FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
September 9, 2001

FAITH AND SCIENCE:
IS GOD THE RULER YET?
John M. Buchanan

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all
true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can us longer pause
to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed

Albert Einstein

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
_ 126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

FAITH AND SCIENCE: IS GOD THE RULER YET?
SEPTEMBER 9, 2001

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

LUKE 14:15-24
“Such Knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.”
(Psalm 139:6)

O Lord, you have searched us
and known us.
You know when we sit dawn and
when we rise up;
you discern our thoughts from
far away.
You search out our path and our
lying down,
and are acquainted with all our
ways.

Even before a word is on our
lips,
O Lord, you know it
completely.
Such knowledge is too
wonderful for us;

itis so high that we cannot

attain if. Amen (Psalm 139)

T have always particularly loved a passage from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
It’s about sitting in a classroom listening to a science lecture.

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams
to add, divide and measure them;
Wher I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured
’ with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off
by myself.
In the mystical, moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” —

I love that poetry because for years I have been doing what the narrator does —
“walk out into the night air and from time to time look up in perfect silence at the
stars.” I do it at the ocean, every summer; after dark walk out to the beach, sit or lie
down, and look up. It’s a precious experience — not ordinarily available. The
Royal Academy of Astronomy just published a map detailing degrees of human-
made “light pollution” which shows that two-thirds of the people of the U.S.A. can
no longer see the Milky Way. There’s nothing quite like looking up into a night sky
for putting things into perspective. Most of us, in that situation — that encounter
with the magnificence and majesty of the natural world, experience awe, wonder,
reverence. It is, for many of us, the closest we come fo a religious experience.

Walt Whitman’s point was that the analytical methodologies of science can actually
work against the basic human experience of wonder. The charts and diagrams and
numbers of science actually do not adequately describe the reality of the stars.
There is, Whitman argues, another way of looking and seeing, knowing and
experiencing and understanding.

That kind of statement, that there is a way of knowing — other than scientific,
rational, empirical — used to get an argument from the closest scientist. And the
amazing thing is that nobody much disagrees with it any more. There has been |
what some are calling a seismic shift in the relationship of religion and science after
centuries of hostility and suspicion. There is a new openness on both sides, a
growing sense, given the amazing new advances in astronomy and cosmology and
sub-nuclear science, that, finally, scientists and theologians are up to the same thing,
and at the end of the day, asking the same questions — “Who are we? What’s the
purpose? Where do we come from? Where are we going?”

Robert Jastrow, distinguished astronomer, put it delightfully: “For the scientist
who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.
He has scaled the mountain of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak;
as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who
have been sitting there for centuries.” [God and the Astronomers]

Things started to go badly between religion and science in the 16 and 17"
centuries. A Polish astronomer by the name of Copernicus suggested that the sun,
not the earth, was at the center of the solar system. Copernicus knew that his ideas
would cause a lot of trouble and that the church particularly would find them
difficult, because the church, based on its reading of scripture, knew that the earth
was the center of all things. So Copernicus never said a word, and arranged for his
ideas to be published after he died. When they were published they electrified the
scientific community throughout Europe and they were condemned, not only by
Rome, but also by the Reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin.

In 1616 the Catholic Church banned all books that contained the heretical notion
that the earth moved at all. And in 1632, a brilliant Italian, Galileo Galilei, did just
- that. Galileo had been tinkering with his telescopes, refining, enlarging. You can
see them in a science museum in Florence. Some are huge — 10-12 ft. long. Galileo
knew what he was seeing and when he published his findings he was summoned to
Rome. In 1633 he got down on his knees and read a statement the Inquisition had
prepared for him recanting his errors and promising never to speak or write about
them again. But he must have had his fingers crossed. After his trial he was sent
back to Florence, to house arrest in his villa — near the convent where his daughter
Marie Celeste was a nun. He sent her food and herbs from his garden. She did his
laundry. His sentence included reading daily the seven Psalms of Penitence. And
the story is that his daughter read them to him as he sat by his window, with his
telescope, watching the planets revolve around the sun (“The Luminous Web”,
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Christian Century, June 2-9, 1999]

It was a kind of high point, or low peint, depending on your perspective, of religious
triumphalism and it drove a wedge of suspicion and hostility between science and
religion that stayed firmly in place for centuries. The church has had a hard time
saying it made a mistake, that it was wrong, that it’s information was wrong or at
least incomplete. It still does. Galileo was only recently exonerated. But it is not
confined to the Catholic Church. Protestant fundamentalist continue to fight for
Creation Science — an approach that starts with a theological point of view and then
looks for evidence to support it, and that just isn’t science.

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, drove the wedge deeper. The theory of
natural selection and evolution seemed to leave out the necessity or possibility of a
creator and religion attacked once again. In our country the 1925 Scopes Trial in
Dayton, Tennessee, seemed to pit a narrow fundamentalism against enlightened
science — and even though Scopes was found guilty, science clearly won the battle of .
public opinion. .

This year, however, there is a new book, Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith,
which argues that what we know about that whole incident has been shaped and
radically distorted by Broadway and Hollywood in the play and movie “Inherit the
Wind.” in that portrayal, science comes off as knight in shining armor and religion
as narrow, bigoted and ignorant. Smith argues that the movie exaggerated the
dispute between religion and science to mythic proportion.

