About the Creating Universe

October 17, 1965
Plainfield

Sermon Series: WHERE I NOW STAND
About the Creating Universe


Without cosmic dimensions, any faith is inadequate to fulfill the complete human personality. This I believe.

The earlier sections of this three-part sermon attempted to deal with the basic propositions that persons must deal with themselves and others in order to survive in any fashion that may be appropriately described as human. While I speak of the necessity to me of a cosmic dimension to religion, in all candor, many persons seem to do very well without any noticeable response. Wordsworth described this insensitivity:

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And nothing more."

The ancient Hebrew psalmist may have been overwhelmed with wonder, "When I consider they heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou has ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him?"....

But others seem unresponsive to Arcturus, Orion, the Pleiades, Moon and tide, the ever-bountiful Earth and the life-giving Sun.

However, there are those, arid I am one, who still feel the magnetic power of Wordsworth's immortal lines:

"The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and Spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
It moves us not - Great God! I'd rather be
a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, -
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreath'd horn."

Wordsworth, the Romantic, may seem archaic or naive to some of you, but he caught the essence of my present convictions about this mysterious, abundant Universe in which we live and of which we are a part. Religion is not only a way of feeling about oneself and a way of acting toward fellow human beings, but also religion is an attitude merging feeling and thought about the Universe. Man has always tried to solve the mysteries of creation and destiny; man has tried to accommodate himself to natural forces he understood only through a glass darkly. We still confront cosmic mystery. Whether one calls himself atheist, agnostic, a theist or humanist, if one relates to the cosmic order in some significant blend of thought and feeling, one is seeking a relationship that can be a thrilling and fulfilling religious experience.

The case I would set before you divides this way - (1) Man has tried always to understand, appease and control cosmic forces. (2) That although man has achieved fantastic scientific knowledge and mastered marvelous technologies, and although man has applied reason and become intellectually sophisticated, he still needs to wonder at the manifold ways and forces resident in the living Universe in which he lives and from which he has been created.

1. Early man - primitive man, we call him - lived dangerously. He was by no means master of wild beasts. The storm and sea could bring quick disaster; droughts and famine were not conditions to be corrected but rather supernatural forces beyond the control of man's bare hands and crude tools.

Primitive man believed the ferocity of the beasts and the catastrophic force of fire and storm, the wondrous gifts of light and fertility to have lives of their own - supernatural powers. Man tried to placate these powers through worship because man did not understand their nature. Religion was practical in that man offered sacrifice, prayer in word, gesture and ritual dance in order to obtain certain favors from these powers that inhabited inanimate things. Inasmuch as then and now men have a tendency to count the hits and not the misses, sometimes the sacrifice seemed to make a difference or the prayers seemed to be answered. Thus accidental or spontaneous efforts to please the gods tended to become habitual, ritualized.

It is not oversimplifying to assert that few ideas have changed form more frequently than man's idea of God or the gods.

In addition to worshiping the powers of light, fire, storm, fertility, man worshiped totem animals and eventually personified the gods in his (man's) ideal image.

Freud in his seminal work, "The Future of an Illusion," proposed that worship of gods or god was an escape mechanism wherein man, who had deep-seated and unconscious conflicts, created the image of the Father God in a strange blend of wish fulfillment and guilt.

The Marxist might say that the priests and ruling classes invented the gods as the best way to control the working classes - "religion was the opiate of the people."

Many of these theories are discredited or substantially qualified in the light of increasing knowledge. But new knowledge seldom wipes the chalkboard clean of outmoded beliefs. To be human is to possess not only the ability to transmit culture which has been tested and reasoned, but also to pass on out-moded beliefs and worship practices.

The humanistic philosopher, Morris Raphael Cohen, observed, "religious truth is absolute and its possession makes everything else unimportant. Hence, religion never preaches the duty of critical thought, of searching or investigating supposed facts.

