Religion Confronting Science
by Donivan Bessinger
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
What doth the Lord require of thee?
Logos. Word.
Word carries extraordinary spiritual meaning for us, for it signifies no less than God's direct revelation, both as word in scripture, and word made flesh. "In the beginning was the Word."
However, the revealed word of scripture says that creation was not revealed, but spoken. In the beginning, God said: "God said, Let there Be ... "
But that raises a very crucial question. Can God's revealed word be in conflict with God's word spoken in creation? That is, can religious truth be at odds with scientific truth? Such a question puts religious belief to a severe test, for if we truly believe that God is creator and that God is truth, we cannot also believe in interpretations of Scripture which conflict with our findings about God's work in creation. To do so would be to believe in a self-contradicting God.
For several centuries, our expanding knowledge base, our science, has been challenging us with a supposed conflict between science and religion, as if we had to choose one over the other. That polarization still reigns in many minds, but now knowledge is bringing us closer to a possible synthesis. As our century approaches its end and the beginning of a new millennium looms ahead, we have a better opportunity than ever before of harmonizing our interpretations of scientific and religious knowledge. It is an exciting challenge.
Perhaps part of the traditional conflict comes from confusion about what science and religion require of us. Science is not so much a Truth as a Method which points us toward an understanding of the workings of the material world. Science requires reason. Science requires a logical system of processing ideas about our observations of the material world. Ideas or theories which cannot be tested against observations (experiments) cannot be handled by the scientific method. Logically, however, there still can be truth, or "truths" beyond the reach of science. As we will develop later, science, in its discipline of quantum physics, is itself pointing us toward the existence of a reality beyond the reach of science.
But what does religion require of us? Those of us in the monotheistic faiths see all authority as deriving from an ultimate source called God. Does God require that we "do" religion by performing certain rituals? That we observe certain laws? That we believe certain doctrines? That we look at the world in some precisely defined way, and that we adhere to that view forever without variance?
The Hebrew prophet Micah, of the eighth century before our era, gave a very straightforward answer to this most contemporary question:
What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Mic 6:8 KJV)
When Jesus was asked essentially the same question in our first century, he gave much the same answer:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ... You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. (Mt 22:37-40 RSV)
In both of these summations, religion is a matter of relationship to God, and that in turn sets the tone for our relationship with and concern for fellow humankind. Neither of these summations from ancient times is based on particular experimental knowledge. Neither of these texts mentions adherence to certain particular beliefs, or defines essential doctrines, or describes a certain worldview. Religion seems to require an intuitive method of sensing the divine, rather than a cognitive method of reason in sensing, and making sense of, the material world.
In English, we use the same word to say we know a fact as to say we know a person. For many languages, these two entirely different concepts require different words: in Latin, scire or novisse; French, savoir or connaitre; German, wissen or kennen. The way we know by experiencing the facts of the outer world is very different from the way we know a person, or experience a divine presence in our inner world. Not only do religious and scientific knowledge proceed from different methods; they entail different concepts of knowing.
The explosion of knowledge which we have seen in own century has been of scientific knowledge rather than of religious knowledge. On the negative side, that knowledge has been used for technology to escalate our weapons systems and yield a climate of global terror, which thankfully now seems beginning to end. Still, at century's end, the hydrogen bombs which can be carried by missles across oceans make antiquated the small bombs flown to Hiroshima and Nagasaki at mid-century. It is easy to forget that at the century's beginning, cavalry still attacked from horseback, and some artillery was still pulled to the trenches behind mules.
Fortunately, our exploding scientific knowledge has also been used for more benign purposes. At mid-century, for all we knew by direct experiment, the moon might really have been made of storybook cheese. Now moon rocks have been studied in our laboratories and are displayed in our museums. The scientific and technologic revolution has given us pictures of earthrise seen from moon orbit, and even pictures of our small dot among the stars, viewed from the edges of our solar system. A new telescope has been orbited that was expected to see nearly to the edge of the universe, but we cannot be sure, for the universe is so large that the light of the farthest stars may not have had time to reach us.
We have also extended our worldview as dramatically at the other end of the scale. In 1990, electron microscopy and super-cooling permitted the individual manipulation of xenon atoms into position to spell "IBM".
Of course there is more to the concept of worldview than that which we can see. Our worldview is the whole "package" of ideas about who we are and what the world is, and how we relate to it. In order to emphasize that expanded concept, we will now write worldview as one word. Clearly, the worldview which we have today is not the worldview that we had at mid-century, or at the beginning of this century. Certainly it cannot be that of the disciples listening to Jesus twenty centuries ago, or of Micah preaching to Israel eight centuries before that.
