Science, Religion, and the Spirit                                   November 13, 2005

Sermon for First Unitarian Denver by Rev. Mike Morran

          Last week we took a look at science and religion in the context of history, and observed that both of these, one an apparently moral force and the other an apparently amoral force have been the cause of both great good and great evil.

          We observed that the development of the modern world has not been peaceful, but has revolved around wars of unprecedented scale, by oppression, genocides, and all manner of unspeakable violence to human beings, to indigenous cultures, and to the natural environment on a global scale.  It’s not that modernism doesn’t have its benefits.  I for one have no desire to go back to the lifestyle of some previous century.  It’s just that there has been a cost to the modernization of the world, and if we are honest, we know that that cost has been very high.

We also noted that one of the effects of modernization has been a certain sense of spiritual emptiness, a subtle but pervasive spiritual despair among modern people, and that one of the human responses to this underlying despair has been the rise and development of religious fundamentalism, which we noted is not a historical, but a thoroughly modern phenomenon.

          We ended with the observation that the conflict between science and religion is not really a conflict at all when each is approached appropriately, and that each is a distinct discipline that speaks to and informs vastly different human needs.  We quoted Einstein who wrote that, “Science without religion is lame.  Religion without science is blind.”  And we ended last week with another quote from Einstein, “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling love.”

          Today we turn to the more introspective aspects of science, religion, and the spirit.  What does it mean to have real spiritual needs and hungers while living in a secular world?  How do we cope with this underlying sense of despair that many of us feel acutely?  And, what might be an antidote?

          To begin, once again we have to be aware that we do live in a secular world, and it’s not just external to our lives.  The very ways that our senses perceive and approach reality, the way we’ve learned to understand what reality is and how it works, the relative value we place on our perceptions and which determines what kind of information actually rises into consciousness, all of these are grounded in a distinctly modern and rational world-view.  It is a world-view that in general terms values knowledge and things over relationships, economic growth over justice, competition over cooperation, and financial success over spiritual maturity.  These are cultural values, norms, and expectations that are specific to the modern world.  If it’s hard to see and grasp these things, it is because this world-view is like the water we swim in.  We live it, and we live in it.  We are taught ceaselessly, thoroughly, even mindlessly, to make culturally acceptable discernments, to understand that mind and matter are separate and distinct, just as are life and death, growth and decay, light and dark, reality and spirituality.  This world-view has been spectacularly successful in conquering the world, and it is profoundly indicative of how thoroughly enmeshed we are with this particular view of reality that people who get these distinctions confused are labeled fanatics, out of touch, or even insane.

          Perhaps it is simply the nature of being human to assume that our own world-view is somehow correct - that all others be judged within the context of our own - or to assume that all others are similar to, or just failed versions of our own.  But I have come to believe that to make this assumption is to live an unexamined life.  Let us try to pull back our lenses a bit, and see if we can get a glimpse of the forest beyond the trees.

          In the distant past, these discernments that we make so well and automatically did not exist.  To ancient people, what we sometimes call primitive societies, there was no real difference between mystical experience and normal experience, no special value given to real time as opposed to dream time, and this is important, no meaningful, spiritual distinction between the past and the present.  To the ancients, the whole of creation was constantly on the verge of chaos, life was tenuous, and the sheer fact that the world appeared to have order and structure was obvious enough proof that there was some divine, unseen, and mysterious power at work behind the scenes.  That time and space allowed different forms and events to be distinguished from one another was itself evidence of the holy, and so the holy, or at least the mysterious unseen force of creation was built into the very fabric of existence, every minute of every day.

          Later, as societies developed, as tribes became cities, and cities became nations, pre-modern people began to make some of these distinctions.  To quote Karen Armstrong,

…they developed two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos.  Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence.  Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence.  Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of human mind.  Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning.

          I will use the words logos and mythos, but you could substitute others.  I am speaking in very broad terms and have no desire to get bogged down in definitions, so if you don’t relate to logos and mythos, substitute rationalism and mysticism, logic and intuition, science and religion, secular and sacred.  Any of these will do for my purposes.

          Logos has to do with practical or scientific knowledge.  My dictionary defines science as, the systematic study of anything that can be examined, tested, and verified.  (This definition, by the way, as far as I am concerned, is the end of the debate between evolution and intelligent design.)  Notice that logos and logic share the same root, and that the prefix “log” is present in the descriptive names for many of our sciences like anthropology, biology, psychology, and etc.  Logos is exact, practical, and to be functional logos has to correspond to external reality in some mutually agreeable, measurable, and testable way. 

Mythos, on the other hand, is no help at all if you are trying to design an aqueduct or plan the layout of your city.  But, if you are missing your father who has just passed away, if you are trying to manage your grief after some catastrophe, if you are wanting to celebrate the birth of a child, or feeling the urge to offer prayerful thanks to the mysterious, unseen creator for this great and precious gift of Life, then it is logos that is useless.  It simply has nothing to say.  Einstein wrote, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

          According to Karen Armstrong, pre-modern people generally understood it was dangerous and foolish to mix up your mythos and your logos.  But in the modern world we are generally not so wise.  We tend to be so entrenched in the rationalistic world-view, and myth has been relegated to such a backwards and suspect class of knowledge, that most of us find it difficult or even impossible to give ourselves over to the symbols of myth and meaning.

At the risk of oversimplification, it may be exactly this difficulty that underlies the sense of spiritual emptiness and despair that runs through our culture.  While we have undoubtedly grown far beyond our need to blame drought cycles and the gender of our children on the whims of the gods, we have certainly not outgrown our need to grieve, to wonder, to be awestruck, to pray, to cope with pain and loss, to know grace, to be humbled, and grasp that our lives are but one thread in a grand and mysterious tapestry of hope and striving and love. 

