Politics by Other Means: Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century

By William Grassie

Politics by Other Means explores profound issues at the interface of contemporary religion and science from a global perspective. Brought together and thematically organized in this volume are twenty-four essays that were originally presented at conferences in China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and Sri Lanka. Many of the essays are more journalistic in tone and content while others adopt a more academic prose style and approach. All are provocative and iconoclastic challenging scientific and religious orthodoxies, exploring the great cultural ambivalences at the intersection of the domains of science and religion, and holding out the possibility of a transformative politics for addressing the great challenges of the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450038508

Book preview

RELIGION BY OTHER MEANS

2. Ten Reasons for the Constructive Engagement

of Science and Religion

This essay was originally published on Metanexus, 2003.12.11.

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/8539/Default.aspx

1.   Cultural Ambivalence

When we talk about the domains of science and religion, much less the constructive engagement between the two, we are confronted with a deep cultural ambivalence about one or the other. Science for many people brings to mind negative images of toxic industries, Frankenstein foods, arrogant physicians, dehumanizing knowledge, nuclear holocaust, and other Promethean tragedies. Similarly, religion also brings to mind negative images for many of religious wars, inquisitional torture, fanatical intolerance, genocidal persecutions, and deadly cults. Often juxtaposed to these negative images of one domain, either religion or science, is generally a positive and sometimes utopian orientation towards that which is considered the other. In light of these deep prejudices, many would say that a constructive engagement of the two is foolish and futile. Take this instead as a backwards compliment, evidence for why this dialogue is both courageous and visionary. We are clearly going against the tide of some of the deepest prejudices and most profound ambivalences in our culture today. If for no other reason, this is fertile and necessary ground for sustained and serious inquiry. Science and religion is a hot spot for cultural evolution.

2.   Definitional Ambiguity

There is really no such thing as science or religion. Instead we are confronted with a vast plurality of religions, seemingly incompatible in their truth claims and practices, and a multiplicity of scientific disciplines, which may have little in common with one another. In all of our philosophical attempts to rigorously define either science or religion, these abstract terms, which we use daily with a common sense understanding, begin to elude comprehension. The modern university has become a new Tower of Babel, in which we are all speaking mutually incomprehensible languages when we leave the comfort of our narrow specializations to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue, which is in some sense also necessarily an interfaith encounter. There may not be definitive definitions, and certainly not final answers, but we need to put questions about the Universe and the Universal back at the heart of the University.

3.   Metaphysics Matters

When we talk about metaphysics, please stay away from that section of the bookstore so labeled, which it seems has become a catchall category for wild speculation and wishful thinking. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, for instance the relationship between mind and matter, animate and inanimate, substance and attribute, fact and value. Contrary to much thinking in the sciences today, there is no such thing as a metaphysically free way of understanding the world. To argue that there is no overarching metaphysical reality, as in the case of postmodernism, or to argue that this reality is mere materialism, reductionistically understood, is itself to assert a metaphysical system. The moment we try to understand how disparate data relate to one another in some kind of coherent or incoherent system, we are engaged in metaphysical speculation. Some interpretations may be more adequate than others, but there are no definitive proofs. While the metanarratives of metaphysics are currently out of fashion in academics, these are nevertheless the foundations upon which we construct our worldviews and our world-doings. One exciting aspect of the science and religion dialogue is to see how science seems to point beyond itself to something more, something transcendent, although it would be a big leap to necessarily equate this more with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus, and Mohammed, for example, or the Buddha nature in all things. Nevertheless, metaphysics matters. We need a more humble hermeneutics in which we do not use our metaphysical assumptions as a truncheon to truncate open-end conversations.

