeming divide between reason and religion, rather than advocating for one side or the other. See what you think.

The Dangerous Edge of Things

By Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich

Several nights ago, over dinner with friends who are not part of the All Souls community, my wife Holly and I found ourselves engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about religion. This seems to happen rather frequently when I’m around, though almost never at my instigation. With our friends—he’s a sardonic Jew, and she’s a wistful Congregationalist, both quite lapsed—we decried the appalling state of religion in the world. We wondered how people came to believe things that science tells us can’t happen, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection. We mused about whether Christianity could be reformed thoroughly enough to become gender-neutral and still survive.

Then the wistfulness set in, as the Congregationalist longingly recalled the power of the hymns and Bible stories of her small-town Christian upbringing. Maybe Thomas Jefferson was right, Holly remarked, when he took the New Testament gospels and a scissors, and literally cut out the miracles and supernatural elements, keeping the rest. The sardonic Jew objected. Every religion has irrational elements, he said; that’s what makes it a religion.

Not necessarily, I countered. Mystery and magic aren’t the same thing. I don’t believe in events that contravene the laws of nature, but some important elements of human life can’t be put into a test tube or under a microscope. He persisted: if you can’t prove something, it’s irrational. Mathematicians can’t prove the principle of addition, I responded, but that doesn’t make belief in addition irrational. And so it went.

An hour later, we paid the check and said good night. It had been a wonderful evening: engaging, provocative, even profound. It reminded me of the conversations people must have had to entertain themselves before radios, televisions, and the internet presented themselves as substitutes.

But the evening was more than entertainment. Without intending to do so, we had stumbled upon what I believe is one of the most important issues facing our world today: the difference between science and religion, between reason and revelation, between knowledge and faith. The usual way of parsing this relationship is to say that knowledge is based upon human reason, and that faith is based upon a supernatural revelation. For those who accept this dichotomy, the problem comes when reason and revelation clash, requiring that one or the other be given precedence. We live in a world roiled by this dilemma. Within this setting, my goal is to clarify what we mean when we describe ourselves as people of faith.

(Read on … )

Today is the birthday of Bobby Henderson, founder of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The what, you may ask?

In response to the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision in 2005 to require the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the state’s schools as an equal alternative to the science of evolution, Mr. Henderson wrote a very entertaining, and apropos, letter, insisting that the schools must also teach his version of the creation story, glorifying the Spaghedeity, since it seemed to him to be just as probable as the theory of “Intelligent Design.”

The Wikipedia writeup of the ensuing phenomenon is quite hilarious.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, Unitarian Universalism, today we explore the relationship between science and religion. Rev. Preston Moore, co-minister of the Williamsburg Unitarian Universalist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, gave this sermon this past Earth Day (PDF), in which he posits science in our Unitarian Universalist churches as a spiritual value, and Unitarian Universalism as uniquely poised to mediate the balance between the “holy work” of scientists and theologians alike:

Working at the Water’s Edge: Toward a Reunion of Science and Religion

worship service led by Reverend Preston Moore, Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists, April 22, 2007

A little over a hundred Aprils ago, a twenty-six year old clerk working in the Swiss Patent Office dashed off a whimsical, newsy letter to a friend. “Conrad!” the letter writer began, “What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul?” After asking about the condition of Conrad’s soul, the letter writer brought his friend up to date on his somewhat eccentric hobby: theoretical science. Squeezed in alongside being a husband, a father, and a government worker, it seems he had found time to write a few science papers.

This chatty correspondence is still around for us to peruse because the writer was a guy named Albert Einstein. In one of those spare time science papers from 1905, he worked out the special theory of relativity, the foundation for work that transformed physics forever. I bring Einstein to church with me this morning because religion and science are acting like antagonists these days; and yet Einstein, who became the living symbol of science, was passionate about their interdependence.

He described the deep religious feelings of scientists this way — “a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection . . . It is beyond question closely akin,” he said, “to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages . . . [T]he cosmic religious experience,” he declared, “is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

(Read on … )