How so I respond when someone says, “Science and Religion Conflict.”

Acts 17:24-29

Today’s the first Sunday of Lent. We begin a journey, a long journey towards that moment in our lives when we move through death and into new life. We begin to examine our faith. Historically, that’s one of the things that the Church did during the period of Lent Is they examined their faith, they learned their faith so that they could live out their faith. So we’re going to do a series of sermons and a series of classes following the 10 o’clock service, that just talks about the basics of our faith.  Because it’s  gonna be difficult to talk to other people about what we believe if we don’t have any sense of what’s important and what’s integrated into our lives. So the purpose is to try and figure out what to say so I’m asking questions in these sermons.

How then do we respond when someone says to us well, I’m  not interested because science and religion are in conflict. How do we  respond to that? And just by way of preface I’d like to say that  generally speaking arguing doesn’t help. At a  practical level arguing doesn’t help you. I found this out, most recently when I talked to my cousin Jim by e-mail. You know Jim is a dear friend and just for laughs I argued with him -  not because I thought I’d change his mind. At one point he was spouting off about God doing this and doing that and I said Jim you know, sometimes I feel like I have more in common with integral Sufism than I do with Integral Christianity and he wrote back and he said, “Integral Sufism? That sounds like something we did in the dorm on Friday night with chemical substances.”

The arguing doesn’t work; arguing doesn’t work because people have to be at a moment to move and grow and develop.  In their faith, they have to be a moment where they’ve been, what they’re holding is not satisfying is not working for them and the two things that I know of that can move people or work with people at a moment like that is one, to ask questions. Is that really working for you? How does that fit?  One is to ask questions and the other is to say what’s important to you. Just a question of witness. And so in many ways what we’re gonna be doing over these weeks is asking ourselves, What’s important to the way we live?

So we begin with the text from the Book of Acts. The speech that the apostle Paul made – most scholars don’t think Paul actually said it but it’s in our Scriptures living as something that was going to reveal the word of God to us and so I invite you to listen as the spirit speaks.

Paul has said that as he went through the city he noticed that the Athenian people were very religious. They had  God’s for everything, in fact they had so many gods that he discovered that one statue was dedicated to the unknown God. And so he makes a speech. OK so the unknown God – he says the God who made the world and everything in it, one who is ruler of heaven and earth does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is that one served by human hands as though this God needed anything. As God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things from one ancestor, God made all nations to inhabit the whole Earth and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries and the places where they would live, so they would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God, though indeed God is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being as even some of your poets have said. We too are God’s offspring. Since we are God’s offspring we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. Well God has overlooked the times of human ignorance. Now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed the day on which God will have the world judged in righteousness by one whom God has appointed and of this God has given assurance to all by raising Jesus from the dead. When they heard of the resurrection of the dead some scoffed, but others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

Here with the spirit is saying to the church.

So how do we respond to somebody who says religion and science conflict? I don’t want to have anything do with religion. In some ways we’ve talked about this quite a bit over the last couple of years. And we talked about the difference between a mythic construction of faith and another kind of developed faith that goes beyond myth. But that’s at the heart of that kind of issue when somebody is making those statements religion and science conflict the view of religion that’s taken in hand is his view of the myths. You know those stories that are told about the world, how it works.

But you know those myths aren’t holding water anymore for a lot of folk. And I understand that, because science, modernism has come in, and it certainly said that the world was not created in six calendar days and God rested on the seventh, and you know these things did not happen in these ways – and I understand. But that’s not the only purpose of these myths.

The purpose of the myths was not simply to say to the people that were reading them in the first centuries when they were read. It wasn’t to just tell them how it all worked and. Oh I think I’ll sit down to teach my kids how the world was created and so I’m going to write down this poem and that will teach them.

That wasn’t the purpose . Because while it may have served that purpose in their mental framework, what it was really doing, was trying to offer them a glimpse, trying to offer them inspiration to understand who God was, what this creator was doing.

As God interacted with humankind as God worked through history, as the power and strength of the divine that looks upon us all and says we are tov, good – as that one works out, how is it that we were to relate how is it that we were to see through all the natural history that we knew? That was the other purpose of myth and the trouble is that once you’ve undercut the myth and said well, that story is not true, what happened for a lot of people is they said, “Well then the rest of it isn’t true.”

We got rid of the scientific explanation that’s fine, but then this question of engagement with the presence of the creative power of God gets put on the periphery and the trouble is that when they did that, when they do that, they were unable to get a hold of the bigness and beauty of God. Because science alone can’t do it; science alone is not going to find our way into the presence of the one is engaging us. When myth died and that inquiry goes on the periphery – and what’s really at stake here is that the presence of God, the sense of God all around us, the attention to God within us is what’s been lost, because God becomes very distant. When we simply look at science and say the rational, what we can move and handle with all our senses – the rational is all that we can deal with – it makes it a God who is very far away.

The Deists many of our country’s founders were Deists they saw the universe as almost like a clock you wind it up and God put it over their and went away. No engagement with the divine, and that’s maybe what’s sad.

