Does Jesus Like Science?
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Reading: Job 28:1-3, 12-15, 23-28
Welcome back friends. It’s good to see all of you. It seems like a Toronto law that folks scatter for the summer to places with lakes and rocks and childhood memories north of here. Some of you are still “up north,” worshiping with us online. Others with kids are back for a new school year. May it be filled with blessings and may all of Toronto’s little ones grow wise and brave.
Our church new year starts today also, with Sunday School at 9:15 and a welcome back lunch after church. Youth group starts not this Wednesday but next, and the Sunday after that, we have lawn bowling. I don’t know lawn bowling from lane bowling, but both sound fun. There is more going on than I can relay, and you didn’t come for a commercial. You came to hear the Word of God.
I like preaching through series over months—we’ve done sibling rivalry, more recently rude praise. We have another coming in October on our vision as a church, another in Advent on Mary of Nazareth, mother of our Lord. That leaves me a few Sundays with no series, just stuff I’ve been meaning to say. Today you’ve seen my title, “Does Jesus like science?” Next week’s: “Is Jesus fat?” When we bless pets on September 29. I’ll ask, “which dogs go to heaven,” which dog-owners and other people too. I’ve sort of imagined this not-series being called “Let’s get fired,” all the stuff that might earn me a sit down with the ministry and personnel committee. In seriousness, I did start asking at some point, if I knew I was going to die Monday, what do I wish I’d have said to y’all Sunday? One of these weeks that will happen. We’re all dying sooner than we would like.
You heard the passage from Job. It’s about mining. When our family lived briefly in the north of England I was walking around the lovely countryside and noticed the land had strange indentations in it. Then I saw a sign. Closed pit mine. Walk at your own risk. Coal mines used to power lots of England and Wales. More than a few of you have worked in mining in Canada. Where I come from in the US south if you dig you just come up with more red dirt. But in lots of Canada, if you dig, something valuable emerges.
Job says great, you can find gold or silver or iron down there if you know what you’re doing. You can grow food from the surface. But can you find wisdom? Can you grow it? I’ve spent a lot of time in academia with people with fancy degrees, I got a few myself, so I can tell you, education does not necessarily mean wisdom. Job says you can’t dig up wisdom. Can’t trade anything for it. But there’s nothing of greater value.
In a sermon about science and religion, you might have expected more Genesis than Job, but wisdom holds all ways of knowing together. Both science and faith are ways of wondering about the world. For an overly tidy distinction: science asks how, faith asks why. How does the world work? Important question, worth a lifetime of study. Why are things that way? That’s more our domain in faith: things exist to glorify God. In mainline and liberal churches, we are not afraid of science. God delights when we learn and grow wise. Nothing you can learn in the lab can threaten faith in the living God.
I’ve spent some time in more conservative churches where if a kid says they want to go to seminary everyone cheers. One friend asked, uh, if a kid says she wants to be a chemist, do we cheer? They want to marvel at God’s creation? Standing ovation and scholarships for that? Not so much. She was getting at a problem we have in all churches: the false perception that faith and science are at odds.
The so-called war between religion and science is not age-old. It was invented in 19th century Britain, a relic of England’s aristocracy under duress. Until the 1800s you had to be a member of the Church of England to teach at Oxford or Cambridge. Not only that, you had to be ordained Anglican clergy. The king had to grant a special dispensation to Sir Isaac Newton to teach because he wasn’t trinitarian and therefore was not ordainable. Folks were right to oppose this ordination requirement but met with resistance from clergy like me—all human beings defend privilege at first. Upstart scientists responded, ‘you church people have always been at odds with science.’ That wasn’t true. Science as they meant it was relatively new. But the weapon against religion was handy, and still is. Especially in my native USA you can count on fundamentalist Christians to fulminate against science, out of fear.
But religion has not always opposed science. Or even usually. There have been flashpoints: Galileo against the pope, Darwin against the Church of England, the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in the 1920s, sensationalized by Hollywood in Inherit the Wind. But these are the exceptions. The Vatican to this day has one of the great astronomy programs on the globe, as if to make up for mistreating poor Galileo. Darwin was not uniformly opposed in the church of England. In fact, his ideas sync with historic Christian teaching more than he knew. We are animals. Genesis makes that clear. We are evolved from previous species through time, Darwin discovered. But the church had long thought that the days in Genesis are more figural than 24-hours. The great patrons of science for centuries were Islam and then the church—no one else had the money or leisure for it. And who has contributed more to science than Jewish people? No one. William Jennings Bryan in Tennessee wasn’t just defending the bible in court. He was worried about social Darwinism: the idea that lesser races deserve to go extinct. That notion powered eugenics and the Nazis’ horrors. Those claiming the mantle of science have done great harm, as has every other sort of human being. Science is good at self-correcting though. Learned that from faith. We repent and go a new way.
Here’s a truer story than the false age-old clash between science and faith. Science could only have arisen in a culture produced by monotheism: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. If there is only one God, then no created thing is divine. So, you can study everything. Freely. Happily. Everything God makes bears witness to God. Cultures that divinize nature did not give rise to the scientific method. If all things are divine, hands off, can’t study them. I heard a Jewish scientist respond to the discovery that there was likely once water on Mars: every time the universe gets a little bigger, I pray a prayer of thanks to God. That’s biblical faith.
