“How the God Story Spoke to a Scientist”

Karen Sloan

02/08/2020

Reading - Video

(There was an introduction earlier)

So let’s keep exploring ..

Nathan as you may know, while a young lawyer, is also a philosopher, or is at least interested in philosophy.

I saw him the other day and he recommended a podcast to me, one from the God Forbid series on Radio National. This podcast looked at the question, “How do we know what we know?”  Which is really the question we are also asking.  Is it because science proves its true. Or because we know it to be true, because we feel it in our bones to be true.

The program featured 3 scientists, 2 who were also either teaching theology or were working in a church setting, and one who was a confessed atheist.  None were belligerent or dismissive of the others claim and all spoke well about the different forms of truth we have. 

Dr Vicki Lorrimer was the person on the program that really spoke to me as I listened  and reminded me so much of myself, except for the PhD part. She is a geneticist as well as a lecturer in systematic theology after doing a Phd in theology and science from Oxford university. 

All 3 on the panel celebrate and love science, as many of us do.  But as Dr Vicki Lorrimer suggested, some truths are not available to scientific observation and testing, things like hope, forgiveness, justice, harmony, and love. Things that can’t be tested in a lab, that don’t have evidence in a scientific way, but have evidence none the less. To reveal the full human existence and explain what the world is and what reality is, we need to look wider and deeper.

She went on to say that she didn’t think people were sitting around thinking about all of this too much, except perhaps for me, but they arrive at different truths when sometimes they aren’t really looking. From personal experience, events in the lives of loved ones, through a commitment to some sort of religious tradition or even in nature.  People are almost compelled to include these additional truths in their explanation of life and the world.  It comes to them when they may not have been looking! Like a divine impulse, which can’t be seen but has always been there. 

It’s a great podcast and I recommend it to you.

So let’s look at her idea that we are almost compelled to think of God as a reality in our lives. And at this stage I am not defining God at all, except maybe for something that gives life. The video with Phillip Clayton also looked at this.

So why the pull, the desire?

Many who would dismiss the notion of God may think we use God as a crutch, believing in a higher power when things get hard.  Suggesting that we blame God when things go wrong and praise God when things go right. Others may say we want there to be something greater than ourselves, greater than the physical world and our own limited horizons, so we make God up.  Deep down we want immortality, that it’s so hard to face our own death we create a heaven up there , and hell is thrown in to keep people in order.  These are all possibilities. 

Yet, for some reason, throughout history, from the very beginning of the human story we have felt this divine/spiritual connection. It seems to be there even when we don’t acknowledge it.  It seems to be something almost innate in us, that we seek this connection.  As Robin Meyer says in his new book, “before language, before cave painting , before making of any artefacts that could be left as evidence some early ancestor must have wondered if all that they could see was animated by a universal spirit that they couldn’t see.  A longing for transcendence translated into burial rituals and songs and painting, well before homo sapiens arrived.”

Let me read another  quote from Karen Armstrong, from her book, “The History of God”….

Introduction p xix

So if one acknowledges that we, as conscious beings, have always had this urge to search for the divine spirit, then it applies to us as much to anyone who has ever lived.

All of us here, even with our cultural heritage, must at some point have responded either yay or no to the question, does this spirit or divine essence I call God exist.  In me, in the world.

Something to ponder…

What about my own journey. I had to recount it at a talk I gave to Greenwood Uniting on Progressive Christianity late last year. I realise it shows that I have always been asking the God question and writing about it since I was an adult.   After getting ready for this month’s worth of sermons it becomes clear it is all that I have written about for years.

My journey has involved being fairly anti religion at one point, having been very good friends and still are with a committed Baptist, and sharing a house and many heavy conversations about God and the universe and life when we were younger.  I felt like Paul, very aggressively on the side of atheism, on the side of science, and how can you be a scientist and a person of faith! Really!

But times change and understandings change, in fact I have gone one way, towards faith and my Baptist friend has gone the other, when she realised a very traditional view of Christianity did not explain the world she lived in and travelled in.

When I studied anatomy, then taught it and was involved in preparing specimens for teaching, so had to dissect dead bodies or cadavers my thinking started to change, I started to expand my views of life and everything really.  The hidden divine impulse began to bite and bite hard.

When you see a  whole cadaver or dead body in a lab, it can be quite confronting.  I remember how I was especially touched by an older women’s body, just lying there on the table in one of my sessions. I pondered, was she someone who had a family who loved her, maybe had children, probably like us had her likes and dislikes, maybe she did something really incredible for a job, or maybe she was a cleaner or just stayed home and looked after her kids.  Was she someone who spoke up for others, or believed in God? How did she die, was it quite quick, or a long drawn out illness. And why did she feel that donating her body to the anatomy department was a good idea?  

Questions, questions.

What is it to be alive, to be in the world?  I know that the inner spark, the life force that makes us who we are was gone from this person. Whatever made that woman alive, had been snuffed out. Whatever made her “her” was gone. 

So yes, we are blood and tissue, and joints and muscles and organs and skin, but we are also thoughts, and feelings, and hopes and dreams, and joys and sorrows, a subjective life that seems to stem not just from the physical world but from some culmination of all that we are.  That give our life meaning and purpose, colour and framework. Some of it can be identified and labelled as this part of the brain or that, but much of it can’t.  Often it’s called the soul or spirt or consciousness or even the heart or essence of the person.  All this makes up what we see in each other, in these amazing human beings.

