Advancing Science – Retreating Reverence?

September 18, 1960
Akron

Is there a conflict between the modern mind and the ancient emotion of worship? In our Akron area, persons are exhorted to participate in tabernacle religion because it is “old-fashioned Holy Ghost” religion. Thousands attend and support these movements enthusiastically. I am not concerned today about what is happening in the tabernacle – whether it is authentic worship, or a social phenomenon of a nostalgic group. But most persons who have been stirred by the honesty and sensibility of liberal religion have also now and again wondered wistfully if common-sense and plain ritual have not missed the “many-splendored thing” of real piety.

Most Universalists believe that the method of science is an enlightening guide in the discovery of truth. Science is not a storehouse of revealed truth, final and complete. Science is a method, an attitude toward probabilities, a tool by which we learn. Science is a living discipline which seeks out the problem, gathers information germane to it, tests relationships and assumes an hypothesis or theory.

When you drive over the High*Level bridge, you are no over-anxious, ordinarily, that the bridge will collapse or suddenly melt. You trust the engineers who have accumulated reliable structural knowledge and experience. You have faith that the steel-maker, surveyor, and bridge worker have developed sufficient skill and intelligence so that the bridge will resist the stresses and strains and we motorists daily can cross safely high over the Cuyahoga Valley.

The combination of open-mindedness, persistence, accuracy, initiative and fidelity to demonstrated truth have elevated the scientist to the role of the great discoverer in modern times. The abundant results of scientific inquiry and experiment are evident at every turn.

The nature of our non-dogmatic, forward-looking faith is such that we readily embrace both the scientific method and the consequences of its results. This does not mean, however, that we believe the test tube, transistor and mathematical equation should replace the hall of worship or be sufficient reason to dampen man’s personal witness to religion.

We need to be cautioned, however, that this readiness to permit the weighing of scientific theories on the scales of evidence and successful experiment can weaken our ability to respond to life with the deep emotion of worship. Worship has lost power when we can no longer be clutched by its truth and seek to be consoled only with its antique beauties of sound, color and movement. This can be illustrated if we will consider how the rise of modern science disturbed the harmony of faith; if we will review two attitudes toward this storm which tore apart the veils of old, awesome mysteries.

A partial muster of some of the monumental scientific discoveries will help emphasize the dilemma of traditional religion.

When Copernicus asserted that the earth was not the fixed, immovable center of the universe, but rather a moving planet, satellite to a star, he did more than make a gigantic stride in astronomical theory. He pulled the rug out from under the authority of religious astronomy. If the skies above were not the heavenly kingdoms, then where is God, his court of judgment and the streets of gold? The development of telescopes of enormous range and fine precision have failed to achieve a focus on the heavenly throne. The deeper we probe into space, the more difficult becomes the puzzle. As galaxies without end disappear beyond the horizon of light-speed, as we contemplate the elusive hints that time and space may not be fixed certainties, where then is Our Father’s House in which there are many mansions? Our earlier assurance that the Creator was a loving, male parent, primarily concerned with human life as it exists on the fixed center, planet Earth, is shaken by the triviality of our infinitesimal, orbiting dot on the edge of a minor galaxy.

When Lyell and Hutton and their successors read the record in the rocks which testified to the millions of years of geologic disturbance and re-shuffling of the crust and climate of the earth; when Darwin stated the enormous evidence for the development and selective survival of all species, with man emerging from a long passageway of development, what then shall we do with the story of Genesis? The testimony of that biblical story of beginnings is that man and other living things were each specially and individually created. To say that Genesis is an authentic, symbolic account of evolution is to overlook the central contradictions.

The older anthropomorphic worship depended upon two proofs for the existence of God and His plan for man – Nature and Scripture. The scientific probabilities of astronomy, geology, biology and archeology have affirmed a more convincing account of the growth of life and the structure of the Universe than the lonely, but no longer convincing myths of historic religion. When the scholarly disciplines disclosed that holy scripture itself was a developing, growing production of men subject to the follies and limited by the knowledge of men of their own age, then the idea of the revealed, supernatural authority of scripture was no longer persuasive.

As Andrew White described in his classical study, THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY, organized religion resisted scientific discovery every step of the way. In spite of the violence of the attacks, in the every-day life of the world, scientific discovery has been the consistent victor over theological opposition. When writing his classical PSYCHOLOGY, William James noted, “I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.” In the modern world, science is universal. It has won its way with the bite of tested theory and stubborn facts.

What shall we do then with the ancient objects of worship? In the Phillips translation, Paul writes to the Romans (10/14): “The lesson we must learn, my brothers, is at all costs to avoid worshiping a false god. I am speaking to you as intelligent men: think over what I am saying.” The modern philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, sensitive to our modern dilemma of intellectual honesty versus theological conformity, wrote (SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD), “To acquiesce in discrepancy is destructive of candor and of moral cleanliness. It belongs to the self-respect of the intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final involvement. If you check that impulse you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness.”

One disenchanting alternative is to resign ourselves that we must be content with the intellectual discoveries and practical accomplishments of science. We can condition ourselves to no longer wanting that deep thrill of awe, that sense of shattering holiness which marks the visit of worship to our hearts. But this is a barren prospect, for the spirit of man seeks more than that.

