Thank God for Science and Religion!

Homemade sign in a neighbor's yard.

Sunday night I had a dream about anticipating a college science exam the next morning and being unprepared—unstudied of class notes and unread of class texts. It’s the standard post-school nightmare that I haven’t had for decades.

I guessed the cause was my plan to write this post Monday about Jeremy Narby’s book, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, which I’ve referenced in two recent posts. There was a quote I needed to find which required my rereading all my underlined and checked segments—as it turned out, a delight for my morning prayers that day.

Those who know me as an activist, author, and minister may be surprised that in high school I was a member of Phy-Chem-Bios, my high school science club. What may surprise others, given the present (and I’d say ludicrous) divides between science and religion is that our faculty advisor was both science teacher and an evangelical Christian, one so dedicated that he had qualms about his future family inheritance of a nationally-known beer company, given his abstinence.

(One of my biggest “aha’s” reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God was how scientists of times past were often people of faith, especially in Islam.)

The awesome insight I wanted to share with you was “that the human brain has many times more connections than stars in our galaxy” [p126]. That’s an “aha” from the inside out, or rather, way, way beyond!

The human brain…contains about one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. Each neuron can form thousands of links with other neurons [p126].

Furthermore, the brain is not limited to the skull. My gut alone contains about one hundred million neurons capable of learning, remembering, and responding to emotions, just like the larger brain in my head [p129]. … Having a gut feeling is not just a metaphor [p130].

Admittedly, this may be dated science, given the 2005 publication date, but it still gives me appropriate pause to wonder at the universe. I’ve remarked before about feeling the weight of billions of years of Big Bang stardust coalescing into stars and planets and systems that can give rise to life and its subsequent evolutions, including you and me.

I think of all the neurons I have wasted!

The word “religion” has a verbal ancestor meaning “to bind” together, and there are many ways to be bound—by conviction, community, commitment, commonality. For believers, Creation is added to the list.

Narby is not a creationist but rather appears to believe that matter and energy have a lifeward direction, life that requires inherent intelligence of some kind. And viewing other creatures as mere machines denies our material relationship with them, giving rise to exploitation, abuse, misuse, and more. Calling him a “shaman among scientists” [p49], Narby credits Darwin for demonstrating that relationship through his discernment of evolution.

Recent squabbles for “personal freedom” as science recommends wearing face masks and social distancing to prevent further spread of the novel coronavirus reminds me of the HIV/AIDS pandemic when a few, citing “pandemic fatigue,” claimed their personal freedom to ignore safe sex practices.

As an activist described this “right” to an audience, Roman Catholic scholar Daniel Helminiak became distraught and finally spoke out, “If you get infected, you will expect others to care for you, friends and family and volunteers, first responders and health care workers. And you will prompt rising costs of health insurance and health care that fewer will be able to afford.”

Religion and science remind us that we are all in this together, that we belong together, bound together in this marvelous universe and this most amazing life.

 

Related Posts:

In Memory of Trees

Contemplation in Science

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Mythologies of Science and Religion

Photo of ruins in Jordan by Chris Glaser.

I’ve written before that I am at “that age” when you look for connections, a time late in life indicated by recent studies. Regular readers will know that, during my morning prayers these days, I’ve been slowly absorbing Fritjof Capra’s 1975 book, The Tao of Physics. I find physicist Capra’s writing more accessible than that of Stephen Hawking, though I wonder how dated his science may be today, even as he demonstrates a pretty thorough understanding of Eastern spirituality.

His recurrent theme is that Western science has come to similar conclusions as ancient, mystical Eastern philosophy. Among them, that reality is indivisible, that the observed cannot be separated from the observer, that a particular scientific analysis is not intrinsic in nature but a creation of the human mind.

Now along comes a New York Times magazine article entitled, “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science,” about deconstructionist Latour’s similar conclusions about the nature of science after studying scientists in their “natural habitats,” much like a scientist might study other primates. In our time of pseudo-science and anti-science religionists dissing real science about climate change and evolution, philosopher Latour has recognized the danger of his work being misunderstood or worse, misused.

All this brought to mind a rather prescient conversation I created in one of my unpublished novels, the tongue-in-cheek Angus Dei – A John Boswell Mystery, written in 2002. Spiritual profiler Boswell, the Catholic narrator, is trying to find the one responsible for the death of Angus MacDonald, pastor of Primitive Presbyterian in Crowbar, Mississippi. He interviews various citizens, including science teacher Annie Hepburn, who describes Angus:

“His passion for God made him stupid, just like romantic love makes you blind to reality and prompts you to idealize the beloved. It makes us closer to the animals who breed by instinct rather than by reason. But humans bring reason into any relationship. We are not bound by blind passion, whether for a person, a country, or for God. Our passion is informed. Angus’s passion for God resisted information. His idealization of God required God to create the world as if by magic, in an instant, at most in seven days, rather than through arduous experimentation and a process known as evolution. Angus claimed it was as if I were suggesting God made the world by following a recipe, or worse, some haphazard, trial-and-error plan. If God made the world though a discernible process, then he was diminished, in Angus’s view.

“I, on the other hand, find the process so awesome that it made me more of a believer than any text of scripture ever could. The world itself is the best witness for this inspiration and yearning for life that we call God. By contrast, look how petty religion can be! They argue and divide over how to do Communion, like a bunch of obsessives with varying compulsions. Lately they’ve wasted a lot of time quibbling over whether homosexuality is right or wrong, as if love is only possible between a man and a woman. And they’ve always debated the merits of personal piety versus social responsibility, as if the two could be separated!”