The result, Smith argues, is Scientism, a world view based on the notion that reality
can only be defined scientifically. Our “sacral mode of learning” he cails it — a mode
that registers nothing that is without a rational component... that nothing exists that
cannot be analyzed and known empirically.... The best example of scientism Smith
says was Carl Sagan, opening his television series Cosmos by announcing, “The
Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” oe

What has happened fairly recently, however, is that science itself has been driven to
acknowledge mystery — and the scientists are beginning to sound like theologians.
The Templeton Foundation has published a handsome book of photographs taken
from the Hubble telescope with the title The Hand of God. The Introductory essay is
written by Newsweek Science editor Sharon Begley who observes, “The cosmos
seems fine-tuned for existence, in an almost too-good-to-be-true manner.” The
argument has been. around for a long time, but recent scientific discoveries have
punctuated the improbability of life.

For instance, British Astronomer Fred Hoyle, who just died last week, discovered
that carbon — the basic component of life, is created when three helium nuclei
whizzing around a star collide simultaneously, same time, same place. Hoyle said it
would be like three friends who lived at different parts of the earth, bumping into
one another at a random street corner in a small town in Kansas at precisely the
same moment. He called it a “monstrous series of accidents — as if the laws of
nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences
they produce.” Hoyle joked, “The universe looks like a put-up job.” [p. 18 The
Hand of Ged|

Alan Sandage, heir to Edwin Hubble, discovered that the universe was not static but
expanding outward at just the right speed to keep expanding forever and then he
began to be nagged by a distinctly theological question — “Why is there something
rather than nothing?” Sandage wrote: “It was my science that drove me to the
conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by
science.” Or, as the Psalmist observed:

Such knowledge is too
Wonderful for me;
it is so high that I
cannot attain it.

Sandage concluded: “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos.
There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the
explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something rather than
nothing.”

And Fred Hoyle popularized the improbability argument with his comment: “the
chance of natural selection’s producing even an enzyme is on the order ofa
tornado’s roaring through a junk yard.and coming up with.a Boeing 747.”

And so, we have come full circle in a sense. Isaac Newton never doubted that in
discovering the laws of motion and gravity “he was being granted a glimpse of the -
operating manual of the creation God had assembled.”

And a few centuries later Albert Einstein would say: “The important thing is not to
stop questioning.... One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the

mysteries of eternity ... science without religion is lame, religion without science is
blind.” [ibid]

Science, it seems, is newly open to mystery and to the insights of religion. And
religion, I believe, must repent of the triumphalism of the past which led it to oppose
scientific inquiry. My theological mentor, Joseph Sittler, used to teach that theology
begins with modesty, with the acknowledgement that God is not, finally, altogether
accessible to human reason, that God te be God, must remain a mystery te us and
that honest religion includes questions for which there are no easy answers.

The new openness between science and religion arrives just in time as we confront
the mysteries and enormous promise of stem cell research, for instance. [’ve tried,
as you have, to read as much as I can — and the more I read the more uncomfortable
I am with the moral absolutes on either side of the argument: those who see no
problem with the creation and destruction of embryos for harvesting stem cells and
with those who oppose use of any embryos for research and potential treatment.
But, the whole matter was brought inte perspective for me this week by a letter I
received from a dear friend, Norm Pott, recently retired Presbyterian minister,
fighting for his life in a San Francisco hospital, undergoing amazingly sophisticated
therapy and treatment involving harvesting his own stem cells and a time of
enormous discomfort and then, after describing the long, arduous journey, Norm
wrote cheerfully, “I get to go home to enjoy life while my happy healthy stem cells
do their miraculous thing ... with much love and gratitude,” Norm.

Appropriate gratitude, I reflected, for science; for the human mind, restless,
curious, unafraid of the unknown; gratitude for the disciplined commitment of the

scientists, gratitude for the health care professionals, for hospitals and doctors and
nurses.

And a deeper gratitude to the One who created and who continues to create; the
God whose love is written in the beauty of the earth, and the magnificence of the
night sky and the intricacies of the atom.

A century ago the distinguished zoologist Ernest Haeckel said that if he could have
only one question answered authoritatively it would be — “Is the universe
friendly?”

That’s it, is it not? That’s the question. On the day I wrote this sermon, I turned
the manuscript over to the office, got in my car and drove to the western suburbs to

attend to a mystery, a Memorial Service for a friend’s son.

A great mystery ... a terrible mystery. A college senior, bright, sweet, loved his
family, his church, an athlete, an officer in his fraternity, popular and two weeks
ago he committed suicide.

And so a community gathered in a church — his friends, his parents’ friends and
professional colleagues, his church — gathered to attend to a mystery.

How in God’s world — how in God’s name did this happen? Why in a beautiful
creation, fashioned by a just and merciful God, do things like this happen? Is the
universe friendly?

The Lutheran pastor in his sermon used no euphemisms, said the terrible word
“suicide,” said that the power of death is real, in this world. But “death is a liar,” he
said.

The truth, he said, is that in this life loved ones do slip through our fingers, but we
never slip out of God’s hands.

Is the universe friendly? That finally is the question for all of us — in good times
and not so good times, in health and in sickness, in success and failure, in birth and
in death — is the universe friendly?

Religion says, yes. There is behind the universe One who, through a mystery, is
fundamentally for us; one who created us and loves us and whose love for us is
eternal.

And now, science itself, more and more stands along side, in silent wonder and awe.

The publisher of the Templeton Foundation Book of gorgeous photographs from the
Hubble deep space telescope wrote — “when FE leok at the material I have a great
sense of relief, an almost surreal sense that it’s all going to be OK, we are not alone,
and there is a God.”

That same sense the poet described:
“I wander’d off by myself in the mystical, moist night air, and from time to

time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

And the Psalmist:

O Lord — such knowledge is too
wonderful for me;

it is so high that I cannot
attain it.

Or the old hymn we used to sing in Sunday school, every week, it seemed:

This is my Father’s world.
All nature sings and round me rings
The music of the sphere.

This is my Father’s world

Oh let me ne’er forget

That though the wrong seems oft so strong
God is the ruler yet.

Amen.