Or, we can, as most people do anyway, live two lives. One is the every-day life, living by and profiting from the schedules and verities of modern scientific thought and technology. On Sundays they worship the God of Moses, Jesus, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther or John Calvin. That these religious giants hammered their deep sense of worship out of their personal experience in confronting their world is not permitted to discipline modern acceptance of their by-gone formulations. The old dogmas are mellow, the old hymns comforting, the mythological world-view offering no arduous labors of mind. Perhaps most people will go on this way – old religion, Sunday, new science Monday through Saturday. But sooner or later such a dream world will return to the chants with a hollow echo and there will be no real sustenance not only for the mind, but also the heart. For the heart cannot forever remain aloof from the stirrings caused by the modern challenges to the mind.

There is choice other than the retreat of reverence in a scientific age. There is also another option to setting aside modern thought in the experience of worship. In his philosophy of civilization, Albert Schweitzer comments, “The beginning of all spiritual life of any real value is courageous faith in truth and open confession of the same. The most profound religious experience, too, is not alien to thought, but must be capable of derivation from this if it is to be given a true and deep basis. Mere reflection about the meaning of life already has value in itself.”

I submit to you that the more one reflects on the “history of the warfare between science and theology,” the stronger the conviction grows that the defeats theology has encountered have been victories for religion. This assertion is not as paradoxical as may first appear. Alfred North Whitehead said somewhere the defeats of dogma have been the discoveries of religion.

When we consider how the old Ptolemaic astronomy proposing a static, central Earth was replaced by the Copernican system of a dynamic universe containing worlds without measure, representing a Creation beyond the limits of human imagination, we should be excited with the thrill of widening knowledge and the wonder of unbounded mystery. All the refinements of physics have pointed ever more strongly to the basic oneness of the building blocks of the universe as they ever re-form and renew in the wondrous Cosmic dance. We are touching an awareness of the unity of Creation which ancient sooth-sayers would never have dared to guess or assert.

Wonder heightens as awareness intensifies that there is one Creative Force and Power, ever-creating and modifying the Universe, our home. We have not begun to create the symbol and liturgy which will express this new feeling. Dante sensed something of the inexpressible majesty of creation in these lines from the DIVINE COMEDY, (Canto Xxiv)

“... the pen passeth on,
And leaves a blank: for that our mortal speech
Nor e’en the inward shaping of the brain,
Hath colors fine enough to trace such folds.”

A few weeks ago, climbing a rocky gorge at Bash Bish Falls in New York, an experience brought home to me another certainty of our existence. In order to assist in the steep climb, I would reach up to grasp a branch or twig for leverage or hand-hold. If I attempted to rise by clutching a dead branch, it would give way and I would slip backward. But a living branch, many times the frailest twig, if alive, would hold fast and provide the anchor for a necessary rise.

A faith born of the living Universe will provide us with the lift and glory of worship when we grasp the living realities of religion, not its ancient limbs made brittle because life has passed to new growth.

It is equally vital to comprehend that religion is neither the authority for technical theory nor dependent upon any scientific hypothesis for justification. In one of mankind’s greatest letters, Paul writes to the people at Corinth, “and though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

Religion is the sustaining framework for our total experience of ourselves, our fellows and our universe. Religion is a response to the undivided experience of life. If one assembled the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, then lifted the completed picture by one corner, the puzzle would collapse. The function of religion is to surround and support the different size piece of our manifold experience.

Theologically a sacrament has been held to be the way one can link himself directly to God – received God’s grace. Through baptism, communion, unction and the other sacraments, God may be experienced – or so many believe. Few of us here could accept this as literal truth. But in a more comprehensive sense, reverence need not retreat under the aggression of scientific fact. For in a poetic measure at least, the sense of wonder is the sustaining sacrament of sensible religion. Consider the lilies of the field, the stars in their courses, the culture in the microscope and the red shift of light on the plates of the astronomical camera. Wonder-full are our sensations; reverence will increase mightily if we but feel the marvels of an orderly, law-abiding Creation registering on the probing tentacles of our human experience.

Reverence is not a prisoner of the formulations of any one time or faith. It is an experience of the grandeur of life and a confident surmise that man can find integration of his life, assigning a total appraisal of value to the universe.

There is nothing suggestive in the old legend of Elijah’s religious experience following his escape from King Ahab. Elijah refused to cut his religious standards to accommodate the cult of Baal which was so favored by Jezebel. The act of running away always increases the load of despair. Elijah wished for death, but in his dream under the Juniper tree, an angel ministered to him and he awakened with renewed courage, moved on until he found safety in a cave. Once more he experienced depression, but he felt he was called upon to stand upon the mountain. There the wind roared, the avalanche tossed great stones and the earth was trembled in earthquake, but the Lord was not in these fearsome experiences.

When the storms passed, Elijah heard the still, small voice, “What doest thou here, Elijah?”

In this universe, the growth of reverence is a consequence of the old but ever-new question of the still, small voice. What doest thou here? Amid the winds that roar and the fires that burn we must each find meaning for ourselves. What doest thou here? For authentic religious reverence is an experience which comprehends life in all its fullness. The ancients found their faith in their total appraisal of victory but also defeat, knowledge but also mystery, joy but also sorrow, guided by love and hope. So, also, must we.