4.   Relational Revelations

Of course, one need not start with the metaphysics of science. Most people begin with spiritual convictions and religious commitments for reasons that are unrelated to the domains of science. One might have personal mystical experiences, be challenged by moral and existential problems, or simply be raised in a tradition in which a certain worldview was taken for granted. Today, however, we cannot ignore the multiplicity of religious traditions, even if we commit ourselves to the particularism of a single tradition. And while there may be privileged traditions, the revelations themselves point repeatedly to our finite ability to understand the Source, and challenge us to look relationally at the world around us as somehow significant to that Source. Because all revelations can only be understood relationally, spiritual humility is always promoted as an important religious virtue. In the theistic traditions, for instance, we believe in a Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the Universe. How then could the content of science, as a language about this universe, be ignored by theists? Contrary to static views of religions, there is a long evolving and intellectually exciting history of interpreting and integrating scientific insights into our traditions. Furthermore, the reverse is also true, that our theologies and philosophies of nature, actually inform the interpretation of our science. While science strives to be apodictic, the object of religion is apophatic. We should not be seduced by science-envy to adopt methods either unsuited to the Source or idolatrous in their expectation of certainty.

5.   Science as a Spiritual Quest

I imagine that most scientists actually begin their careers having fallen in love with the world that they study. Why else would one devote one’s life to the disciplined and often tedious study of some set of phenomena in painstaking detail with generally little reward or recognition? In this sense, science can be thought of as similar to the learning of foreign languages, which requires a lot of hard work, but also the mystical moment of a profound gestalt shift. Great science seems to occur most often when the scientist, like the anthropologist or missionary in a foreign land, goes native. A good physicist dreams in the mathematics of the cosmos; a good chemist thinks within the three-dimensional bonding space of complex molecules; a good biologist has a feel for the organism. Science can be thought of not as a privileged epistemology but as altruistic fidelity to the phenomena. To sustain a love over a lifetime, as most couples discover, requires a kind of spiritual commitment and discipline. Science itself is a kind of spiritual discipleship. If scientists experience their love to grow barren and unrequited, then rage may come to govern their relationship with themselves, each other, and the object of their study. So there is in the dialogue between science and religion also a kind of pastoral concern for scientists, that they have healthy and fulfilling lives and relationships. Fortunately, many scientists today are beginning to speak openly about how they understand their professions to be a kind of spiritual quest. It is important to affirm both the realism and the romanticism in the difficult work that scientists do and for our society to support them in this work.

6.   The Sciences of Religion Revisited

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the social sciences were founded with a largely hostile understanding of religious phenomena. Religion was generally seen as dysfunctional, regressive, and oppressive, something to be explained away and replaced with science. Today, there is a growing appreciation of how religion can also be highly functional and healthful, both for communities and individuals. Freed of this Oedipal hostility and other apologetic agendas, the tools of the social sciences can shed new light on religious phenomena in both their functional and dysfunctional manifestations. As a curious example, psychology, once the overt enemy of religion, has become a helpmate in the widespread use of psychological screening tests in the selection and training of new clergy at most seminaries in the United States today. Similarly, sociology points to the centrality of religion in the recovery from addictions, in upward mobility for disadvantaged youth, and in decreased recidivism in prisons. There is an enormous amount of complicated and exciting research to be done as we revisit the sciences of religion. This research can hopefully help the religious also to be more authentically faithful.

7.   Healthy Semiotics

Sooner or later, everyone gets sick. It is now well established that our beliefs are powerful medicine. About 30 percent of the effectiveness of any medical treatment, whether western scientific medicine, or some alternative healing practice, is the result of the so-called placebo effect. This applies as much to the efficacy of such mechanical-types of therapy like knee surgery as to more mental-types of treatments for depression. Modern medicine would like to believe that placebos can be isolated in the heads of their patients. Double-blind experiments have blinded researchers to the semiotics of health. We need to talk about deep placebo effects that are distributed throughout the cultural context of healthcare. So pill-popping may be an effective placebo in the United States, but it may not be in Brazil, which doesn’t have a culture of pill-popping. While acupuncture and antibiotics work somewhat independently of belief systems, even when animals are concerned, such therapies will work better if you believe in them. Furthermore, belief systems are often deeply related to social support structures and other attitudinal factors, all of which profoundly affect one’s immune system and health outcomes. Of course, in the end, taxes and death are the only certainties. But here too, the beliefs and attitudes, with which one approaches the obligations of life and the mystery of death, profoundly affect the quality of life lived. The semiotics of health necessarily implicated the sciences of medicine in the messiness of cultures.

