Marcia Sietstra:  Pastor

Last week I spoke about the relationship between science and religion.  Both are ways of knowing and each one needs the other, I think, if we are going to find a faith that has intellectual integrity for us.  I cannot believe in my heart something that my mind rejects.  For Christian faith to be believable, it must be consonant with what we know of the world around us.  Because what we know of the world continues to increase, we are continually adjusting our religious knowledge.  Thus, when we figured out that the earth was not flat and covered with a dome, like Genesis says, we learned to see the creation story in the bible as mythical language describing a core truth: that God creates.  I ended last week with words of Wm. Bragg, who said science and religion "are opposed to one another in the sense that the thumb and fingers of one's hand are opposed.  It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped."[1]  

Today I want to talk a little about the view of God that science has helped to shape.  One must start with Sir Isaac Newton.  Isaac Newton figured out four fixed laws of nature, by which the universe works.  Those laws of nature explained why the world works the way it does.  Picture the universe as a huge machine, operating by design according to certain laws of nature.  Everything from tiny atoms to parts of the solar system as big as the sun, obeyed the same four laws of nature, he said.  When Newton published his findings, he ended by saying that God created these laws by which the universe "runs."  But people soon got the idea that once God designed the machine and set it to go, there really wasn't much for God to do.  God was seen like a watchman who designed and created the watch, but then wound it and had nothing left to do.  God's job began to be seen as something like that of a night watchman: someone who dozed in a lawn chair while the stars spun in their courses overhead.  

Human beings learned to rely on Newton's laws. They could be counted on.  We learned to expect things to work in predictable ways, even humans.  If each of the parts of the big machine would do their part, the machine should work.  Each person is viewed as an individual part.  When one of us failed, we needed to be removed or fixed in order for the bigger machine to keep on humming.  

Eventually even our view of God was influenced by Newton's laws of nature.  Barbara Taylor writes, "Walk into many churches and you will hear God described as a being who behaves almost as predictably as Newton's universe.  Say you believe in God and you will be saved.  Sin against God and you will be condemned.  Say you are sorry and you will be forgiven.  Obey the law and you will be blessed.  These are simple and appealing formulae, which make God easy to understand.  Pull this lever and a reward will drop down.  Do not touch that red button, however, or all hell will break loose.  In this clockwork universe, the spiritual quest is reduced to learning the rules in order to minimize personal loss and maximize personal gain (achieve salvation)," writes Dr. Taylor. [2]  

For the past 300 years, the emphasis has been on the individual, just as Newton emphasized the individual atoms.  Fix the individual parts and the bigger machine will run; fix the individual person and the world will work rightly.  

But then the 20th century arrived, and scientific experiments called into question this orderly worldview.  A different worldview is being shaped.  Picture for a moment, a spider's web, a huge one, glistening with dew drops in an early morning sun.  Imagine a universe that functions like a fantastic luminous web, in which every part of the web is connected eventually to every other part of the web.  New studies in science and astronomy give us a world view that looks more like an interconnected web than like a clockwork universe in which individuals function like springs and gears.  In this web-like, connected universe there are no such things as parts that form the whole; rather, the whole of the universe is the fundamental unity of reality.  The whole is everything.  

Now I am no physicist.  I can only glimpse what quantum physics has to teach us, but theologians are beginning to talk a great deal about this.  Imagine in your mind a particle even smaller than an atom, which splits into two, sort of a set of "identical twins"-a single system with two parts going in opposite directions.  Imagine one of them spins toward the moon and the other above our organist's head.  According to the laws of quantum physics, if you could reverse the movement of the particle over Betty's head, the one by the moon would also reverse its movement.  In other words, there is some kind of instantaneous communication between quantum particles, once they have interacted.  What if-as quantum physics suggests--this communication exists in the entire universe, even in human beings.  Imagine if the universe, instead of acting like a machine, acts like a body, animated by some intelligence that exceeds the speed of light!  

You know, if you stand under a high power wire and hold a fluorescent bulb in the air, there is a good chance it will light up, because you are standing in a power field.  Imagine another kind of power field that knits the whole creation together, so that a shiver in the Milky Way gives us a shiver right here, faster than the speed of light.  It reminds me of the mother who sits bolt upright in her bed in the middle of the night, "knowing" something has happened to her child.  According to this scientific theory, a mother "knows" not because she happens to be psychic but because she and the child belong to the unbroken wholeness of the universe.  

This is complicated enough to give you a headache, isn't it?  Or at least make one feel a little disoriented!  It means that Newton's laws apply on one level, but on another level there is what appears to be randomness or maybe even chaos because there are particles that act in unpredictable ways.  And yet there is something very familiar that rings true to me in this scientific theory of unity in the cosmos.  It echoes the words of the gospel writer of John: "In the beginning was the Word and Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God … In him was life; and the life was the light of men.  And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not."  The writer of Ephesians put it like this: "There is one body and one Spirit …one Lord, one God of all, who is above all and through all and in all."  

This is a very different picture of God than the one most of us were raised on.  It is not God on a throne in heaven who stands over the world and sometimes stirs it with a stick.  This is God here in us, through us, the very energy, the very intelligence, the spirit of the universe, the One Paul Tillich calls "the ground of being," the force that Moses knew as "I AM WHO I AM."  Perhaps we are to that God as the wave is to the ocean.  What a fascinating possibility to try on, to mess with, to think about as we sing our prayers today, and receive the communion elements that remind us that God is in us and we are in God.  Amen.  

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[1] Quoted by Cyril Domb in "Science & Religion: Heading for Partnership?" God for the 21st Century, ed. Russell Stannard (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press) 2000, p. 185.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor "Physics and faith: The luminous web," in The Christian Century June 2-9, 1999, p. 612.