THE RABBI AND THE PHYSICIST
Psalm 8
Sermon presented on July 20, 2008
I enjoy reading the “Weddings” pages in the “Style” section of the Sunday New York Times. There are too many wedding there to include announcement about them all, so each week the editors include an entertaining mix of the famous, the interesting and the quirky. One Sunday last month an announcement appeared reporting the wedding of Beth, a rabbi, and Clifford, a physicist. I don’t know these people, but found myself intrigued by their story. They sound like a delightful couple. After years of a long-distance relationship they’ve secured professional positions in the same New Hampshire city, so have decided to get married. Good for them! The rabbi and the physicist. “What do they talk about?” I wonder. I imagine Beth the rabbi and Cliff the physicist discussing faith and science, engaging each other with modesty and respect, as befits newlyweds, rather than in defensive, distrustful tones as often marks this topic. Probably I’m idealistic about this. Probably they’re like any other married couple, more likely to talk about dishes, diets, finances and in-laws than about the elegant and the eternal. But the article quoted Beth as saying something slyly profound, I thought. Asked about their relationship, she said: “We both try to explain how the universe works.” (1)
This wonderful statement counteracts our tendency to see science and faith as occupying wholly different, or even adversarial, spheres of inquiry and points-of-view, a difference made light of by Woody Allen, who quipped that religion has brought us the Pope while science has brought us air conditioning, and “between air conditioning and the Pope, I’d choose air conditioning.” (2) It’s as though two groups have come to the gym, but each to play a different game. On one side of the gym is a group warming-up and preparing to play volleyball. On the other side is a group shooting baskets. Each group handles the ball and performs skillfully among themselves. But they never get together, because they’ve been schooled and equipped to play different games, governed by different roles and different rules. What’s needed is to claim the insight of the rabbi and the physicist, that they’re in the same game together: “we both try to explain how the universe works.” This calls for a modest, respectful partnership. Physicist Dr. Karol Musiol writes that “religion isolating itself from scientific insights is lame, but science failing to acknowledge other ways of understanding is blind.” (3) Since we would want to be neither lame nor blind — in fact, Jesus spent a great deal of time healing people of lameness and blindness — let’s think together for a few minutes about these things.
Thinking in the church begins with scripture, of course. Psalm 8 is a soaring declaration of God’s creation. “O Lord, our Sovereign/how majestic is your name in all the earth.” According to this Psalm, a person who reflects upon the universe will be stirred by three breathtaking impressions:
+ first, by awe and wonder (“You have set your glory above the heavens”);
+ second, by an appreciation of human smallness and insignificance in relation to the cosmos (“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers/the moon and the stars that you have established/what are human beings, that you are mindful of them/mortals, that you care for them?”);
+ and, third, by an awareness of the duties and responsibilities of understanding the universe and exercising appropriate governance of it (“You have given [humans] dominion over the works of your hands.”)
The first of these impressions, awe and wonder, gives rise to praise. A few years ago Betty and I took the funicular, or cogwheel train, to the top of Mount Pilatus, outside Lucerne, Switzerland. It’s 7000 feet up, and at the top there unfolds a spectacular view of mountains, lakes, valleys and forests. As we walked among the rocks on the mountaintop, exhilarated by the view, we noticed a boulder with a plaque on it. We made our way over to it. The plaque read: “Come and see what God has done; He is awesome in all his deeds.” Psalm 66, verse 5. I don’t know who placed it there, but I know why. “O Lord, our Sovereign/how majestic is your name in all the earth.” Faith arouses, and for many actually originates with, an experience of awe and wonder.
And this may be said of science, as well. Einstein said, famously: “One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.” (4) This sublime idea is seconded by another scientist, Mr. Wizard, whose real name was Don Herbert. He introduced a generation of us to science, on his television program, in the fifties and early sixties, and then again on Nicklodeon in the 1980s. Do any of you remember Mr. Wizard? In an interview shortly before his death last year, Don Herbert/Mr.Wizard said: “Science is about the real world around us and it’s filled with fascinating wonders.” (5) Fascinating wonders, indeed.
The rabbi and the physicist, faith and science, both begin with a sense of abiding astonishment.
But with awe also comes humility. As Billy Bigelow sings to Julie Jordan in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel:
We’re not important.
What are we?
Just a couple o’ speaks of nothin’
Look up there . . .