8.   Innumerate Nescience

Surveys suggest that most people in the United States today can’t tell an atom from a molecule from a cell, don’t have a rudimentary understanding of electromagnetism, don’t know the difference between a star and a galaxy, and surely don’t understand genetics or the basic outline of natural history on this planet. This is quite remarkable if we consider how much money and effort has been invested over the last sixty years in public science education. Perhaps there is something wrong in the way we teach science? To paraphrase a quip by Henry Ford on history, science education has become one damn fact after another. Perhaps the introduction of philosophical, religious, historical, and moral questions into the science curriculum would reinvigorate science education. Without the big questions to inspire interest and the metanarratives by which to orient the myriad details, general science literacy will continue to suffer. This does not bode well for democracy in an age of accelerating science, nor for continued and expanded public funding of scientific research. Traditionally, religious questions of meaning and purpose, virtues and values, can help enliven general science education. Religious institutions should actually be the primary ally of institutional science in our efforts to enhance science literacy and public funding of scientific research.

9.   Philistine Fideism

Through the subjectivization and commodification of religion in the twentieth century, we have reached the absurd situation in which everyone claims to be an expert in religion. As if suffering from a massive wish-fulfillment disorder, most have reduced their spiritual lives to mere opinion. Any proposition can be true, if one simply believes in it enough. Religions, of course, are anything but simple. The study of religion is infinitely fascinating, complex, and highly disciplined. While the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against the teaching of sectarian religion in public schools, it has always permitted the teaching of religious history, the philosophy of religion, sacred text as literature, and comparative religion. Unfortunately, this is perceived as controversial, so it is largely ignored in most schools. Of course, it is not likely that there are many teachers out there who would be adequately trained in teaching religion. The science and religion dialogue, however, requires that we take a fresh look at religion to try to understand its confounding particularism and profound universalism. Science provides a wonderful bridge for interreligious dialogue and for comparative religious studies, while helping to sharpen philosophical reflection and deepening our appreciation of these received wisdom traditions. This is a wonderful antidote to Philistine Fideism!

10.   Moral Muddles

The dialogue between science and religion stands at the nexus of the great moral and aesthetic challenges of our age. We live at an extraordinary moment in the natural history of this planet and the cultural evolution of our species. Over the last hundred years, there has been a remarkable growth in human population and resource consumption. We have changed every bioregional ecosystem on the planet and the atmosphere as a whole. We are about to embark upon the large-scale genetic engineering of other life-forms and of ourselves. Humans are a Lamarckian wildcard in the Epic of Evolution. It is not only that science and its technology give us the power to change the world and ourselves; it is that our values and motivations will increasingly animate this growing power. Metaphysics becomes the motive force for our future evolution. What values, morals, and aesthetics will govern this new stage of evolution in the twenty-first century and beyond? These are questions that cannot be solved by erecting a hermetic and hermeneutical barrier between science and religion; we need to be involved in a deep dialogue as we muddle our way into what we hope will be a healthier and safer future.

3. Metanexus: The Very Idea

This essay is an adaptation of the opening address to

the Metanexus conference at the University of Pennsylvania, June 3, 2006

The juxtaposition of the concepts science and religion in our civilization is a kind of Rorschach test for all kinds of deeply held prejudices and beliefs. The terms are often thought of almost as antonyms and reflect a profound cultural ambivalence in our postmodern civilization.

That is why we decided to create a new term, a neologism that in our wildest dreams will eventually work its way into the English language and perhaps other languages as well. We took the Greek prefix, meta-, meaning transcending or transforming, and combined it with the Latin noun, nexus, meaning connection or core. Philologists say that one should never combine Greek and Latin.2 Similarly, it seems the terms science and religion should not be in too close proximity in our culture.

The term metanexus means transcending and transformational networks, and that is precisely what we hope to build with you. The world needs bridges between different academic disciplines, different institutional forms, and different religious and cultural traditions that will help us transcend and transform our thinking and doing in wholesome and creative ways.

Of course, Metanexus is also a proper name for this remarkable organization, the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science. Founded in 1997, it has grown beyond its humble beginnings here in Philadelphia to become an international network of tens of thousands of individuals around the world. Through our online journal, research projects, and events, we promote interdisciplinary, international, and interreligious inquiries, without flattening difference or reducing rigor.