"From this point of view, it is interesting to read the testimony of Bishop Colenso as to what led him to write his book on the Pentateuch. When he tried to teach Biblical history to the South African natives, he was amazed at obvious contradictions which these simple savages discovered in the various accounts of the Patriarchs. Yet millions of astute and learned Christians had not noticed these discrepancies." (Quoted in Kaufmann, RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS.)

In early September, (9/6/65) the "National Observer" printed a feature article (by Lee Dirks) discussing the ways in which some churches are facing the conflict, tension and uncertainties in our world. Two of his observations seem accurate to me because they illustrate that while there may be general belief that there has been an advance from primitive religious practices, the progress may be more apparent than real:

"The Church worships a god but too often it is the false god of the status quo – the Church as it is, the community as it is, the world as it is...

"Church members too often consider God the great psychiatrist, a helpful resource to call upon in times of need but a convenient absentee at other times. The residential church thus runs a spiritual ambulance service, treating suffering when it arises, but rarely trying to influence the 'power structure' that might have caused the suffering."

I am not going to belabor the fifty-seven varieties of rationalizations which pass for devout belief. Think for a moment of the book of Job, the most superb delineation of the problem of reconciling human suffering with the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God.

The introduction to the dramatic scenes uses the device of a challenging argument between the Lord and Satan. The Lord boasts about the man, Job, "blameless and upright who fears God, who turns away from evil."

Satan rejoins, "Does Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not put a hedge about him and his house and all that he has on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hand and his possessions have increased in the land." Then Satan goes on to argue that if the Lord removed the hedge of prosperity and well-being, Job will curse "thee, God, to thy face."

The enduring value of the drama of Job derives from the self-searching and the spiritual agony and final existential resolution achieved by Job when the hedge is gone.

Our task is that of Job's – how to reconcile religion with life when the hedge is gone. The hedge is gone, for unlike some ideas of Job's time, good-fortune does not inevitably follow good behavior. The prayers of the just are not always answered. Furthermore, we are aware, or should be, of the extent to which the gods are images made by the mind of man, rather than vice-versa.

Can we like Job, remain reverent while unconvinced by false, irrational or outmoded ideas of God?

2. I can only offer my own testimony that this Universe, the force that resides in it and the constant creativity that seems to be its dominant characteristic cannot be dismissed as trivial, merely because other persons may cherish naive or wrong-headed ideas about origin and destiny.

The human personality has evolved to a state where not only are we self-conscious and conscious of others, but also the human personality, by way of the process we call by the name of consciousness, labors valiantly to find meaning in the totality of experience. This totality of experience encompasses more than self-consciousness and more than consciousness of others and the social order. The totality of experience also includes sensitivity to the swing of the seasons, to the ordered journey of the galaxies and an awareness of the bounty of the good Earth on which we depend for all the elements which combine to create our human life.

In my view, it is unnecessary to possess a closely-argued case for the existence of a God with particular characteristics. At issue in the present stage of astronomical discussion seem to be two theories of the origin of the Universe.

One is the "steady state" theory (Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and others) which maintains that in the universe there are an infinite number of galaxies which have always existed. Theologically, this implies that the universe was never created, but has always existed.

The second theory is the "big bang" theory which asserts the universe was created when a primal atom exploded, its shattering parts creating the galaxies which began shooting outward at a pace of nearly the speed of light. According to this view, the stuff of the Universe is finite, rather than infinite, and theologically suggests an end as well as a beginning.

When dealing with religious consciousness, the point is not the correctness or truth of one of these theoretical cosmologies, but the reality, that as human beings we try to find meaning in the Universe. We seem to identify what we call "order" in the Universe. There are happenings regular enough in their repetitions that we call them natural laws. It seems to me irrelevant to argue that our human consciousness may be only harboring illusions of an orderly, lawful Universe. If it is an illusion, it is OUR illusion. As the eminent humanist, Sir Julian Huxley, wrote, "God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about." (ESSAYS OF A HUMANIST, p. 221.)

