Our theological diversity: November 2005 Archives

Gary Kowalski who serves the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Burlington, Vermont has written an important book for religious liberals, Science and the Search for God. The book provides its readers with a good introduction to relation between religion and genuine scientific inquiry, and helps its readers to make the distinction between the philosophical stance known as materialism and new findings of science. Materialism, a legacy of the ancient dualisms of heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, mind and matter has become merged in the minds of many with science. But Kowalski in a popular style and with excellent illustrations argues convincingly that contemporary science has moved beyond the limits of reductionism and materialism, and introduces liberal religious thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne who have developed theological approaches that are more compatible with science as it is actually done.

But materialism continues to have its adherents. Kowalski writes:

Like some slow-growing disease, the ideology of materialism has gradually infected the scientific world-view and then popular culture, slowly but surely taking over the senses, one by one.  As defined by the dictionary, materialism is the "philosophical doctrine that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world, including thought, will and feeling can be explained in terms of matter alone."  

Materialism robs us of our vitality and saps the will to change.  And it's hard to imagine anyone crawling into such a mental straightjacket voluntarily.  Naturally, it didn't happen all at once.  The process began with the Copernican revolution as science addressed the question of where we are.    Human beings learned that they were living in a universe much larger than they supposed, but hardly one in which our kind held ay special place or privileged position.  In the nineteenth century came the Darwinian revolution,  which examined the question of how we got here.  The longstanding mystery of the origin of the species yielded to explanations based upon chance and necessity.  Finally, materialism invaded the inner world of the personality -the question of who we are-as within the twentieth century advances in genetics and molecular biology seemed to unlook the ultimate secret of the mind and consciousness itself.

Not too long ago, it was still possible to believe that each person possessed an eternal soul, a divine spark, a sacred essence. The individual was seen as a moral agent and creative force within the unfolding drama of history, but breakthroughs in genetics have seemingly reduced ingenuity and daring, heroism and sacrifice, to nothing more than the chance combinations of chromosomes.  As Francis Crick, the discover of DNA, has written, "the astonishing hypothesis is that €˜you,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your freewill, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells, and their associated molecules.?

But what is modern physics saying about matter? Kowalski continues his critique of materialism: "Ernest Rutherford , first discovered the atomic nucleas almost a hundred years ago.  When he was first asked to describe his discovery he replied to the effect that "Something - we don't know what - is doing something - we don't know how."

The bafflement among physicists that Rutherford expressed has only increased as the atom has revealed more and more of its workings, we have muons and mesons, which seem multiply geometrically, and even these subatomic particles have been analyzed and we find quarks and the quarks appear to be strings, not things at all.   Our universe rests on a firm foundation of one dimensional strings of vibrating energy."


Matter?  What matter?   The fundamental building block of all material existence, mere flashes in the microsphere.

Is it possible?  The Universe seems to be made up of nothing,  nothing but pulsating waves of energy.  How much to you weigh,  how tall are you?   Take away the empty space, and you and me would be reduced to sparks of energy no larger than grains of sand.  But wait, a grain of sand is full of energy.  Go to the beach, and get some.  There is enough energy stored in that sands atoms, to drive a city for a week.   A child's bucket full of sand if the energy could be released could power a hundred thousand automobiles for a year. 

Energy / mass / matter /stuff.

Empty space isn't what it used to be....we are now told that space is charged with cross currents of wave fields, and these field are constantly giving birth to particles,  energy taking form,  becoming what we once called matter.   And then disappearing again, in a fraction of a nanosecond.  

So much for God created the heavens and the earth,   and so much for the apocalypse, as well.   The beginning of matter happens every moment of eternity, and the end of matter as well. A different theology is needed for a universe in constant flux, neither materialist nor theist. My stance is pan-en-theist, the universe is holy, creative, and conscious of itself.

To the people of this land - as well as to many contemporaries who commit to living deliberately, and who seek to be aware of the world that has been given to us all - the world is "alive with spirit."

Some "intellectuals" would tells us that this world understanding is something they call animism,  and dismiss it as pre-modern and "superstitious."  The more mechanical and arrogant "science" that was in vogue in  the first half of the twentieth century lent authority to the imperiousness of modernist anthropologists of religion, whose own world view saw nature as an object to be manipulated, rather than the outward form of our mother earth and our father sky - that sacred realm in which we lived, and moved and had our being.

I am not in awe of "the science" of those who think of the cosmos as dead matter,  devoid of consciousness and vitality - I find that way of thinking dangerous and if my readers might indulge me  "unscientific."  Materialism as an intellectual movement has impoverished thinking and created the dangerous ideologies of the capitalism and communism.  Sometimes the materialists would have us believe that they are "naturalists."  The more materialist of the humanists are fond of that dodge.

Naturalists are those who seek a explanation of all events based on explanations drawn the processes of nature,  naturalists do not seek "supernatural" explanations.  Why did the Hurricane come?  The supernaturalist argues about a God that directs hurricanes,  a naturalist would point toward warm water causing updrafts of air, and wind currents forming convection cooling, and stirring currents.  But the naturalist is not compelled to the materialist conclusion that the earth is a mechanical system rather than a living ecology that learns and changes based on those learnings.  A naturalist is not compelled to ascend into "human only" ethics, but may assert with Gary Kowalski that animals have souls, and should not be subjected to vicious treatment nor raised for slaughter.

Edward Abbey speaks to me and for me as a cosmic mystic, pan-en-theist, religious humanist when he writes:
"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures.
The croaking thing with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas. . .

How utterly rich and wild
Yet some among us have the nerve,
The insolence, the brass, the gall to whine
About the limitations of earthbound fate
And yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky.

We are none of us good enough
For the world we have."

Some have argued that religious humanist perspectives necessarily descend into "anthro-centric" points of view,  incapable of self criticism directed at the hubris of modernism with its "humankind against nature" mythologies that provide the rationales for the ecological destruction that we witness.  But religious humanism is not inherently modernist, nor is religious humanism incapable of transcending the dominant culture's technocratic corporatism and imperialism.  A liberating, multicultural, anti-oppressive religious humanism that realizes that the earth does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to the earth is being born.  A religious humanism that proclaims with ancient wisdom that our earth is sacred,  we are part of nature, and we are connected intimately and passionately with the whole.