All of this is the result of the leadership of a remarkable board of directors and a highly dedicated and effective staff. All of this is the result of all of you, our many members and partners throughout the world. And all of this is the result of the vision and generosity of Sir John Templeton, whose foundation makes much of this work possible. Metanexus is nothing without each one of you, contributing in your own ways to making this complex distributed system transcend and transform itself and the world.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES

The constructive engagement of religion and science means many different things to many different people. I shall attempt to give an overview of the different ways that scholars think about religion and science.

One can approach the topic with general philosophical and metaphysical concerns: What is religion? What is science? How are they similar and different? How do we know? What are adequate metaphysical categories? These are great questions to contemplate and debate.

When we consider science, we are compelled to quickly break it down into different disciplines and subdisciplines. The dialogue between religion and science also breaks down into these different scientific disciplines.

One can approach the juxtaposition with special reference to physics and cosmology. Many books have been written, and conferences were held to delve deeply into the appropriate interpretation of contemporary physics and cosmology, all of which has implications for our understandings of religion.

When we turn to evolution and biology, we end up with a different set of issues to be philosophically interpreted, all of which have religious significance. Here, we seek to get beyond the tired history of Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design to explore constructive theologies of evolution.

When we turn to the human sciences, there can be no easy boundary drawn between the domains of science and the domains of religion. More than anything, religions are about what it means to be fully human, to realize our humanity. From the human sciences come many new discoveries. Disciplines as diverse as the neurosciences and economics offer important new insights into what it means to be human. When we are ourselves the subject of scientific investigation, this inquiry must also impinge upon and be informed by the world’s cultural traditions and the acquired wisdom of our ancestors.

As subsets in the human sciences, we must consider both the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena, as well as, the dynamics of religion, spirituality, and health. Both of these interdisciplinary specializations have compelling practical and clinical relevance for human well-being.

The point of entry into this larger conversation varies for each one of us. Many will have a particular interest and expertise in one of these areas and have little interest or expertise in another area. Science and religion is a big field, not much is excluded. So too is Metanexus. We expect you to chart a course through this gathering based on your particular interests, but also to be surprised and delighted by exposure to other ways of formulating the issues at hand.

Moving away from the more scholastic concerns, we confront the domains of science, technology, and ethics. Let us call this the power paradox. Humans have enormous new powers that would have appeared godlike and magical to our ancestors even hundred years ago. What is not clear is whether we are any wiser, more compassionate, and more moral than our ancestors. Only more powerful, it seems. We lack historical perspective. We think nothing of flying around at thirty thousand feet, complaining about uncomfortable seats and bad food. We think nothing of cheap cell phones and googling for truth on the Internet. We have life, more abundantly perhaps, but there are also dark and dangerous challenges presented by all of this progress—the possibilities of global environmental and economic collapse, the dangers of virulent new diseases, the horrors of modern warfare—it could be a long list. The nuclear bomb is perhaps the most poignant icon for the modern power paradox. As Einstein warned, The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled disaster. The world needs the best of science and the best of religion to adequately address these challenges. We need to change our ways of thinking, and the constructive engagement of religion and science helps to do so.

When we consider the conflicts ranging in the world today, we find that science and religion have a supporting role to play in crafting healthy civil societies. Free, prosperous, and peaceful societies will not thrive long or even survive in our global civilization without an adequate understanding of the sciences, as well as diverse religious traditions.

Finally, we recognize that most people do not approach their spiritual life with the sciences as the point of departure. Most people begin with a profound commitment to a religious tradition in which they were raised and of whose profundity they have been convinced through community worship, meaningful stories, deep study, and personal experience. If one believes in a God, for instance, who is a Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the Universe, then he or she is also obligated to take science seriously as part of God’s revelation. What we don’t agree about is how to appropriately incorporate contemporary science into the interpretation of our traditions. Here is another great opportunity in the mission of Metanexus, the opportunity to engage in deep, enriching, and transformative intrareligious and interreligious dialogue.

THE PRESENT MOMENT

The more humans learn about the universe through science, the more we must look anew at ourselves. Science is a kind of magic mirror for human identity. As science helps us to better understand the world and ourselves, it also transforms us through remarkable new technologies and discoveries. The appropriate integration and interpretation of these new scientific insights and technologies require the creative collaboration of the world’s wisdom traditions. This is one of the core assumptions that guide the work of Metanexus.