The conflict between science and religion rests in part on a basic confusion of knowledge and of the methods of knowing, but it is fundamentally a clash of worldviews. In the history of mankind there have been many worldviews, and most of them, in many mixtures and variations, still live side by side today. For purposes of illustration, let us drastically simplify and classify them into four general categories. To illustrate them, we will visualize two deeply convoluted mountain ranges separated by a wide chasm.
In ancient times, the only choice was the mythic worldview. Myth offered an inspiring and encompassing view from the heights and even in our day, gloriously drives our arts and our life spirit. However, the ancient mythic stories were not consciously composed in the planned way that a history book or even a novel is written today.
Instead, as the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and others before them have shown us, most such stories emerged over time as symbolic expressions for feelings and psychological insights which arose largely from the unconscious. The stories were true in that their truth lay behind (or, should we say under?) the story line. Even when their symbols arose from historical events, the point was not to record the news of the day, but to present eternal (not-spacetime) truth in a way that could relate humans to "real world" (spacetime) events.
A key problem in both religion and science is that we ordinarily take the word myth to mean false. Fundamentalist religion registers myth as a threat to literal belief in scriptural reality. Fundamentalist science registers myth as a violation of the literal description of material reality. Throughout this discussion, myth will be used in its special technical sense to mean a sacred story that carries profound (and true) psychological significance for human living.
Exhibit 1. Myth as Truth. In conventional language, a myth is false
(-) and asking about its sacred meaning "does not compute." However,
in technical language, a myth is a story which conveys a sacred truth (+)
whether or not the story's events are historically true (+/-).
|
|
Sacred |
Historical |
|
Conventional |
?? |
- |
|
Technical |
+ |
+/- |
As we shall develop, our inner psychological world is real, even though it is a different reality from that of normal temporal, historical experience. The mythic worldview is based on a reality; however, a particular story may or may not be true in a historical sense.
Most of our modern religious systems are in fact grounded in historical experiences which took on special profound significance; they express their special truths in a symbolic way. Even so, we must conceed that the mythic worldview is severely limited in its ability to describe our increasingly complex observations of the outer material world.
A transitional type of worldview, coming into ascendency during Europe's middle ages, was the alchemical worldview. The alchemists sought to change common metals into precious ones, but in their elaborate and esoteric symbolism, they were also seeking psychological transformations. Figuratively speaking, they sought to cross the chasm between the mythic and the scientific views of life. As they walked unsteadily across a shaky bridge suspended between intuition and experiment, their crudely bent flasks and retorts became the test-tubes of primitive chemistry, and thus they helped start our scientific expedition on its way.
The scientific worldview is the one which has followed, and from its own land mass across the dividing chasm, it holds our global imaginations to this day. Its great method is traced from Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637), and it begins with doubt. For centuries, on the other side of the chasm, religion had always emphasised belief. By contrast, Descartes' method emphasized doubt. Science does not ever really set doubt aside, but only suppresses it temporarily as long as observation and experiment confirm an hypothesis.
Even then, theory must be trimmed with "Ockham's razor". William of Ockham (c.1286-1349) is credited with the idea that we must shave away all theory that is not needed to explain our experience, as observed in our experiments. That means that a scientific theory must be a coherent description of physical reality, reasoned from known facts.
Increasingly, science has carried us down the ever-branching paths of its massive mountain chain into the intriguingly lush valleys of detailed knowledge of our material world. However, at the same time, it has carried us farther away from the all-encompassing view from the ridge line, and away from the inspiration of the mythic world across the chasm.
What then is the fourth category of worldview? It would be the one that we could have were we to carry our knowledge back up those paths, to cross again the wide chasm separating our human spirit from our system of reason and experiment. Yet the old alchemical bridge was a flimsy one-way bridge of rope, now much decayed. Our modern problem is to create a new and durable two-way structure which can arch between the two aspects of our nature, and stand up to the considerable weight of modern experience.
Exhibit 2. Classification of
worldviews.
The alchemic experience
represented a historical transition from the ancient mythic worldview to the
present day scientific one. The modern challenge, individually and globally, is
to synthesize knowledge into a comprehensive worldview that gives full
expression to both spirituality and reason.
If we change our metaphor, to let the convoluted land masses of myth and
science symbolize the convoluted hemispheres of the intuitive "right
brain" and the rational "left", we can better see our challenge.
Then, perhaps for the first time, we may relate the symbolic and the literal,
the intuitive and the rational, the eternal and the temporal, the religious and
the scientific orientations to life.
From that perspective, we as individuals (and hopefully, global society), may relate not only our quarks, atoms, and molecules, but our spirits as well, to all that we see and experience as fully alive human creations. It is to such a saving reconciliation that these essays are dedicated.
[ Exhibit 1. Myth as truth ]
[ Exhibit 2. Classification of worldviews ]
[ Notes and References ] , [
Glossary ]
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