Religion that is not afraid of science

ANCESTRAL GRACE: MEETING GOD IN OUR HUMAN STORY
By Diarmuid O’Murchu
Orbis Books, 288 pages, $22

WHEN GOD IS GONE, EVERTHING IS HOLY: THE MAKE OF A RELIGIOUS NATURALIST
By Chet Raymo
Sorin Books, 160 pages, $21.95

THANK GOD FOR EVOLUTION: HOW THE MARRIAGE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION WILL TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE AND OUR WORLD
By Michael Dowd
Viking, 413 pages, $24.95

Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic Orphans of the Sky is the story of an enormous “multigeneration” starship, five miles long and thousands of feet wide, outfitted for a long voyage to Far Centaurus, a distant place in our galaxy.

Three or four generations into the voyage, the inhabitants, after a long-ago mutiny, have forgotten that they live on a ship and that it’s supposed to go somewhere. For them, the ship’s windowless interior is their entire universe, and even the idea that something might exist “outside” the ship is so foreign a concept that most can’t imagine it. Their lives revolve around the necessities of eating, mating and feeding the matter converter, controlled by a high priesthood of “scientists,” themselves ignorant of where they actually are.

When the story’s protagonist, Hugh Hoyland, a young man with ambitions of becoming a scientist, is forcibly thrown into the company of mutants who occupy the upper decks, he has his eyes opened to what the ship truly is when the two-headed leader takes him to the bridge to look out the window at the stars. Hugh starts a battle to educate all the inhabitants and put the ship back on track, but first he is jailed and accused of heresy.

--NewscomIt’s a plot premise that has been revisited many times in science fiction.

And it’s an apt parable for religious views in America today.

A 2008 CBS poll showed most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form in a day.

A Creation Museum opened in northern Kentucky last year, costing $27 million to build and sitting on 49 acres. The nonprofit ministry that built the museum, Answers in Genesis, claims the universe was created in six 24-hour days a mere 6,000 years ago, and that “fact” serves as the blueprint for the museum. Founder Kenneth Ham said, “The conclusions of modern science are not to be trusted, as they are biased by the fickle reasoning of humans and a modern antagonism toward faith.”

On the other end of the war between science and religion, three recently published books take as their starting point the story modern science tells us about how the universe formed and how we humans emerged from it. The authors take present-day science accounts seriously, moving from them into areas of religious speculation.

In the Hugh Hoyland tradition, all three join the battle to put the human community back on track.

NCR interviewed the three authors of these books. Listen to these podcasts on NCRcafe.org.

Ancestral wisdom

In his new book Ancestral Grace: Meeting God in Our Human Story, Fr. Diarmuid O’Murchu states his belief that God has been fully present with humanity on the whole evolutionary journey of millions of years and not merely during the recent 5,000-year history of formal religions.

Fr. O’Murchu finds scientists’ work on uncovering our human origins in Africa “deeply mystical.” He cites the discoveries of the Leakey family and of lesser-known paleoanthropologists such as Michel Brunet and Tim White.

Anthropologists and psychologists, he said, tend to view this distant past negatively, alleging that humans were so immersed in nature and its processes, “they were largely unable to attain human distinctiveness and allow human uniqueness to evolve.”

For most of our time on this earth, however, we viewed ourselves as a part of the natural world and learned to live convivially within it. “Ours is fundamentally a narrative of belonging and interdependence,” he writes.

The loss of this ancestral wisdom is the source of the deep alienation that bewilders the human species today. His presentation of the spiritual ignificance of discoveries made by scientists in the last 50 years is a more expansive understanding that will help reverse that spiritual emptiness. “Ancestral grace has a great deal to teach us about the choices we need to make and how we can best make them,” he writes.

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Listen to Rich Heffern's interviw with Diarmuid O’Murchu. It's an NCR Podcast.

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A religious naturalist

Science teacher Chet Raymo, author of When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist, calls himself both a “Catholic agnostic” and a “religious naturalist,” explaining each term in turn.

An emeritus professor at Stonehill College in Massachussetts, Mr. Raymo writes tender and lyrical essays that explore the boundaries between faith and reason. In his latest book he contends that the ongoing tension between science and religion is caused by religious dualism, putting matter over against spirit, natural over against supernatural, body over against soul. “Science though has found nothing to sustain or support such dualism.”

Mr. Raymo is critical of much current religious thinking. “We have anthropomorphisms, misplaced pieties, triumphalism, intolerance toward ‘infidels,’ supposed miracles and supernatural imaginings, all offspring of the human imagination.”

Mr. Raymo would like to see theologians adapt to the new evolutionary story of the universe, which he says provides a satisfying ground for spirituality. The Catholic spiritual tradition contains resources for this new ground in the writings and sermons of religious naturalists and mystics such as Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin or the Dominican Meister Eckhart. The Catholic sacramental sensibility and liturgical life also provide a valuable perspective on reality, Mr. Raymo said. This is why he still calls himself Catholic.

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Listen to Rich Heffern's interviw with Chet Raymo. It's an NCR Podcast.

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Evolution’s evangelists

Michael Dowd and his wife, Connie Barlow, who is a science writer, call themselves “evolution’s evangelists.” They travel the country giving talks, workshops and retreats on the religious implications of the theory of evolution.

Mr. Dowd was pastor of three United Church of Christ congregations and managed government-funded sustainable lifestyle campaigns. His new book Thank God for Evolution has a self-help-book-type subtitle: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World. But the book is indeed about this marriage between science and religion and the bright offspring of their union.

Mr. Dowd takes the scientific account of evolution seriously while respecting the point of view of evangelical Christians who object to evolution.

“Until evolution is taught and preached in ways that conservative believers can know in their guts is holy, sacred and meaningful, that draws them closer to God, helps them feel that the history of the universe enhances their faith, then they should reject it,” Mr. Dowd said.

His book gives voice to those in the middle who manage to find a way to integrate faith and reason who are neither creationists nor militant atheists.

One obstacle, he said, is that evolution is caricatured as meaningless, blind chance, yet the whole trajectory of evolution exhibits a tendency toward greater complexity, interdependence and cooperation.

People simply know more than they did when the Bible was written thousands of years ago. For example, viral infection couldn’t be understood before the rise of science, the author said.

Filled with well-organized material and exercises, Mr. Dowd’s book could almost be a textbook for a class in creation theology and spirituality. Mr. Dowd contends in his book that we humans are made for the world while our traditional religious views have taught us that the world, indeed the whole unimaginably vast universe itself, was made for us humans. But we didn’t come into the world in some special way, he said. “We grew out from it naturally, like a peach grows out of a peach tree.”

In the end, Mr. Dowd believes that science and religion can be mutually enriching, that their present conflict is the catalyst by which both will mature in healthy ways. Science that doesn’t consider its own meaning can be a danger to us all, while religion that doesn’t adapt to new truths risks irrelevance and grave error.

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Listen to Rich Heffern's interviw with Michael Dowd. It's an NCR Podcast.

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More than 150 years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.”

All three books challenge religion to grow up, to come to terms with modern science and its discoveries about where we are and how we got here, and then let it inform and inspire theology, spirituality and even liturgy. The books discussed here may not be for the religiously faint of heart, but they will provide plenty to think about for a long time to come.

Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His e-mail address is rheffern@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter October 3, 2008