I have never understood the popular tendency to see faith in
God to be at odds with the work of science. And I have been suspicious of the
times when religious people treat faith as if it were science and secular
people treat science as if it were faith.
For me, science and faith are like the peanut butter and
jelly of human inquiry and meaning, with the arts and music serving as the
bread. That’s because I grew up in a household steeped in science, art, music,
and religion. My mother was a librarian who served on the altar guild and her
father was an engineer who taught an adult Sunday school class. My father was
an aerospace engineer who eventually was ordained a deacon. When I was a kid, I
followed the space program the way other kids followed their favorite sports
team, actor, musician, or celebrity. I loved physics and biology, was so-so in
chemistry, but don’t ask me how I did in calculus … and I went to a church
where my Sunday school teacher also taught physics at a local college.
This last week, we watched with awe, wonder, and appreciation as the Artemis 2 crew circumnavigated the moon and returned safely to earth ending a fifty-year absence from human lunar exploration. And I remember when the days when the space race was a contest between super-powers over how best to organize societies. It got so intense that even God was dragged into the Cold War. After Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the earth, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev loved to say that Gagarin never saw God, heaven, nor angels out the window of his space capsule (Gagarin never actually said that, and besides he was a secret Russian Orthodox Christian, but I digress….). Then, a few years later when Apollo 8 first orbited the moon, and the crew took turns reading from Genesis on Christmas Day. Moving, yes, but it was also a kind of a technological and ideological “gotcha!”
It can be easy to fall into the trap of treating faith like
science and science as if it were a religious faith, which can lead to some very
strange and silly debates. Remember back in the 1990’s there was a televised
debate between a biblical fundamentalist named Ken Ham and the science popularizer
Bill Nye. Watching that caused me to want to throw something at the television,
not least because it was mainly two people who were not interested in listening
but talking past each other loudly, with a moderator scoring points as if it
was a ball game. From a theological perspective Ham could have been smacked
down by a first-year seminarian, and from what I could see Nye was more smug
than scientist in his presentation, so the whole thing was embarrassing.
As you might guess, the whole science versus religion thing
has never been a hobby horse that I wanted to ride. Which is but one reason why
I found myself drifting away from my adolescent attraction to Biblical
literalism, and into a different kind of faith.
When I am asked to share my faith story, I often begin by
saying “I was a teen-aged Baptist.” I attended a Baptist youth group in a
church that taught a kind of Biblical literalism that included a belief in a seven-day
creation, and a version of the Rapture with all the end-times trimmings. I
never heard them talk about the sun orbiting the earth, but it wouldn’t have
surprised me. What was surprising, though, was that there were members of that
church who worked in aerospace or served in the nuclear navy, and others who were
doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals, and one or two who even
taught science and math in the public schools.
Here’s the thing: the whole Genesis versus Evolution debate is
not about science. It’s about how to read the Bible. It’s one kind of
Christianity trying to use the creation stories to prove that their way of reading
the Bible is the only way to read the Bible. They really don’t give a fig about
science. When they say, "if you can't believe in a seven-day creation, then you can't believe in the Bible, and so you can't believe in Jesus" they are presenting a kind of slippery-slope theology that is a particular way of believing and following Jesus. There is nothing about science in this approach. And science popularizers should stop taking the bait.
The whole thing just makes me want to sigh deeply and give
everyone back their homework papers covered in red and say, “do over” while
sending them to their rooms without their suppers. Every now and then I will get
asked whether as a “man of God” I believed in the Garden of Eden, the Ark,
Balaam’s donkey, or what my end-times theory is. Not so much about to live and do the work of Jesus. So, there it is. Occupational
hazard, I guess.
This is why the apostle Thomas is one of my biblical heroes.
He was the apostle who was absent when Jesus made one of his first resurrection
appearances, and he would not simply take the word of his excitable friends at
face value. And he wasn't skeptical of Jesus, he was skeptical of the other ten disciples-- he doubted their observational skills in the turmoil of the moment. He wanted empirical proof. And he came out with the life of faith.
A week after Easter, Jesus provides it for him when he
appears in the upper room a second time and offers to show Thomas his wounded
hands and body, but in the Gospel Jesus offers all of us a last beatitude as
the punch line, which, by the way, underscores the whole point of the Gospel of
John: “blessed are you who have not seen and yet believes”.
Because the story deals with the role of doubt in the life
of faith, it also speaks directly to the false but popular division between
faith and science. Thomas wants proof…he wants his faith to be grounded in the
concrete. Jesus is willing to indulge that need as okay but pushes Thomas to
have a faith that is informed by the realities of his world and to have his
place in the world to be informed by his faith.
And I like that because I want science to be treated like
science, and not like theology. At the same time, I realize that the life of
inquiry that drives scientific exploration is fundamentally a life of faith.
Now a particular inquirer may or may not have the same theology as me…they may
not even believe in God…but their quest is a fundamentally a quest for meaning
as much as it is a search for how things work.
Thomas, to me, is the patron saint of the skeptical
inquirer. He wants proof before he can make the step of faith. There are times
when a literalist approach to faith…scientific or religious…gets in the way.
Because the problem is not that our religious stories and our science do not
line up, but that they are doing different – although sometimes overlapping –
things!
The real challenge is the meaning that we make out of what
we know, experience, and explore. What does it mean that the universe is
apparently infinitely small and at the same time infinitely vast? What does it
mean that we have the power to change the world we live in, for good or ill?
What drives our ethics and whom do we serve? What will ground our ethical and
moral choices?
Thomas meets the risen Christ in the upper room and comes to
believe. But instead of getting stuck on his skeptical moment, let’s look at what
Thomas does with this new knowledge and where his renewed faith takes
him. Tradition says that Thomas founded churches in Persia (yes, that Persia…
modern day Iraq!) and then in modern day India and Pakistan, where he was
eventually martyred.
And where does our confession of the Risen Christ take us?
Maybe not so far geographically, but wherever we go, we are challenged to live
our faith in the face of life’s contradictions and wounds, and to see the
wounded and risen Christ present to us wherever we go.
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