And thank God(!) if there is one, that our souls remain so stubbornly unreasonable!

          Don’t get me wrong.  I love science!  But let’s look a little closer at this tension between science and the spirit.  In ancient times, everything was more or less a miracle; birth and death, the growth of new life in the spring, the wanderings of animals, the origins of people, and the genesis of creation.  Science and rationalism, with great ingenuity and incredible achievement has now explained every one of these, even to the point where we have come to believe that we actually understand them!  Or, perhaps we don’t claim to understand them entirely, but we believe in science, and we generally believe that we could understand them if we tried, and probably someday we will.  We look at these things, experience these things, and while they are fascinating and necessary and we understand that they are more or less complicated, the underlying truth of our experience is that there is no real mystery or miracle involved.

          Even our experience of time, that mysterious, completely arbitrary, unseen something can now be measured down to the billionth of a second, cut into slices so small that we can’t even conceive of it.  But in mythic understanding, time is a sort of an everywhen, with no clear distinctions between past and present, dream time and real time, because everything is tied together and things take their meaning through connections that cross time and space.  An ancient person would know that the dwelling they lived in would be remarkably similar to the one their grandfather lived in, and his grandmother, and her great grandmother and on back into the unknown.  The child she or he was raising was conceived the same way they were, and is remarkably similar to the child he or she will one day raise.  If you were that person, you would know that the food that sustains you is the same food that sustained your people since before anyone can remember or imagine.  You would know that although the ancestors have passed on, and you will pass on, and so will the children and theirs, that the people will go on, that everything and everyone has a place in the great mystery, and there is great comfort in this knowing.  This kind of deep understanding of life and our place within it is now foreign to us.  In rational thinking, time is linear with beginnings and endings, events are finite, distinct, unique, and connected not by meaning, but by cause and effect.  Our world-view is oriented to the future, with an emphasis on progress rather than in spiritual grounding and identity in nature or community.  Science has given us amazing benefits, but it has also had the effect of robbing us of a sense of the sacred in most of the most intimate areas of our lives!

I believe that our spirits miss that sense of mystery, miracle, and connection to the everywhen, even if we’ve never once articulated it that way.

          The attempt to give mythic stories a literal meaning, as when religious fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of scripture, is to use the methods of logos to achieve mythic ends.  To quote my colleague Rev. Ken Collier, “Much of the heat could be taken out of the evolution versus creation struggle if it were admitted that to read the first chapter of Genesis as though it were an exact account of the origins of life is not only bad science; it is also bad religion.”

If this is true, and I believe it is, it rather begs the question, so what would good religion look like?  What approach to life, or what kind of world-view would satisfy the needs of the spirit and still make welcome room for good science?  How do we reconcile having real spiritual needs while living in a secular world?

Traditional religion has tried to accommodate these tensions with time honored rituals, by keeping religion separate from other, purely secular institutions, and by creating tasteful, comforting Sunday rituals of singing, music, words, and community; the kind of thing going on in thousands of congregational gatherings of every possible denomination in every corner of the continent right at this very moment.  It’s going on right here!  But many people feel that as comforting, tasteful, (occasionally brilliant!) and carefully prepared as a modern church services can be, that they can also be saccharine, shallow, and don’t quite get to the heart of it. 

Sometimes they’re right.

          I believe, that is to say, my experience and my intuition tell me that the heart of it is difficult to articulate in a Sunday service.  It is to know that spiritual maturity and the ability to lead the kind of lives we long to lead is much more about an attitude than it is about an argument.  Rationalism is not much help.  It is a way of being more than a way of thinking, a function of the spirit more than of the head, a world-view that gives equal weight and measure to mythos and the needs of the spirit as well as to logos and the progress of science.  In liberal religion we often say that the measure of a religious life is not the contents of our theology, but in how we actually live, the choices we make, the directions of our energy and resources, and how much love we can give away or create in the world.  But we don’t often consider that the ability to make those choices, the ability to create and share that love, and the ability to lead the life that we wish to lead is far more dependent upon our attitude then it is upon our thoughts, no matter how logical they may be. 

This is part of the failure of religion.  We have models and language, images, symbols, mythos, etc. about what salvation, grace, or enlightenment might look like, but little genuine guidance about how to get from here to there.  We are trained in logos, but not in mythos, and therefore have little real guidance or cultural expectations that we should be deeply compassionate, or that life is about being deeply in relationship, or how to honor the earth, or feed our souls, or how to pray to creation for the strength to keep going.

          And, we cannot go backwards.  Pre-modern times have passed and we are modern people.  Our task is to respond to our spiritual crisis by taking it seriously, perhaps by creating new myths that honor mystery as well as knowledge.  Indeed, science is now beginning to show that reality, matter, consciousness, and energy are all far more deeply interfused than we had previously imagined.

At a deeper level, I believe the truth is that the path from here to there is counter-intuitive to what rationality and our culture has taught us.  It will be a process of letting go more than of acquiring; letting go of expectations, letting go of denial, letting go of fear, and freeing our spirits to live every bit of what we have been given.  I believe it will be a process of surrender more than of discipline, being open to and letting the world tell us what we should be doing instead of seeking to impose our will upon the world.  It will involve the cultivation of humility more than one-up-man-ship, embracing the much deeper self-awareness that comes from knowing the limits of our humanity instead of reveling in our cleverness.  It will be much more about vulnerability than about strength, and being open to whatever life brings to us, loving without apology, grieving our losses honestly, sharing those moments of joy without hesitation, honoring the wholeness that lies in every human heart, holding fast to the good that is somehow present in all things, even if it is beyond our comprehension.  It will require of us great and undying love.

          I close with a passage from Dag Hammarskjold:  God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when we cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

          This is my wish for all of us.  May you know awe, and may you know love.

Amen