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 … )