Faith and science
A new/old World Order: 1 & 2
Reframing religion and science without the exclusion
Update: follow on is From Vienna to Colorado Springs
This follows on Faith and climate practice, and I thank in particular my dear cousin and my new sponsor — prayer friend-turned-confidante — both is the US for helping me recover my faith as a lifelong scientist. I also thank my Extinction Rebellion fellow scientists who rekindled and broadened my science practice beyond the Earth Sciences: The fact that my original profession and my passion, geology & map-making, are at the cusp of arts & sciences helped a lot also…
Disclosure: Let me outline my spiritual journey to help you see where I’m coming from. I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic primary school in Brisbane AU and had the sacraments of initiation. I saw my parents as being religious for their children’s sake that rang hollow if laudable. I was actually attracted to the orders’ social outreach, but celibacy and paedophilia (yes we knew 60 yrs. ago) precluded that. My first wife’s United Church in Calgary CAN made me feel welcome and that renewed my interest, which I pursued at in-betweener girlfriend’s Barnabas Church. My current wife and I got interested in Humanist Unitarianism, when a local church harboured Guatemalans the guv was about to deport to their certain deaths. Our daughter was consecrated in Dallas First UU and we loved Riverside UU in So. Cal. Cambridge Unitarians were however Christian not Humanist, so we were pointed toward Cambridge Quakers where I’m member and active today. My previous post mentioned above also chronicles my recent rediscovery of traditional religion.
History is littered with pitch battles between religion and science: the former started not only as faith and a social phenomenon, but also a means to help explain the unexplainable; it was gradually overtaken by the latter that developed as understanding our environs increased over time. I recently realised that these needn’t be contradictory, indeed that opposition is yet another example of confusion emerging from the current and historic chaos in a world wrought with challenges, some natural and others man-made. Let me suggest that integrating both is the only way to save us from the havoc we wreaked as we face Earth’s next extinction event.
I found Einstein on religion very interesting: one of the greatest minds spelled out its limited understanding, yet embraced Spinoza’s pantheism that saw the soul and the body as one for example (ibid.); are God(s) in particular and religion in general anthropomorphic creations, or are they Mankind seeing an ineffable truth beyond its own scope? I think it’s a bit of both, and pitting one against another is yet another misdirection that ignores the evolution from belief to cognition as mentioned in this post’s opening sentence.
So let’s be clear: faith relies on an entity beyond us that is all-knowing and omnipresent in contrast to our selves — I see it as a personal choice whether it’s embraced individually by Quakers or through priests by Catholics, speaking from personal experience — yet it’s that choice that drove religion forward (Christianity) or split them in factions (Islam), speaking again from the personal. [ Living over a year in Kuwait exactly a decade ago but not as an expat, helped me cap a lifelong interest in Islam among the trio with Christianity and Judaism, though I still lack knowledge of the latter. ]
Second, in the grand scheme of things, the Age of Enlightenment and subsequent Industrial Revolution — speaking again from my Global North perspective — human knowledge and consciousness of self appeared to put science fact ahead of religious belief, which was pushed back as “primitive and naive” to use Einstein’s words above. I think that only reflected our lack of inclusivity driven by political interests, of which Colonialism is an extreme example. I think it also reflects our lack of knowledge of religious fundamentals (and I’m the first to admit to mine), which for example parroted that the Earth is “for Mankind to exploit” or that men “subjugate women and other races”: Let me suggest that it’s Capitalism that took on the mantle of Christian credibility to drive its own unethical practices, made easy by the fact that early Church hierarchy practised the same; the latter is in fact what led Ockham and Luther to challenge those irreligious practices and usher in Protestantism.
Third, I see those two points among the Global North’s failures: who the hell do we think we are, to believe that we will ever have enough science to be effective custodians of Mother Earth? It’s that mix of what I call the “C cubed” (Capitalism, Christianity and Colonialism in alphabetical order) that lead to the Climate Breakdown — let’s please dispense with economic and political interests’ obfuscation and prevarication, and follow the links atop this page to thread back this series and another one— & the following is a recent update.
Posted to local Extinction Rebellion groups, having taken a break from social media:
Following that (link):
And right on cue (link):
Then just in today (link):
Fourth, my recent spiritual (re)discovery mentioned previously taught me to simply let go. I also just realised that as a male white middle class professional, how much weight I was carrying on my shoulders, like a figurative Atlas: “pushed to lead, lie and dissemble [in the] pretence and mask [of] my ego propped by others for their own gain, as I was leeched for my own privilege”, quoting from a personal poem. It made me realise this: to surrender our ego to a higher good and a higher will that sees well beyond our Earthly viewpoint is not giving up; on the contrary it’s empowering, as we can start and think straight beyond our immediate hurts. We can truly develop as the beautiful human being we are &/or as God designed us, depending on your perspective (DOYP, after BYOB: bring your own bottle). But we forgot in our pride and prejudice that lead us to confusion and destruction of our Earth that we are custodians of &/or that God gave us, DOYP.
Fifth, I believe it’s each of our personal responsibility to start and remedy that: be good to ourselves and to our surrounds under our own cognizance &/or divine guidance, DOYP. You see I was and activist in Extinction Rebellion, following young leaders who really show my older generation what needs be done to avert the next extinction event. But this is where I see DOYP stop. I believe that without faith, we shall never fully comprehend what needs to be done. We need to face head-on what’s needed today urgently with climate breakdown — I faced things head-on too but I had no anchor so I kept getting washed away — let me suggest that if we face it head-on and plumb the depths of our faith, that will anchor us instead of set us adrift as mentioned before.
Sixth, faith doesn’t contradict science either. We know what governs the universe, and we’ve been recently blessed with wonderful efforts like Mars rovers missions and James Web telescope currently unfolding to peer into the origins of the universe. But that’s the tangible, and we miss the intangible, that ineffable grace that hold together this cosmic collection, or God DOYP.
Second disclosure: I took enough physics and chemistry fundamentals in French prep school for entry exams to engineering schools to last me several lifetimes — when I transferred to Canadian university, they never believed I had covered that much ground, and gave me only one year equivalence against the two I had spent—but I recovered that knowledge 40 yrs. later: I was briefly a note-taker at the University of Cambridge for a disabled Ph.D. student in High Energy Particle Physics; that meant she studied black holes via measurements in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva SUI, and I knew just enough fundamentals to actually understand what I transcribed!
It’s been said that quantum physics never quite resolved what’s deceptively called The Standard Model, because there is that end-member in its fabled equation that the best minds can never quite figure out — see Claire’s TED talk on The missing 96% of the universe — as mentioned Einstein himself had faith, but what’s little known is that he knew mankind’s hubris will be that we will never find that last bit. He famously said God does not play dice with the universe to express limitations of quantum mechanics. Let me put to you that is God’s domain: we simply must admit and surrender to the facts that they we will not, cannot and should not even try to know absolutely everything.
Where is the magic then if we think we can “get it all”? It’s that mystery beyond the end of that yellow brick road, it’s the darkness around the next bend that we should not be terrified of in our confusion: on the contrary we should embrace it, but wee cannot do it alone; we have this ally in God who we ignore at our peril… And we largely do! Let me put to you that our role and duty is to start reversing that, and to show by example how faith and science can co-exist: only then will we truly grasp how we can save ourselves & our planet from the next extinction event… Nothing more and nothing less!
So referring to the banner image, let’s look beyond the prickly realities of our own shortcomings, and scale the peaks of our own faith and science together!
