CAN SCIENCE REMAIN OUR SACRED COW?
A sermon by Rev. Robert M. Eddy
prepared for the Unitarian Universalist Church
of Pensacola, Florida
2 December 2001

A year ago today Gerry and I were enjoying the hospitality of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Miguel de Allende, the only real UU Congregation in Mexico. The membership of the group is about 50 though attendance can climb to 150 when the snowbirds arrive in January. I was privileged to speak to the Fellowship four times while we were there. I also attended a small “quest” group which was exploring “spirituality”, a new experience for most of the old non Theistic Humanists in the group. One Thursday our guest was a visiting “healer” who used the ancient Hindu concept of Charka's and a more modern “new age” jargon of “auras” and “energy fields” to describe the life of the Spirit which she tied in with her understanding of the metaphysical nature of the Universe the really real “out there.” During one of the exercises - I won't go into detail -- she asked the members of the group, “Do you feel it?” “Do you feel it?” Most answered, “Yes” but one said, “No not really.” To which our healer said, laughing “You don't believe a word of it, do you?”
Now I don't really know whether charka's or auras or chi or chai or yin or yang or any other terms she used represent what’s really real or not. I do know that the “healer” was not only real but good. She did not put down those of us “couldn't believe a word of it.” She cared about us and used her belief to try to heal, never to harm.
Who among us will say, with absolute certainly, what's “really real?” Not many. But there are many among us who find it easy to say, “ that’s baloney” to other persons’ versions of “what's really real.” I must confess I too find many of the ideas that are popular among younger UU’s literally incredible -- unbelievable. But that is not what is important -- and that is perhaps the most important point of this sermon. What is important is not whether a belief is true. What is important is what that belief does to a person. What is important is what that belief encourages, empowers, makes real in the life of individual and in the community to which that person belongs.
Sophia Lyon Fahs said it much better than I can. She wrote,
“It matters what we believe.
Some beliefs are like walled gardens.
They encourage exclusiveness,
and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive
and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are like shadows,
clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities.
Other beliefs are like sunshine,
blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive,
separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community,
where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders,
shutting off the power to choose ones own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways
opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood.
They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self confidence and
enrich the feeling of personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, i
impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling,
ever growing with the upward thrust of life. These are the criteria by which I evaluate beliefs and not only to beliefs about the inner life, but beliefs about the world “out there” as well. Over thirty years ago, soon after I became a UU minister, I preached a sermon titled, Games People Play While Waiting for Godot. Those of you of my vintage will recognize the two books from which the title was spliced. In the first Eric Bern introduced “Transactional Analysis with it’s talk of the Child, Adult and Parent within each of us. The second Waiting for Godot, by Irish writer Samuel Becket, was a merry and mysterious drama featuring two clowns who were, ostensibly, waiting for someone named Godot. He never does show up but, while waiting, the clowns have long conversations about whether he is really coming, whether he exists, whether they are at the right place, whether he has come and gone before they arrived, etc., etc. The play was of course really about everyman’s -- and every woman's -- search for GOD. Or to use modern terminology, Ultimate Reality The Really Real. All of us, long ago, gave up the vision of God as a person. But we still ask “What's really real?”Most of us would reply, “Whatever Science says is Really Real is Really Real: Energy congealed in various ways from Neutrinos to Galaxies with Stars and Planets and Earth and us somewhere between. That's what's really real.” For most of us it seems that scientists have finally answered the question that Job heard coming from the whirlwind which asked,
“ Who measured out the earth? Do you know that?
Who stretched the builders line?
What were its pedestals placed on?
Who laid the cornerstone,
when the morning-stars began to shine,
and all the angels chanted in their joy?”
Do you remember the old camp song,
“Tell me why the stars do shine.
Tell me why the ivy twines.
Tell me why the sky’s so blue.
And I will tell you just why I love you.
Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine
Because God made the sky so blue,
Because God made you, that's why I love you.”
That’s still the most common reply. Because God made it that way. The Heavens Declare the Glory of God. While in Mexico, I read a delightful book titled: “Galileo’s Daughter”. It's not really about Galileo’s illegitimate daughter who became a cloistered nun at 13, but it uses her letters to her father as a framework for discussing the transition from the medieval world view to the modern world view. Although Galileo is credited by most with dragging intellectuals of the seventeenth century from the earth centered to the sun centered world view, the credit really belongs to Nicholas Copernicus a Polish Clergyman who, posthumously, in 1543 published in Latin “De revolutionibus.” It was the defense of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory as what was “really real” 90 years after Copernicus, that landed Galileo in the hands of the Inquisition. Dava Sobel, author of Galileo’s Daughter writes,
“The [official] cosmology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries founded on the fourth century BCE teachings of Aristotle and refined by the Second-century [CE] Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, made Earth the immobile hub. Around it, the Sun, the Moon, the five planets, and all the stars spun eternally, carried in perfectly circular paths by the motions of nested crystalline celestial spheres. This heavenly machinery, like the gear work of a great clock, turned day to night and back to day again.” (page 49)That was what was “really real” for nearly all educated Europeans in Copernicus’ life time. Everybody who was anybody believed it. Today we are likely to say Galileo was right and the Church was wrong. But the fact of the matter is that both were wrong. It is as inaccurate to say the Sun is the center of the Universe as it is to say the Earth is. But the point is not that both the Polemic and Copernican world views were incorrect. The point is that as the Polemic, Earth Centered view of reality lost credibility, we human beings were removed from the center of the Universe, reduced to insignificance, “lost in the stars.” But of course, the world view that Science has generated today is as far from the views of Galileo or even of Newton as those views were distant from Ptolemy. But the great displacement is still going on. Our insignificance has been attenuated to near non existence. What Science tells us is really real is hardly comprehensible in any language but abstruse mathematics. Still, Science pursues the ancient quest for “the really real.” But now the scientists have come up against a sort of black hole. Science is a process of organizing data so hypotheses can be formulated then using those hypotheses to make predictions that can be tested by experiment. If an hypothesis can not be disconfirmed it is no longer a scientific hypothesis. It seems that the theory explaining “everything,” can no longer, even theoretically, be tested. So claims David Lindly in his 1993 book The End Of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory. Not an easy read, but essential if you really want to go into this subject. A popular version is titled, “Reality isn’t What it used to be” And I would Add, it never was.
