We have been thinking in chapel for the last two terms about the relationship between reason and faith. Today is the last word on that subject.
As you may remember, this series was prompted by the onslaught of books that appeared in the last year that have attracted a great deal of attention by preaching atheism. They are written by people whom I call evangelical atheists, because they not only argue for atheism; they argue that everyone’s life would be better if we were all atheists. The latest of these diatribes in by Chrsitopher Hitchens and is called God is Not Great. These books, as I said, have made a very big splash. Atheism seems to be on the offensive, while the intellectual proponents of religious faith seem somewhat silenced. Casual observers may well come to the conclusion that reason and faith, and especially science and religion - are incompatible, and that one must choose one side or the other. I think all the speakers in this chapel series have argued that this is a false dichotomy; that reason and faith can indeed be complementary – that they can be partners, not opponents.
In the spirit of this series, I offer today, briefly, these observations. I confess that my knowledge of science is very limited, and I do not speak as a scientist. I speak as a normally intelligent human being who has found faith not only credible, but essential, and who feels somewhat defensive when faith is, with a very broad brush, painted as infantile delusion at best or stubborn ignorance at worst. Rather, I would argue, both religion and science, if they are genuine, share a single basic source, which is awe, and a single basic virtue, which is humility.
My knowledge of science is almost limited to Time magazine, which happened to have a very interesting brief article last week on the subject of SN2006gy. In case you missed it, SN2006gy is the largest super nova ever observed. Let me quote the opening of the article:
Remember the supernova, that great burst of sky violence that was supposed to be the finest pyrotechnics show that the heavens can offer? Forget it. NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and several ground based optical telescopes have just witnessed a cosmic blast that makes the supernova look like a popgun./ The explosion, the subject of a paper that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, took place 240 million lightyears away and was, in the words of astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, … “truly monstrous.” About 100 times as powerful as an ordinary supernova, it resulted from the death of a star that was probably 150 times as massive as our sun, or “as massive as a star can get”, says Smith. What’s more, a similarly huge and unstable star is rumbling a lot closer to earth than we might like.
Hmmm. As they say, awesome.
This supernova, this monstrous explosion, was 240 light years away. In other words, the explosion occurred 240 million years ago, and we are just finding out about it because it took 240 million years for the light to reach us.
What is there for us mortals to say about such a thing? Can we even conceive of something that happened 240 million years ago? The star that is referenced in the opening paragraph – the star that is closer to us - is only 7500 light years away. It has not exploded yet, that we know, but even if it has, we will find out about it 7500 years after it happened.
Science and religion, reason and faith, begin in a sense of awe – awe about existence itself and the order that seems to characterize it. Human beings have spent their existence learning about the stars – observing, testing relationships, hypothesizing. And we still find it awesome. As the psalmist said: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of they fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:5) Now every believer knows that this cry of awe is metaphorical. The God is who worshipped here does not have fingers. But we have fingers. That is how we make things. And the faith that is proclaimed here is that, in this awesome world, human beings have the amazing ability to appreciate, just a little bit, and to understand, just a little bit, how vast is the universe. Limited as we are, we can still appreciate majesty and miracle and power beyond expression, pressing far beyond our comprehension, yet making contact with it, and affirming that this great power has made us able to understand, and to appreciate, and to preserve, and to love, and to worship. This is faith. And, like science, it is rooted in awe.
The proper attitude toward existence is awe. And the proper virtue is humility. Both scientists and religionists go astray when they lose this virtue. What we know is so partial that we should always be much more aware of what we do not know. This is the virtue that both religion and science at their best always model – and that in reality they both so seldom do.
I end with the words of Whitman, who really does have the last word on this subject, in his poem, “When I heard the learn’d astronomer”:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Amen.
Jeffrey Kluger, TIME, May 21, 2007, p. 56