In my decades in ministry, two-thirds of my life now, I’ve found hard scientists a little more open to faith than humanities people. Give me a biologist and we can likely find a way to pray together. Give me a literature or language person and that’s less likely. Why? Scientists are on the hunt for patterns. And patterns suggest an overall design. Some have pointed this out: there is more beauty in nature than there needs to be. Some beauty is advantageous for mate-finding or whatever. But there is an excess. An overflow beyond what’s merely necessary. And that capacity for noticing beauty and responding with praise? That’s not limited to humans. Apparently when a group of gorillas comes upon a waterfall, they do a dance together. In the humanities we’ve mostly been taught to deconstruct for the last few generations. I get why. But cynicism can leave you jaded, uninterested in truth or goodness or beauty. These are vast generalizations, forgive me. But the capacity to wonder is what holds all learning together. I’ve noticed scientists a little more willing to join the waterfall dance, and us humanities people more likely to say, ‘that’s just capitalism’ or ‘that’s just oppression.’
Tom McLeish is a physicist at York University in the UK who’s written about science and faith as a committed Christian. He describes other scientists approaching him sheepishly. They’ve discovered something. And they’re frightened to feel bubbling up in them something alarmingly like religion. Can you tell me what’s happening to me? I feel like saying hallelujah. Like the Jewish astronomer about Mars. It’s natural to offer praise when the universe shows its patterns. They’re signs of God’s glory. So, she’s right to say it. Repeat after me. Hallelujah. This is why we come to church: to learn important words like that. If the world were right, every scientist peering in every microscope or telescope, discovering something, would sing the doxology. More do now than we realize. One day all of us will.
But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? The world isn’t right. Popular histories hold that Darwin left Christian faith because of his discoveries on the Galapagos Islands. That’s not true. He left faith because of his agony when his little daughter died. He couldn’t reconcile God’s power and love with death. Neither can I. Neither can you. Neither can anyone. Someone wise points out that chess players go mad. Poets do not. Those who think they can master all logic are candidates for insanity. Those who delight in beauty instead grow more human. Genesis portrays God creating effortlessly, with just a word. Darwinism depicts millions of generations of death until random adaptation allows a slight advantage to survival. We all stand on a pile of bones. As Christians, we can also understand this. Our life is made possible by sacrifice. Every bite of food requires sacrifice. That’s why we pray before we eat. Our salvation requires Christ’s self-sacrifice. So, we’re not surprised that blood was necessary for life. The problem is excess blood. More than there needs to be. Little kids who don’t deserve death. Darwin’s baby girl. Countless others. What do we say to that?
Remember our reading is from Job. Job loses all his children. His health. His livelihood. His respect. He is stripped of all dignity and even his spouse and friends taunt him: you must have deserved this. Biblical faith looks sorrow square in the face. Misery is addressed head on, not avoided. As Christians we think the only sinless one ever died the most horrid death. Don’t try to solve the problem of evil. God undoes evil with the cross and resurrection of Jesus. But no one can understand it. Meanwhile mourn with those who mourn. Like Job. Like everyone else you’ve ever met. Some people know how to dig for valuables. But everywhere you dig on this earth you will find bones before valuables. They were once soaked in tears.
But here is a problem. Not for us religious types, but if you’re on team atheism. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are you and I here now wondering about these things? Martin Rees, England’s greatest living astronomer, points out that if just six numbers had been different, there would be no life on this planet, no universe. If any of these numbers had varied by a tiny fraction of a degree ... nothing. A Guardian review of Rees’s book puts it this way: One can marvel, almost indefinitely, at the balance between the nuclear forces and the astoundingly feeble but ultimately inexorable power of gravity, giving us N, a huge number involving 36 zeroes, and nod gratefully each time one is told that were gravity not almost exactly 10 to the 36th times weaker then we wouldn’t be here.
Notice the words: Marvel. Gratefully. Who are you marveling at? What are you grateful to? The fine-tuning of creation to make life possible is one reason religious people point to God. Now be careful. This does not mean if science can’t explain something we play the God card. God is not in the gaps between understanding. God is in everything. The understanding. The not-understanding. All of us exist and sit here right now because a good God wants it. Philosophers and scientists know this fine-tuning is a problem if you’re against a notion of God. They’ll generally say there is an infinite number of possible universes, so it follows that in one case, ours, we have a cosmos fine-tuned enough for life. We’re super lucky. But can I put this nicely? There is no evidence for other universes, and science needs evidence, right? That’s its genius. The scientific method sets up experiments where results can be verified and checked by others and built upon. It’s hard to do that with things that happen only once: like the origin of the universe, or the resurrection of Jesus.
There’s even been some scientific work on the question I asked earlier: why is there something rather than nothing? Some physicists posit this: space is springy. What we perceive as “nothing” is actually teaming with the possibility of life. Again, we religious types give thanks, sing the doxology, say hallelujah. That nothing is likely to become something is also in our books.
Now be careful here. No need to oppose science as such. Sure, it’s made mistakes, eugenics and modern racism are just two examples. We religious types have made our share of mistakes too, for longer. God only has sinners to work through.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge she holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an unbeliever to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear us maintaining foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven?
Religious types at times have opposed scientific inquiry, found it threatening. We need not ever. At other times we’ve championed, praised it, pushed it forward. Above the front entry to Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where the Physics Department is housed, is a quote from Psalm 111, “The works of the Lord are great; sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.” Thirty Nobel prize winners have walked to work under that verse. The two spires of St Paul’s Cathedral in London were designed to hold two great telescopes to explore God’s cosmos.
Where is wisdom to be found? We hope church is one such place. We hope the laboratory is another. But there are wise people far outside each. Fools in both. Job marvels: we can bring valuables out of the earth. But how do you make someone wise? Wisdom is just a way of marveling, learning what is, passing that on. In Christian faith we hold that God is all the wisdom there is. And God dumps all that wisdom out into the belly of an untouched Jewish teenager from the sticks.
Does Jesus like science? You bet. You know what he likes even more? Wisdom. Job says this, “Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” Jesus commands this: “love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, (did you hear that? Your mind!) and with all your strength. And love your neighbour as yourself.” And he himself, Jesus Christ, right now, right now! is making all things new. All of them. Amen.