Anyhow, Lindly ends his book with these provocative words:
“That the world can be understood by pure reason, not by experimentation but by mention alone, is a very old idea, reaching back to the ancient Greeks. For the modern advocates of theories of everything, as for the ancient Greeks, reason, logic, and physics are supposed to constitute the unmoved mover, the uncaused effect. ... This (modern) theory of everything will be, in precise terms, a myth. A myth is a story that makes sense within its own terms, offers explanations for everything we see around us, but can neither be tested nor disproved. A myth is an explanation that everyone agrees on because it is convenient to agree on it, not because its truth can be demonstrated. This theory of everything, this [postmodern] myth, will indeed spell the end of physics. It will be the end, not because physics has at last been able to explain everything in the universe, but because physics has reached the end of all the things it has the power to explain.” (Emphasis added.) A myth? Doesn't Science tell us what's really real? No, it doesn't.
That's a common misunderstanding, a misunderstanding perpetuated by inadequate science teachers in our schools and evangelical science popularizes on television. Two thousand six hundred years ago, Thales, the Greek, asked , “Behind the infinite variety of life, is there a common, immutable thread?”
Many believe that today's nuclear physicists have discovered that immutable thread, the ultimate reality beyond which there is nothing more. We forget whether it’s a neutron, or a photon, or a quark or a one dimensional string but we trust the Scientists to tell us what's really real. We reject the old testament myth. We reject the Ptolemic medieval myth. We reject the Mayan myth which I studied somewhat in San Miguel. But we educated Anglos trust the scientific myth. Science is our Sacred Cow and woe be anyone who attacks it.
Myth? Myth! How dare you Bob Eddy call Science a Myth!? I dare because science, or more properly the world view produced by science to date it is a myth. Not a myth in the sense of “something other folks believe that ain’t so” but myth in the sense of a set of assumptions that give order to our perceptions - an order that makes sense of the universe;
Myths in this sense are beliefs that tell us what’s “really real.”
Should we trust the scientists to tell us what's really real? No, we shouldn't. We should trust them to search for ever more inclusive generalizations of what they “see” as they look ever farther out into space and ever deeper into the sub atomic realms. Science is the process by which we develop ever more inclusive myths. Let me repeat: Science is the process by which we develop ever more inclusive myths. But those Myths are not “the really real.” They are not true in any ultimate sense.I believe the modern scientific word view is no less a Myth than was the world view of the Egyptians or of Job or of the ancient Hindus, or of Ptolemy or of Galileo, or of the Mayans. The Scientific world view is simply a better myth for explaining the kinds of things that Science can explain. Science is one more game people play while waiting for Godot. Science does not tell us “what's really real.”
So, what is really real?
Are the inner “child,” “parent” and “child”
as the Transactional Analysts taught, really real?
Are quarks and black holes, galaxies and superstrings,
as most of you believe, really real?
Are God and Satan, Angles and Demons,
as most of our neighbors believe, really real?
Are Goddesses and Gods, as the new Pagans believe, really real?
Are witches and wizards and magic and ........... really real, as many million of Harry Potter fans may believe, really real?
Are auras and charkas and celestial spheres, as some believe, really real?
Are ghosties and goblins and “things that go bump in the night,” as most children believe, really real?
My contention is that none of these sets is really real. Do I therefore come to the conclusion that nothing is really real; that each person's “reality” is equally valid? No. I've come to the conclusion that Thales asked the wrong question. Remember? Thales asked, “Behind the infinite variety of life, is there a common, immutable thread?” That's the question that the Nuclear Physicists and the Cosmologists have been pursuing. It's an interesting question but it is not the important question. The important question is this:
Given an increasing ability to explain, predict and control the non human world, how can that knowledge best be used in the service of humanity?
That is the important question. That is the religious question.
“How can knowledge best be used in the service of humanity?” If we fail to ask that question we fall into what Pascal called “concupiscence of the intellect.” If we fail to ask that question, we become like Mary Shelly’s “Dr. Frankenstein.”
For me the “really real” is not found in material things, those “things” which can be sensed and quantified. For me the “really real” is found in non material “nothings”:
“notthings” like Justice, and Mercy, and Humility and Forgiveness, and Gratitude, and Remorse, and Loyalty, and Grace, and Friendship, and Encouragement, and Peace and love; oh yes most especially like Love. The religious person explores these realities with the same enthusiasm as the physicist pursues “the immutable thread.”
Our UU Hymnal contains many persons’ explorations of these “nonthings.” Many different myths are represented in our Hymnal. I’ve included some in our hymns and readings that explore the Deist Myth this morning. The Myth that “The Heaves Declare the Glory of God” There are other Myths there as well. What is he best myth for you? I don't know but, with Joseph Campbell, I give you this advice. Choose the myth that feeds your soul. Or perhaps I should say choose the myths -- plural -- that feed your soul for it may be foolish to think that the same myth which explains galaxies and atoms can also explain the human spirit. Consistency is useful servant but a dangerous god. But whether you choose one myth or many never forget you are choosing a myth. It only represents, it is not in itself, “the really real.”
Yes, “choose the Myths that feed your soul.”