I love science and I love religion. My great desire is that science and religion would learn to love each other. Well, maybe love is too strong, maybe just acknowledging one another’s right to exist would be a good place to start. Whatever the quarrels between them, be it Darwinism, Creationism, Intelligent Design or whatever is next...truly, something has got to give...and soon.
In his book, Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilbur considers the historical underpinnings of the split between science and religion as beginning during the Enlightenment period. And with that split came the scientific community's suspicions of religion as archaic and mythical, and the religious community's suspicions that science had thrown out the spirit with the bathwater. Looking back at the split it makes good sense that those new scientists were no longer willing to proclaim horrific events such as the black plague as being a judgment of God upon humanity, but sought to discover why the black plague was actually occurring. I'm sure many religious people would join me in saying ...thank God that science gave the death blow to that god. But, who could have known at that time that science was in the process of replacing that dead god...with itself?! With science as the new proclaimer of truth its adherents began to proclaim that energy and matter was the only God that existed. So the religious took their defensive stance on the battlefield of ideas, and rightfully so. And, there they stayed. And therein lays the great divide that we are still living with today. But alas, there is new movement afoot that's very promising and could be moving us towards a new healing paradigm.
As I read, listen and learn, it seems to me that the old arguments between religion and science are quickly becoming outdated. With quantum physicists and cosmologists penetrating both the small and large in our universe, it seems we are in a scientific as well as a spiritual transition. For me, the science that is developing today seems as eventful as was the publishing of Copernicus or a gaze through Galileo's telescope. So maybe we can together take a new look through Galileo's telescope only this time looking from the 21st century backwards to see if we might have new eyes to see and new ears to hear what the the spirit might be saying. And maybe the words you are hearing might just be the same words that I'm hearing..."fear not"!
Most cosmologists today agree that the universe is very old, not static and, is indeed, expanding. In addition, some scientists are theorizing that the universe is not only a matter of expanding energy and form, but might very well be a movement of matter through time directed by something invisible to us. Cosmologist Brian Swimme makes an interesting point when he says that we humans need a new story that gives meaning to our lives...not a story that further divides us but a story that unites us, a story for the entire human race. Our ancient and beloved religious stories are important and necessary and must be retained but they need to be merged with who we know ourselves to be in the 21st century. As science is discovering more and more about the universe that we live in, and as we move closer and closer towards a global community we might need a new narrative about ourselves, a cosmic story that we can all resonate with and a story we can all find ourselves in no matter what our personal religion might be. This story is one that brings the essence of the ancient religions together with science and tells of a new creation story. This creation story puts both spirit and matter together and becomes a story of epic proportions, a cosmic story, and a story of evolutionary spirituality. So travel back in time with me and let's see what might be possible if we were to ask...what if there is a new story to be told based upon the blending of science and spirit, and that this new story might be told something like this?
Unimaginable as it might be, try to image the grand mystery of the ages, the oneness that existed before the beginning...The Perfect, The Uncreated, The Formless Eternal Being...Consciousness Itself residing in no time, no space, no thing, no universe, formless and void. Then...quite suddenly, from this Perfect Ground of Being, on that day at the beginning... a tremendous light bursts forth, a fire storm of tremendous preportions...glaring light expanding at terrific speed creating time and space as it goes. And so, in less than the time it takes to make a sandwich, our universe was born. After about a million years this fire storm of light begins to subside and take form. Billions of stars are born and over their short life span they condense and condense until they first implode and then in a great act of, well...sacrifice, they blow apart forming more stars and more galaxies. This goes on for billions of years until an even more complex order begins to take shape and our galaxy, our solar system, our own planet earth now evolves into form...orchestrated from the beginning of time by mystery. Earth, a womb of creation and biospheric brooding, encounters crisis after crisis hence forcing atoms to cooperate and create molecules, and then molecules to cooperate and create cells and cells to cooperate becoming multi-celled...and so on, and so on until the grand array of life on planet earth has begun. Crisis became the evolutionary driver...for atoms, for molecules, for cells, for vegetation, for animals and for humans. Limitation produced crisis and crisis produced either death OR cooperation that produced new and more complex life. In time the universe developed eyes to see itself and ears to hear itself and a mind to know itself and to know its Source. And this process continues today in all of nature and in each and every one of us.
And so a new story begins to emerge...a story in which the mysterious image of that Source that we have named God impregnated itself into the world of becoming...a kind of virgin birth combining the perfection of God with the imperfection of matter together forming a whole new creature, a conscious universe! From deep time emerging over and over again, creation groaning and groaning to finally produce something new...a conscious universe knowing itself through US...sons and daughters of this Source we have come to know as God! Now it's possible for the confusion to clear...God is both Being and Becoming...both the Perfect Ground of Being peaceful and still, the container that holds the space for all possibilities, and also as the Divine Impulse, not stillness but an urgency that moves us onward and upward to evolve and become. God as agent or Holy Spirit drawing all life towards its own perfection working within the material world moving forward in and through the cosmos, in and through nature, and most recently, in and through humanity. Divinity incarnated into the smallest of all particles and into the most complex of all matter, the human being. The Way of God, expressed in the universe as crisis, cooperation and rebirth. Or might I say...crisis, cooperation and resurrection! This is not Pantheism reborn, but a whole new possibility of the same consciousness (or mind) that was in Christ, now in us causing us to know ourselves as divine beings one with God and all of nature.
Moving forward we can now imagine that this new story doesn't need to change any of the ancient stories but adds a new dimension to them which brings a greater cohesiveness to the planet. Imagine that we are at the dawn of a new kind of partnering of religion and science...that each might be moving towards a new acceptance that both are a viable form of inquiry into the nature and meaning about the universe we live in. Imagine that science and religion retain their own versions of inquiry with a higher level of respect and understanding for what the other knows and how they know it. Imagine that now, as it has been from the beginning, a new cooperation takes place, much the same as it did with atoms, molecules, and cells but this time with physicists, cosmologists and theologians all in mass cooperation...a cooperation capable of producing a whole new way to move forward through crisis, towards a new kind of life...the evolution of a new kind of human being.