Today, humans can gaze out upon the fascinating complexity of the universe with the Hubble Space Telescope, even as we discover that the elemental components of our bodies are recycled stardust.

Today, humans can explore and edit the intricate chemical structures of life, even as we understand that the cellular structures of our organs are condominiums for DNA-replicating microorganisms.

Today, humans can ponder anthropogenic global climate change, even as we recognize that the chemical composition of our bodies is a complex manifestation of ocean water—thinking about itself.

Today, we can log on to the Internet and share in rich technological and cultural legacies, even as we learn that this negentropic exchange of information is as ephemeral as the vibrating subatomic particles which beam across fiber-optic cables and bounce off satellites.

Today, vast global markets are transforming how we eat, live, work, love, fight, and think, economic markets which are governed by a merely symbolic system of value, i.e. money that nevertheless radically changes the material world.

THE NEW COSMOLOGY

Certainly, the modern scientific account of physical, biological, and cultural evolution is an extraordinary discovery of our times. Many different scientists in diverse disciplines have pieced together the Epic of Evolution over the last few decades, but it really represents a cultural achievement spanning the millennia of human existence.

Science gives us every year exponentially more seemingly disconnected facts. The university becomes a new Tower of Babel organized around increasing specialization and divisions of labor, also within the humanities. It is no longer C. P. Snow’s two cultures; instead we are confronted with thousands of disciplinary cultures within the academy. All is not lost though, because in spite of the lack of a universal scientific or cultural framework transcending our disciplinary differences, the threads of scientific facts are nevertheless woven on the warp of time and the woof of scale like a magical Persian tapestry. Science has given us a chronological narrative of an evolving universe of emergent complexity, ordered in the scale of entities from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic.

In brief outline, this omnicentric universe began some thirteen billion years ago as infinite heat, infinite density, and total symmetry. The universe expanded and evolved into more differentiated and complex structures—forces, quarks, hydrogen, helium, galaxies, stars, heavier elements, complex chemistry, and planetary systems. Some 3.5 billion years ago, in a small second- or third-generation solar system, the intricate process called life began on at least one small planet. Animate matter-energy on Earth presented itself as a marvelous new intensification of the creative dynamic at work in the universe. Then some two million years ago, as if yesterday in the enormous timescales of the universe, early humans emerged on the savanna of Africa with their enormously heightened capacities for conscious self-reflection, language, and tool making. And this unfolding leads us all the way to today, to this conference, to tonight, with people gathered from the four corners of the world in order to consider so many profound topics. Truly astonishing!

HOMO RELIGIOSUS

The word myth is popularly understood to mean an idle fancy, a fiction, or a falsehood, but there is another meaning of the word in academic discourse. A myth, in this latter sense of the word, is a story that serves to define the fundamental worldview of a culture by explaining aspects of the natural world and delineating the psychological and social practices and ideals of a society. Using the original Greek term mythos is perhaps a better way to distinguish this more positive and all-encompassing definition of the word.

So the question now becomes, can modern science provide a mythos for our times? On the one hand, the modern scientific enterprise has assiduously sought to avoid such questions of meaning, values, and purpose implied by the term mythos. Science is about describing reality as it really is, not how it ought to be. This is the famous is/ought distinction in the philosophy of science. Indeed, many of the descriptions of how nature is in reality would be horrific guidelines for how humans ought to think and behave. Using a description of nature as a prescription for human behavior is called the naturalistic fallacy. In the ought-world of our moral imagination, for instance, we should not have famine, death, predation, and extinction, though this is true and necessary of natural processes. The is-world of nature should not become normative for human behavior.

Furthermore, the objection to our enterprise would continue: the history of combining science with preconceived ideals and ideologies for how the world ought to be has resulted in bad science and bad societies. So the plea from this camp is to leave science alone to do its methodical and myopic work of figuring out the intricate details of how reality really works. No good will come from asking these big mythological questions in the context of science.