That’s maybe what’s really sad about this view. It’s that “science and religion conflict and therefore I will have faith in science and not religion” doesn’t really hold on for very long. And if we just look at the world as random and without any kind of purpose or direction – just things happened and that’s the way they happened and it really doesn’t matter. What it does, is it leaves people in the place where the only law that seems to matter is the law survival. The only law that seems to matter is getting into the next-generation – to play the game a little bit better because after all, it’s all random and none of it particularly matters.

The best that you can hope for is an ethic of enlightened self interest. So where none of this really matters there is no purpose and no direction, no engagement with the creative power of God so then all we’re really talking about is survival; all we’re really talking about is playing the game. – We have some ethic, you know – we should probably be nice to each other after all. But this was built in by that random evolutionary process; we’re social creatures so we have to have some morality built into our brains. It is simply enlightened self-interest that we are relatively nice to one another. Mass murder is probably a bad idea because then the species won’t survive.

There’s a trouble with enlightened self-interest – only works for those for whom the current order satisfies them. And oh,  if your not being served by self-interest and you, you have no sense of purpose, well then you move around it. Violence erupts.

That’s very distant  and it becomes very said. When all you have is that, it’s kind of hopeless and so entertainments become extremely important because you need entertainment at the center of your life for  goodness knows you don’t want to think about the fact that you have no purpose and reason for being here at all.

Sometimes I feel that way, you know when it’s difficult to get a hold and really recognize the presence of God around you and when you don’t have that deep sense of purpose. It’s threatening, and that’s what worries me about so many people as they say, well religion and science conflict. So let’s get rid of religion; it’s sad.

On the other hand this is what Paul called the unknown God, , isn’t it? The God we don’t know about. And it’s way out there – so you’re agnostic or atheist about it but you know, whatever it is it’s irrelevant to us, is that unknown God.

But here’s the thing about science that I think is kind of cool, is that I think it leads us right back to the mystery that seeks to engage us and call us good. I think it leads us right back there, especially lately. I just love the fact that we know the age of the universe – 13.7 billion years give or take a couple of billion, I really don’t care. But 13.7 billion years, and that’s really quite beautiful.  You know there’s that old proverb that I was taught in school – That you know, evolutionists say that well, you gotta  understand that it’s a whole random world but if you have enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters – and if they could just pound on the typewriters, eventually Shakespeare would be written.

OK, that was sort of a parable they used to tell us about the randomness you know it’s like, hey look, life happens because you know it’s random. Everything was tried, all kinds of things occurred, and lo and behold something beautiful comes out.

So here is the thing: 13.7 billion years is simply not a long enough time for all that randomness to have occurred. Just not enough time.

All of a sudden science says to us, no wait a minute there has to be some directionality, some sense of creative purpose in the midst of that because OK, I’m going to  come out of the closet. I believe in intelligent design. Oh not big in a creationism and drag the other people talk about  but, you now an intelligent design – something that’s moving with purpose and direction. And it leads one to ask how do I fit into that and  now I turned back to the myths and I begin to ask the questions. What might that say about the presence of God in my own life?

Science finally brings us to the brink of mystery, but can never cross over into it. How come there is something instead of not how come there is nothing? How come there is nothing instead of whatever wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t any nothing. Science can bring us to the moment of mystery and when we come to that and have no answer, we find we are engaged by a presence that comes back to us.

It’s a beautiful thing to recognize that which we that which we cannot know, reaches out and lives among us. That’s what Paul said to the people God’s not far away. This unknown God, not far away and then Paul quotes one of their poets. This is the God in whom we live and move and have our being. God is close.

That is what’s at stake when the question is asked if science and religion conflict.   Is God far away or is God close? All we need do is pay attention, to awaken to the presence of God that lives within us.

Can you feel that presence now? There are lots of ways to get to it. Sometimes it comes to us through a deep feeling. Sometimes something that shimmers in our imagination, sometimes it comes to us in an engagement with other people.

But notice the presence of God, the Spirit in which we live and move and have our being, close and working with purpose, looking at each one of our lives and saying – tov – your are beautiful, Marc is forever saying, “Gorgeous, you are all gorgeous. And what makes you gorgeous, is the fact that the spirit is living within you, moving within you, bringing something beautiful forward.

We live in a world not of random purposelessness. Rather we live in a world of deep beauty, of beauty that lives within each and every one of us.

How do we respond, how do you respond when people say – well religion and science are in conflict? Well, we should probably ask questions. What does that mean for you when you fill that out? What does that mean for you? It’s random you really think that’s random? Living in a world – it’s random and has no purpose,” is that working for you?
I live in a world where I notice the presence of God, where when I read the text of Scripture I begin to see what they saw. God is a God that moves from death to resurrection always the new moment of life, always seeking to bring something more true and beautiful out of every one of us.

Questions, and what you’ve experienced in the presence of God. You know the beautiful thing is about talking to people about your faith, is you are not responsible to convince them; only responsible to share what you found – questions and all – because God is their close, so close you can’t be separated from God, and it turns out that creation goes – in the long run – God’s way