The balance of science and religion, of the work of humanity versus the ineffable, can be hard to describe. This lovely song by Catherine Faber, set to images by Vu Trong Thu on YouTube, does a beautiful job of speaking to the complexity of the world we live in and seek to understand.

The word God in this piece may cause some readers pause — how do you hear this word in this context? Personally, I find it well in keeping with Rev. Michael Dowd’s treatment — god as the whole of creation, constantly growing and changing.

The Word of God

by Catherine Faber

From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline…
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.

By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things — how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.

And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.

Source: “The Word of God” by Catherine Faber, video from YouTube by Vu Trong Thu, and poem/lyrics from Echo’s Children. Hat tip, Ms. Kitty.

The past few readings have explored the Unitarian Universalist perspective of the human place in the natural world, particularly in the context of evolutionary science. But what of our understanding of the concept of God, in the light of scientific progress? Indeed, many among our number have dismissed the idea of a deity as irrelevant.

However, evolutionary evangelist Rev. Michael Dowd has a way of bringing the language of faith into a marriage with scientific language in his new book, Thank God for Evolution! He argues that we need not abandon the language of religion as we discover more about the Universe around us, but that the use of metaphor is a valuable insight into the human experience of the Universe. His view of God is much larger than the traditional personal deity described in many faiths relying on what he terms “flat earth” theology, or theology developed when humanity knew the earth was flat and orbited by the sun. Science and religion can exist in a greater harmony, in this view, and enhance each other as we search for meaning in our lives.

The entire book is available as a free download at thankgodforevolution.com, and is very thought-provoking reading.

Experiencing God versus Thinking about God

from Thank God For Evolution!, by Rev. Michael Dowd

“Thinking about God is no substitute for tasting God, and talking about God is no substitute for giving people ways of experiencing God.” — MATTHEW FOX

Our hominid ancestors experienced Reality as divine. For them, Nature was majestic, mysterious, awesome, benevolent, occasionally severe, all-powerful, nourishing, and more. Virtually every human attribute (the bad, as well as the good) was not only mirrored but also magnified in the mysterious forces of the natural world. Our ancestors experienced Reality this way long before words would label the experience—indeed, before there were verbalized beliefs of any kind. Most beliefs, rational and irrational, spring from the womb of symbolic language.

(Read on … )

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 … )

Last week, we read a passage from Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland’s 1902 book, The Spark in the Clod: A Study in Evolution, in which he approached the scientific theory of evolution from a religious standpoint. Today, an opposite approach, where religious ideals are found from a more scientific point of view, in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).

Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, but also a scientist, and his ideas were unsuccessfully quashed by the Roman Catholic Church. His primary work, The Human Phenomenon, was written in the 1930s but published after his death in 1955. While he was not himself officially a Unitarian or Universalist, it can be argued that his theology was very much in line with both forms of liberal religion, and informs liberal theology today. A rather comprehensive chapter on Teilhard from the book God and Science, by Charles P. Henderson, can be found here for further reading.

What I find fascinating in this excerpt, on the nature of matter, is Teilhard’s conclusion of the interdependence of all things, from our very atoms.

from The Human Phenomenon

by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

Moving an object back into the past is equivalent to reducing it to its simplest elements. Followed as far as possible in the direction of their origins, the last fibers of the human composite are going to merge in our sight with the very stuff of the universe.

The stuff of the universe–that ultimate residue of the more and more advanced analyses of science. To know how to describe it properly, I have never developed the kind of direct and familiar contact with it that makes all the difference between someone who has read about it and someone who has experimented with it. I also know how dangerous it is to take as material for durable construction hypotheses conceived of as only meant to last a day, even in the minds of those who originate them.

(Read on … )

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and is still causing furor today, particularly in the relationship between religion and science. As Unitarian Universalists, we strive for a foot in both worlds — allowing science to deepen our religious experiences and our religious experiences to deepen our understanding of science.

Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (February 11, 1842-August 13, 1936), wrote about this very struggle in his 1902 book, The Spark in the Clod: A Study in Evolution. This excerpt describes his take on the nature of truth, and how advances in science enhanced his understanding of God rather than diminishing it, in direct conflict with traditional religious thought at the time.

Rev. Sunderland, originally a Baptist minister, converted to Unitarianism and served churches in Massachusetts, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he also served as a Unitarian missionary for the American Unitarian Association. His full biography is here.

As with all historical material, you may want to mentally substitute gender-inclusive language.

from The Spark in the Clod: A Study in Evolution

by Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (February 11, 1842-August 13, 1936)

We have now before us, in brief, the two theories of the origin of the world, which present themselves to modern men asking for acceptance. Is there any question which one we must receive, if we are truth-loving, and care at all to have our beliefs based on realities?

And now we come to the important question of the relative religious influence and value of the two theories.

I know the fact that one is ancient and venerable, while the other is new, and especially the fact that one is contained in the Bible, while the other is not, may seem to give the greater religious claim to the theory of creation found in Genesis.

And yet is the claim necessarily valid? Has God no truth besides that which the Bible contains?Rather, if we are not atheists, must we say that all truth is of God, whether found on parchment or on stone; whether inscribed by pen held by human hand, or by wind and rain and ice and fire on mountain sides; whether written two thousand years ago in Palestine, or to-day on the face of the starry sky above our heads, or of the earth beneath our feet.

(Read on … )

This morning brings us a charge. The Rev. Dr. Marni Harmony of the First Unitarian Church of Orlando, Florida writes that we must see our connection to the world if we are to live in it fully. May none of us remain “chained to a rusty anchor.”

I Say It Touches Us

By Rev. Dr. Marni Harmony

I say that it touches us that our blood is
sea water and our tears are salt, that the seed of our bodies is scarcely
different
from the same cells in a seaweed,
and that the stuff of our bones is like the coral.
I say that the tide rolls in on us, whether we like it or no, and the sands of time keep running their intended course.
I say we have to go down into the wave’s trough to find ourselves, and then ride her swell until we can see beyond ourselves into our neighbor’s eye.
I say that we shall never leave the harbor if we do not hoist the sail.
I say that we have got to walk the waves as well as solid ground.
I say that anyone who goes without consciousness of this will remain chained to a rusty anchor.
May the journey find us worthy. Amen.

Source: “I Say it Touches Us,” Rev. Dr. Marni Harmony, minister at the First Unitarian Church of Orlando, Florida; Church of the Larger Fellowship Quest Newsletter, June 2006.

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 … )