So with hypothesis of "natural laws of the Universe," theologically, I classify myself as a "naturalist," because I believe man to be a natural, organic part of a natural order, a natural order which is larger and far more comprehensive than man. "Cosmic Humanist" might be a better phrase encompassing my beliefs, except it sounds pretentious and more positive than my feelings warrant. I shy away more and more from excessive and extensive use of the word "god" because too frequently when people speak of God it is either an immature fixation or a practical atheism which (quoting Rowlingson, Christian Century, 8/25/65, p. 35) "denies God's existence by ignoring Him except in meaningless lip service." Ralph Waldo Emerson perceived the difficulty when he wrote in his JOURNAL, (p. 73), "It is plain from all the noise that there is Atheism somewhere, the only question is now, which is the Atheist?"

Abraham Maslow in his little book of large impact (RELIGIOUS VALUES AND PEAK EXPERIENCES, p. 28 and 59) believes that "the essential core - religious experience may be embedded either in a theistic, supernatural context or in a nontheistic context."

Every one of us will do well to cultivate a natural reverence toward all that lives and all that touches our human experience, Many among us who believe in "one god at the most" agree with the late Nobel winner in literature, Albert Camus, when he wrote, "The difference as to whether a God exists involves our feelings more than most scientific disputes and in this respect is more like a difference as to whether there is beauty in a thing." (Quoted by Kaufmann, RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS.)

But our feelings are as real as anything in our experience. While our evaluations of beauty may differ, beauty is one of the finer aspects of human experience. So it is with our experience of this marvelous universe. Knowledge has been acquired in fantastic quantities, but the magnificent mystery of creation deepens. The longer the radius, the greater the circumference and the longest radii of our knowledge draw but a small arc in the circumferential totality of the creating Universe.

There are recognitions which should generate both humility and reverence. The famous British astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell, refers to a "close" star as one as "near" to the Earth as 4000 light years - we could travel to it in 4000 years if we were able to cross space at the rate of 186,000 miles per second.

Dr. David Goddard, a biologist, said that a single human sperm, weighing one billionth of a gram, contains more information coded into its microscopic size than all the information contained in all the libraries of all men in all times. (See THE URBAN CONDITION, Ian MacHarg, p. 55).

The late Norbert Wiener, prophet of cybernation, wrote in his little book, GOD AND GOLEM (p. 72), "any computer with powers comparable to the brain would have to occupy a fair-sized office building, if not a skyscraper."

In his new novel, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS, Peter DeVries has a character say, "the universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe."

We live in a universe of constant creativity. Greater marvel still – we are conscious of this cosmic creativity and cosmic mystery. As I see it, the essential reality question is not the usual one of deciding which variety of god operates and controls it, but rather recognizing that the Universe is not a chaotic void but an orderly cosmos. Huxley seized upon the core meaning: “Though gods and God in any meaningful sense seemed destined to disappear, the stuff of divinity out of which they have grown and developed remains. This religious raw material consists of those aspects of nature and experience
which are usually described as divine.... The term divine did not originally imply the existence of gods; on the contrary, gods were constructed to interpret man's experience of this quality." (p. 222 ESSAYS OP A HUMANIST.)

We are living beings who live because we are of the stuff of living Universe. The key word of it all is "life." The elements of the galaxies and this vital impulse we call life combine in rare harmony in us, granting us consciousness and physical growth. We are living beings who should be everlastingly grateful for the gift of life, while remaining confident that this gift of life must ever be valued as precious. Prom that basic value we infer other values which flow from it in harmonious procession. If man values friends, loves persons, and man permits his self-centeredness to be overmatched by outgoing sympathy, permits his neurotic vanity to become submerged by wide understanding of the human condition, and throughout it all embracing the regularities and mysteries of the totality of life experience, then no matter how he may state his faith in theological or nontheological jargon, he is close to the heart of things; and the unfolding of all experience will be for him the good life.