Conversations with Scientists
In the spring of 2007, Krista presented her spiritual journey before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in Minnesota, which was also recorded for a radio audience via Minnesota Public Radio. The stories that she told made it clear that she now understands that religion is not dogma or a list of doctrines, and that we must continue to seek new understandings and new revelations. We must temper the beliefs of our ancestors with an appreciation of the context that led to those beliefs. She told her audience of a conclusion to her journey. "In our time, many essential human questions and institutions seem to be up for grabs: definitions of the beginning and the end of life, of marriage, of community, of government. And we've let our most important discussions on these questions be framed by strident answers, by poles of competing certainties. But I believe that most of us between those poles - left, right and center - know that at the very least, we have lots of questions in common with different others. ... One false dichotomy we've set up along the way is that the insights of science and religion must inevitably clash, that they are irreconcilably at odds. I love my conversations on Speaking of Faith with scientists, and those are also some of our listeners' favorite conversations. We've even gone back to the legacy of Darwin and Einstein and found riches there."
The Religion of Scientists
During her years as a broadcast journalist, Krista developed an important insight. "Now I know that even as episodes of religious hostility to science make headlines in this country, there is a lively interface between religious thinkers and scientists across many traditions, globally, and in many fields - astronomy, computer science, biology, physics, genetics. Beyond our culture's entrenched debates, a parallel universe of dialogue is unfolding. Things in this universe confound and transcend the narrow imagination of our culture wars. There are points of disagreement, to be sure, and contrasting perspectives and areas where the conversation stops. But blinders off, defenses down, I see that scientists - especially those who work with mathematics - possess a reverence for beauty as strong as their reverence for reason. If an equation is not elegant and beautiful, they will tell you as a solemn point of fact, it is likely not true. Science's theoreticians are as likely to employ analogy and metaphor as poets or mystics. They routinely proceed to new heights of knowledge by way of faith in things unseen."
"Images and ideas from the world of science repeatedly give me new, creative ways to think about the 'rationality' of religious modes of thought. The wildly imaginative discipline of physics alone is rife with pointers. Contemporary physics revolves around objects, premises - quarks, for example, and strings - that no one has ever seen or expects to "see"; but worlds of passion and discovery and progress thrive on them because the idea of them gives intelligibility to the whole of what can be measured and experienced and observed. Or consider this: a scientific puzzle that Einstein chewed on, the question of whether light is a particle or a wave, was resolved with the unexpected, seemingly illogical conclusion that it is both. And here's the key that made that discovery possible: how we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at. Light appears as a wave if you ask it 'a wavelike question,' and it appears as a particle if you ask it 'a particle-like question.' This is a wonderful template for understanding how contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true."
"It's not so much true that science and religion reach different answers on the same questions, which is how our cultural debate has defined the rift between them. Far more often, they simply ask different kinds of questions altogether, and the responses they generate together illuminate human life more completely than either could do alone."