Science and the Sacred
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The most profound truths about what it means to be human belong to both science and religion. The deepest questions, the most challenging mysteries, are shared by philosophers, theologians, physicists, and astronomers alike.
Curiosity, the search for truth, and the joy of discovery are crossover experiences. All three motivate our personal lives, our work lives, our thinking and reading lives, because we humans seek to understand that which we cannot see. We hold faith in things unseen; we write our faith in mathematical equation or chemical formula; we speak our faith in prayer and meditation.
Unseen things include love, gravity, black holes, evil, hope, and joy, to name a few. We can see the evidence of these things. We see expressions of love, acts of evil, effects of gravity, and the dancing and singing of joy. But we believe in their existence even when we can’t see them.
Professor of astrophysics and Hubble Fellow Adam Frank in his book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, writes:
Science and spiritual endeavor are both gateways. They are not the same. They are not equivalent. But both arise from the same ancient location in our history and our being.
The ancient location that Frank points to is the position of the human being as observer and storyteller. Both science and religion rely on observation of the world and all its wonders. Both science and religion rely on story, myth, and narrative to make sense of what has been observed.
Historian of religion Mircea Eliade explored the universality of myth, ritual, and the sacred across cultures. He created the category of hierophany for manifestations of the sacred. Sacred refers to things set apart and worthy of reverence. Eliade suggests three universally human questions that aid us in our search for the sacred:
- Who are we?
- Where do we come from?
- Where are we intended to go?
Religion and science both explore these questions. Through observation and narrative, both disciplines search for truth and meaning.
We 21st century UUs continue to seek after Eliade’s great questions of the meaning of life and death. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we intended to go? The answers are still open; revelation is not sealed. Like the astrophysicists, like Einstein, we still search for origins and the meaning of it all.
Adam Frank speaks of the impulse to understand—this essential human urge to search for truth. He calls it “The Constant Fire.” It is, he says, the aspiration to know what is essential, what is real, what is true.
This was the Constant Fire of men and women working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory for 40 years. This is the Constant Fire that brings us back again and again to our faith. It is the desire to know. The passion to know what is real, what is true.
Ancient myth and classic literature are evidence of this Constant Fire in the human breast. We yearn to understand—ourselves and our world, the universe and the multi-verse. We wake each morning hoping for a sighting of the sacred, a heirophany. We wake ready to take on the world with our questions, with our quest for meaning.
Each morning I wake hoping to watch the sunrise. Each morning I wake searching for an experience of the sacred. Each morning I wake with deep questions on my heart.
We are observers, writing and telling the story of the universe, the story of humanity. What a gift, what a joy to dwell in the house of the sacred! To reach the furthest points in the galaxy and beyond. To hear the chirp of black holes colliding and detect gravitational waves from a billion light-years away.
To acknowledge nature as a source of the sacred in our lives requires each of us to live a new ethic, one of care and compassion for the earth, the universe, and all human and animal kind. An ethic of reverence for life.
Science and the sacred will together lead us on a path of love of life. And what we love we will protect. What we love we will honor. What we love we will pass on to our children’s children.
Rainer Maria Rilke writes, in Letters to a Young Poet:
Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, almost unsayable. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
May we find joy in living our way into the answers.
Called to ministry by the spirit of love and justice.MDiv from Meadville/Lombard Theological School.
Lynn has served Tennessee Valley UU Congregation in Knoxville, TN.,River Road UU Congregation in Bethesda, MD.
and is in her 13th year as minister of the UU Congregation of Rockville, MD.
Lynn and her husband, Dave, have four adult children and 7 grandchildren.Life and ministry has brought many blessings.
- Science and the Sacred - July 1, 2017
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