There’s a whole lot of stars in the sky,
And the sky’s so big the sea looks small,
And two little people, you and I,
We don’t count at all. (6)
It’s an instinctive and natural response, which we hear echoed in the Psalm (“what are human beings, that you are mindful of them?”). But here’s another point on which faith and science agree: that the human spirit is appropriately “whelmed” by the vastness, beauty and intricacy of the cosmos, but ought never to be overwhelmed. The human mind aspires to penetrate, unravel and understand the mysteries of the universe.
Christianity’s cultural despisers often put forth a different story at this point, arguing that while science honors the inquisitive, ever-expanding human mind, religion shuts it down, setting-up limits and boundaries to intellectual inquiry, so science is where the action is. And, of course, there are historical instances of religion regarding science as enemy more than friend; most famously, I suppose, the church in 1616 directing Galileo not to “hold or defend the idea that the earth revolves around the sun.” But the broader stream of history suggests that modern science actually emerged from fertile soil of Biblical faith. Rodney Stark, of Baylor University, in his important book titled The Victory of Reason, writes:
What the great figures involved in the 16th and 17th century
blossoming of science – including Descartes, Galileo,
Newton, and Kepler – did confess was their absolute faith
in a creator God, whose work incorporated rational rules
awaiting discovery. The rise of science was . . . the natural
outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it
was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it is
necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork.
Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord
with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given
powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible
to discover these principles. [He concludes] These were
the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian
Europe and nowhere else. (7)
To affirm the truth of this is not to deny that religion and science require very different kinds of mental apparatus, and so tend to require different kinds of people, equipped by God with different gifts of talent and temperament. My own academic experience with the sciences was undistinguished. I remember one day my high school physics teacher told this joke. Two atoms bumped into one another. One said, “I think I lost an electron.” The other asked, “are you sure?” To which the first replied, “I’m positive.” Do you “get” it? Well, I didn’t. But everyone else in the class did. I knew then that God was not calling me to a career in science. I not only didn’t understand the material. I didn’t even get the jokes.
But though different in a great many ways, the rabbi and the physicist are alike in their basic worldview and life-purpose: “We both try to explain how the universe works.” Notice not only their mutual respect, but also their humility. “We both try to explain how the universe works.” “ . . . try to explain.”
Humility is the only appropriate temperament, because we are mere limited beings seeking to know the unknowable, to explain the unexplainable, and to wrap our finite minds around the infinite. Anything and everything we say is partial and provisional.
In July 2005 the journal Science marked its 125th year of continuous publication with a special edition, featuring the “125 Things Science Doesn’t Know.” In his introduction to the magazine, editor Thomas Siegfried wrote:
When science runs out of questions, it would seem, science
will come to an end. But there’s no real danger of that. The
highway of ignorance runs both ways. As knowledge accumulates,
diminishing the ignorance of the past, new questions arise,
expanding the areas of ignorance to explore. (8)
In the same way, when it comes to faith the New Testament uses language every bit as humble in regard to what we can know. The Apostle Paul, for one, speaks of our knowing now “only in part . . . as in a mirror, dimly,” whereas in heaven “we will see” clearly (I Corinthians 13). He also declares that the cosmos is not the mere stage on which the human story is played-out, but is itself part of the story of God’s creative and redeeming love (Romans 8). And he teaches that God’s plan for creation is mysterious and hidden in the mind of God (Ephesians 3).
Michael Heller is one of those rare individuals graced with such diversity of gifts that he can speak the language of faith to scientists and the language of science to the church. He’s an ordained priest, who also has doctorates in mathematics and philosophy. Heller writes: “Science is a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God.” (9) I like that, don’t you? “Science is a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God.”
I saw a cartoon recently picturing two people, sharing a street corner, facing each other angrily. Each holds a protest sign for passers-by to read. One sign says: “The end is near for religious reasons.” The other says: “The end is near for ecological reasons.” A particular kind of bad, alarmist faith confronts a particular kind of bad, alarmist science. The good news is that, whatever the end is, it is as it was at the beginning, is now, and ever shall be — that the cosmos is governed by God, who in creative love brought all things into being, who inspires and equips us to bring our best thinking to bear on unraveling creation’s endless mysteries and understanding its awesome wonders, and who is Himself Lord of the coming kingdom.
NOTES
(1) New York Times, June 22, 2008, p. ST-18.
(2) Movie Deconstructing Harry, 1997.
(3) www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cosmologist-wins-largest-prize-award-794673.html, March 12, 2008
(4) quoted by Walter Isaacson,
(5) www.networkperformancedaily.com/2007/06/
(6) Oscar Hammerstein II, “If I Loved You,” from Carousel, 1945
(7) Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005. pgs. 22-23
(8) Science, Vol. 309, Issue 5731, July 1, 2005
(9) same as (3) above