I felt compelled to argue the other side, if only to hear her answer. I said, “But scientists argue over experimental procedure—their rituals. They disagree over what makes for healthy human relationships, including sexuality. And there’s always conflict between ‘pure science’ versus ethical responsibility.”

Annie paused, and smiled, and I could see that she was thinking. “That’s true,” she said at last. “Science is also a mythological framework in some ways, purporting to give meaning and order to what others see as random and chance. But what is revealed in the religion that we call ‘science’ I find ultimately more hopeful and helpful. Religion is too often caught up in the past, and both religion and science are held back if either is paralyzed by the old ways of doing things, the old ways of understanding things. The very nature of science calls for breaking boundaries, breaking the supposed rules.”

I thought of my own Catholic tradition, its very nature caught up in the past, but a past begun in the divine nature of a human being whom we believe modeled how to be a child of God, a past populated by venerable but vulnerable saints who followed the model, as well as powerful demons that didn’t, demons of conformity and cruelty, violence and division—the weeds within the harvest. And then I looked at Annie, and a thought came to mind that I dared not say, that would be highly inappropriate because it would unveil her own precious vulnerability. Just as Catholicism set up an altar to honor its lover, so she had set up an altar to honor hers, her dead husband—a side table adorned with fresh flowers and two candlesticks beneath his photograph, hanging on the wall. She too had an experience in the past of love so powerful that she also remained faithful, I thought to myself. But a true Southern gentleman or lady may only think such things, one doesn’t say them, trudging on people’s personal vulnerabilities for the sake of winning an argument. This is a Southern virtue that other Americans should emulate. Of course, then there would be less for the media, politicians, lawyers, and talk show hosts to exploit.

Annie continued, “Angus also hated breaking the rules. Beyond defending the only one that he thought could possibly satisfy his longing—God—he also was defending himself, his own fortress of beliefs that held him together in the chaos that’s in every person. He was afraid of letting go. And for him, removing one stone from his fortress would cause the whole thing to collapse.”

In the wake of the recent violence, my heart goes out to the Tree of Life synagogue and the beautiful Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, which I visited years ago. I also stand in solidarity with Jewish communities everywhere in their grief and their anxiety over increasing anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks.

A reading for Halloween which seems particularly relevant these days: 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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Copyright © 2002 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Collective Christian Memory

Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” it is said, and a background in literature has taught me that in earlier periods writers often borrowed from one another without compunction or complaint.

But I was shaken, early in my activist writing career, to discover another writer had “borrowed” something I had written for her Methodist curriculum. She put her name as the author because she had “adapted” it. I had felt similarly offended when I noticed Cat Stephens failed to acknowledge on an album that “Morning Has Broken” is an old hymn that he “adapted.”

About the same time, someone told me that a mutual friend had used one of my stories as his sermon. She thought I’d be thrilled, but no, he hadn’t credited it to me, claiming to have “found” it, a rhetorical device to add to the piece’s mystery. What concerned me at the time was that his large high-steepled not-yet-welcoming church might have become more welcoming if they knew it had come from a gay Christian.

Reading a book decades later, I discovered a sentence I knew to be mine, and then another and another, and checked the footnotes at the end of the book to find the author finally attributed a quote from the same article to me in the chapter that followed. When I shared my dismay with another writer, I was advised not to take it too seriously, as it was probably “just poor scholarship.” I never brought it up when I later worked with the author, but ironically heard his own complaint of another writer borrowing liberally from him!

I’ve mentioned on this blog my own failure of attribution when I wrote somewhere, “We know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all.” I had no idea the quote originated with body theologian James B. Nelson because I had not yet read any of Nelson’s work or heard him speak! When I happened on the sentence in one of his early books, I was chagrined, to say the least.

All these examples came to mind when I read two chapters on memory in Oliver Sacks’s last book, The River of Consciousness. He concludes, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

He cites one of his own memoirs as an example, in which we recounts an experience at his family’s London home during World War II. After publication, a brother explained to him that he and Oliver were away at school when the event happened. Another brother had written to them about the incident, but apparently with such great emotion and detail that Oliver had incorporated it into this own memory bank.

Even more memorably, Sacks describes the “plagiarism” controversy surrounding the beloved public figure Helen Keller, just 12 years of age, when a story she wrote paralleled another written by Margaret Canby. Keller did not remember Canby’s story, but realized she was more prone to think a story hers if, in Sacks’ words, it “had been ‘read’ to her, using finger spelling onto her hand.” To Canby’s credit, she defended Keller, writing, “What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have!”

All of this prompts me to compare our collective Christian memory, one that began with the first encounters of Jesus all the way to us “latter day saints.” As we follow the church calendar, reliving Jesus’ life from his advent to his elevation, following him in baptism and Communion and ministry, his story becomes our own, much as Helen Keller’s tactile reception of Canby’s story.

On a television program promoting my first book, Uncommon Calling, an evangelical pastor countered my “revisionism” of the Christian story, as I read biblical stories in the light of contemporary experience. I explained that was the task of every generation, to make sense of Jesus and our faith for the present times. (Though I did not say this, even his fundamentalism was a 19^th century example of this.) Revisionism, I said, was quite traditional!

No less for progressive Christians, who are making sense of Jesus and our faith in a world that has a grander and more accurate perspective of the cosmos, thanks largely to science and Christianity’s intercourse with other faith traditions.

Citing Freud, Sacks explains, “remembering…was essentially a dynamic, transforming, reorganizing process throughout the course of life.  …Memories are continually worked over and revised and…their essence, indeed, is recategorization.”

And so with collective Christian memory in the course of the church’s life. To repeat, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. I took the photo during a speaking trip to that welcoming congregation some years ago.