On the other hand, it can be argued that science is necessarily and always important currency in our cultural unfolding. It is not the least bit clear how the rest of society can leave science alone to do its work in isolation. Nor is it clear that a mythos-free society is possible or desirable. Indeed, humans might better be classified as Homo religiosus, in our seemingly universal need to discover, create, and tie together a seemingly chaotic reality into ordered and meaningful narratives. In the name of demystifying one religious story, we always seem to create new religious stories. For some, salvation through science, which we shall refer to as scientism, is also one of these stories, another unprovable faith among many. Nietzsche’s famous aphorism applies: He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how. Humans are hardwired, beginning sometime around two years of age, to ask why. We must develop deep cultural structures that are filled with profound stories and meaningful symbol systems.

INTERPRETATION MATTERS

Modern science is an important part of this cultural process today, even as it discovers new aspects of reality. Science itself is imbued at every level, consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally, with meanings, purposes, and values. This is as it must be. Let us begin to talk about this as a global civilization by rigorously examining both the content of science and the interpretation of science. As we traverse the sequential changes in time-space and matter-energy that have brought us to this moment of consciousness, let us ask the question why. Is it so preposterous to think that the biophysical processes that gave rise to our purpose-seeking species might themselves be processes imbued with purpose? God’s purpose?

The universe and life that I experience through reason and faith are overflowing with meaning, order, and values. Perhaps it is a peculiar kind of modern cultural autism to think of nature otherwise. Science is begging for this kind of philosophical, mythopoetic, moral, and cultural treatment today. From general science education in public and parochial schools to the most advanced levels of research, science and society will be left increasingly sterile and barren without such an engaged discussion.

Religionists have something important to teach the scientists in how to interpret this marvelous new story that they have quite unintentionally put together in bits and pieces. Clerics and educated laity understand the importance of interpretation, though they frequently disagree about how. All believers confront the problems of interpretation in revealed scriptures, mystical epiphanies, and evolving traditions. Though mystics seek a direct connection with the spiritual core of the universe, God by whatever name, they are also necessarily nurtured and limited by communities of interpretation. While the Divine can powerfully manifest itself in human lives, humans are nevertheless finite in their ability to embrace this fullness of Spirit. For better and for worse, our understanding of and access to the Divine are always mediated by an interpretative tradition, living community, and finite individuals. When religious people are at their best, they engage in vigorous dialogue about their differences and are enriched by this diversity. The truth is one, reads the verse from the ancient Rig Veda, but the wise call it by many names.

There is not yet an interpretive tradition about science in our global civilization. Neither scientists nor the educated public tend to understand the difference between the facts of science and the interpretation thereof. If anything, there is an anti-interpretation tradition. This is actually a dangerous situation, because cultural beings, like other beings in nature, can be rather opportunistic and lazy when not challenged to be otherwise. Precisely because science is a powerful revelation for our time, it is also dangerous. As the saying goes, even the devil quotes the Bible. Here, I am referring not to technology per se, which can be very dangerous indeed, but more to the cultural appropriations of science. To the extent that science is used to justify an ideology of cosmological meaninglessness, it undermines the pursuit of noble purposes in human life. It is widely taken for granted in scientific culture that science has somehow proven that the universe, evolution, and human existence are devoid of meaning and purpose, even if the actual practices of scientists belie this purported conclusion. Indeed, science is itself an example of the possibility of self-transcendence and thus opens up a possibility space for other kinds of transcendence.

INSURMOUNTABLE OPPORTUNITIES

We are at an extraordinary moment in the natural history of our planet and the cultural evolution of our species. The exponential growth in human population and consumption patterns, empowered in part by science and technology, is significantly altering atomic, chemical, genetic, ecological, and geological processes on Earth. Humans are a Lamarckian wildcard in the Epic of Evolution. Our desires and abilities, our intentions and unintentions will significantly alter the future evolutionary trajectory of our species and the planet as a whole. The present moment and future challenges hold many known and unknown dangers and opportunities.

I have long cherished the wisdom of a Walt Kelly cartoon, in which Pogo announces we are faced with insurmountable opportunities. It feels like that most days. So many opportunities, so little time. Friends, there is much important work to be done. And we must use the best of science and the best of religion, if we are going to succeed.

