Psalm 8
Reason and Faith: The Last Word
Richard R. Crocker, College Chaplain
Rollins Chapel
May 31, 2007
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
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