As Paul Kahini, the author of “Breath Becomes Air”,  says .  “The most central aspects of our human life cannot be measured, “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honour, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue”, and I would add, joy and compassion and forgiveness. “Between these core passions and scientific theory there will always be a gap.  No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience”.

My anatomical career, both as a student and as a teacher, has led me to explore the nature of life, and the age old question of God or at least the idea there was something else going on here that cannot be seen or measured. 

But what did I do with it in my 20s, when this widening of my reality happened. Because I worked at RPH, and met Keith Jones who worked with me I was led to Wembley Downs Uniting.  Not that this was simple or without some feelings of doubt.  But I came anyway, heard Nev preach, among others and realised that what he said made sense to me on my journey of discovery.  Of course Nev was   a progressive before the term was even coined, which helped a lot, as did the community who have always been outward looking, and questioning, but warm and accepting.

So here I am many years later, a husband in tow, having meet him from a Monday night group I joined through the church, which seemed weird at first.  But funnily enough most of the people in that group, also explorers, are still my close friends.

And I am still an explorer. Pick axe in hand.

So that’s some of my journey.  And you may ask, where am I now, after all these years. Well I am an integrationist, between science and faith.  

While we will explore this more next week, delving deeper into how science helps our understanding of God in the 21stcentury, let me share some introductory thoughts on it.

I have been a scientist and a teacher of anatomy and human biology, but clearly, from what I have said, I am not as some are, a materialist,  or as the atheist, James Fodor, on the God Forbid podcast described, a believer in scientism. A materialist is someone for whom science will explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry and biology. That science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brain activity and nature is purposeless.  This is materialism, or scientism, which some of the new atheists like Dawkins prescribe too. 

And I am not alone in the science world in not supporting it!

Modern physics, focussing on quantum mechanics and cosmology, philosophy and evolutionary biology is taking us to a different more expanded place.  There is the story of the universe, our own evolutionary story, and then there’s the story of consciousness. More and more the subjective world, the world of consciousness explodes this idea that we are just a bunch of cells, that respond to internally driven cues.   There is the actual presence of a subjective world, that is more than just the mechanics. We experience colour, rather than just seeing it, we experience our surroundings, rather than just responding to them as a machine, and we are conscious of ourselves as human being and of others who travel with us.  

We are a marvel of creation and there are mysteries going on that are deeper than we can understand.

As science moves beyond materialism Rupert Sheldrake would suggest we are recovering a sense of the life inherent in nature as a whole and in self organising systems at all levels of complexity. And producing new ways of connecting to our Christian roots.  I feel like my journey matches this journey.

So maybe the sense of awe we feel at the created order, or the beautiful music we listen to, the sense of peace we experience at times when we are silent, the sense of connectedness to all things that rises up and greets us when we are working alongside others, loving others, the knowing we get at odd times, that there is something more, something extra within and between us, doesn’t seem so radical anymore.  This is the transcendence Clayton speaks of.   The presence of God in all things, and all things in God. 

This is where I am at. But I don’t want to finish this sermon without thinking about all of you.

What about your journey, your story, your searching. 

For we have all been explorers in our own ways.

Many of you might have started in a fairly traditional way.  The story of God is woven into the story of Jesus, and the doctrines you were given as children sat with you as you grew, and found a job, a partner and had children.. The ethics that were given to you through the stories sat well and you sensed this was a good way to live.

But maybe there has come a time, when your life is closer to the end than the beginning, when the answers given in Sunday school class or even in your early adult days,  are not enough to explain the wonderous world we live in, or the sorrow and grief you have endured.  It has made a God sitting in the sky unbelievable.

So you explore further, ask more questions, doubt and worry that maybe you have got it wrong, or others have it wrong. All the time searching searching….

Yet it’s okay to have a faith that is changing, and developing, just like science is a growing and developing practise.  As Einstein says, we sit on the shoulders of those who have gone before, to see the future horizon. Many people writing in modern theology and philosophy today, have been on such a journey. 

In fact we come from a long line of searchers, a long line of seekers……

It reminds me of a quote by Kari Jo Verhulst, who is a writer for the Sojourners magazine. I have used it before, but it seems to speak to me today, and hopefully you -

“I sometimes wake at 3am with a start, jolted by the certainty that we had made God up. Given the dispassionate nature of the world, and the banality of our cruelty and self-absorption, the idea of a loving, present God seemed overwhelmingly absurd, a feeling as sad as it was terrifying. Thus it has been a great and humbling relief to discover that I exist in the company of millennia of God lovers who also awaken to this dreadful sense of improbability. Those wiser than I, rabbis and poets, theologians and preachers, locate these midnight churnings squarely within the life of faith. I heard one say that if you are not convinced you are making it up at least a third of the time, you are spiritually dead. So, I now say to myself on nights like these, `This is what it is to be alive`.”

This is what it is to be alive!  

Like Phillip Clayton says, it’s the greatest of privileges to explore the meaning of God. And science helps us to widen our view, and open our eyes.

So we will continue exploring next week.