How to interpret science as it continues to unfold and accelerate is neither obvious nor simple. It requires knowing science in its complexity and diversity. The details matter, so the challenge is something like acquiring fluency in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Hungarian, and English, all at the same time.

The educational, dialogue, and research programs proposed by the term metanexus assume not that we possess truths at the outset, but that truth may emerge through a rigorous, open, and exploratory encounter between the domains of science and religion. We assume that a fusion of horizons is possible, even as new horizons of human discovery and right livelihood appear.

We believe that the new view of the universe and ourselves offered by modern science tends to minimize human ideological and territorial disputes, and so also helps promote peace and conflict resolution. Friends, let us stand shoulder-to-shoulder exploring and celebrating the many mysteries of the universe, rather than going head-to-head in escalating conflicts.

CONTINUITY + CHANGE

In pursuing this vision, we will also need to reinvent the university. Humanity has made tremendous progress through specialization and division of labor, but we need a new breed of intellectuals, scientists, clergy, and citizen alike, who are broadly trained in multiple disciplines and able to do and teach difficult and creative integrative work without collapsing disciplinary rigor. Interpreting science and religion in the twenty-first century will also require romantic vision and philosophical rigor. It will require appropriate metaphysical concepts and inspiring artistic forms. The challenge is really too much for any individual, so we must build interdisciplinary communities for integral studies. These interpretative communities must seek to integrate knowledge and wisdom from across disciplinary boundaries of our compartmentalized modern university and our fragmented postmodern society. The solution is evolution. Adapt!

In cultural evolution, as in biophysical evolution, there are both continuity and change. New adaptive structures are built upon the old structures. Critical components of the continuity needed to face the challenges of the twenty-first century and beyond are surely to be found in the religious traditions of the world. A blanket rejection of the spiritual insights accumulated over the centuries of human experimentation in diverse contexts is cultural suicide. Indeed, many of the frameworks best able to interpret science are already present in the world’s spiritual traditions. Successful adaptation is built upon creative replication. We need ancient wisdom upon which to build this new world.

THE CHARGE

And hence the mission of Metanexus and the charge for this conference are to build a community, to dialogue and debate, to hold each other accountable to rigorous standards of scholarship, but also to learn from each other. To this, we must add the challenge for many of understanding and expressing oneself in a foreign language. For some, that foreign language will be English, for others it may be a different religious tradition, for others it may be an unfamiliar scientific discipline.

In this difficult endeavor, let us take comfort and hope in the presence of a power and personality greater than us. Muslims characterize this Presence as compassionate and merciful. Jews and Christians characterize this Presence as just and loving. All religious traditions affirm these insights with different words and in different ways. Albert Einstein suggested that the curve of the universe favors us. We may take comfort that the Universe, God by whatever name, seems to favor elegant improbabilities.

Our mission is also improbable, some would say impossible, but it is most assuredly elegant and beautiful. The contemporary encounter between science and religion is intrinsically one of the most fascinating conversations going on in this corner of our galaxy. It may also be one of the most important for our future well-being.

4. Beyond Intelligent Design, Scientific Debates,

and Cultural Wars

This essay was originally published on Metanexus, 2005.05.05

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/9284/Default.aspx

The English theologian William Paley wrote an influential book in 1802 entitled Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Paley employed the metaphor of a watch discovered on a beach. One would not know who made the watch, but one could infer that there was certainly a watchmaker. In such a way, humans studying nature could also come to understand God as its creator and designer. This metaphor of nature as watch is perhaps one of the most famous metaphors in the philosophy of science and haunts us to this day, as we see in the current debates about equal time for Intelligent Design theory in the science curriculum of public schools.

Today, some read the evidence of nature and find no evidence for the existence of a Deity. Richard Dawkins, the contemporary biologist, notorious atheist, penned a book with the title The Blind Watchmaker. He argues that The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. In the context of the warfare between evolution and creationism in the United States, the problem is perhaps less with believers who read the Bible as a literal account of Creation and more with believers who read Richard Dawkins as a literal account of evolution.

Intelligent Design advocates argue that random genetic drift and natural selection alone cannot account for the irreducible complexity in certain natural phenomena. The classic example of this is the human eye, to