Great Insight!

Discussing Barbara Brown Taylor's The Luminous Web the other night, subtitled Essays on Science and Religion, I was taken by her sense, shared by many on both sides of that seemingly impossible divide, that the distinction between scientific and religious knowledge is not as clear as it once was. She quotes one scientist who holds that "the common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate."

"As a believer in one God,"she writes, "I think everything is connected to everything else. What is exciting to me is that believers in science are beginning to say the same thing--not the God part but the connection part.

"In Sunday school," she continues, "I learned to think of God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne, who stood above creation and occasionally stirred it with a stick. When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net."

Throughout this fascinating book, "relationship" seems a key word. As all life in nature is related, even energies at great distance from each other, so ought we be related who study it--properly humble before its mystery, both factual and confessional, thus able to address each other from our vantage points without disrespecting the other. There is but one truth just as there is one God who, as the Apostle Paul says is "over all, and in all, and through all."

When your really think about it, how much of the heat generated in scientific/religious conflicts is really an expression of pride on both sides, each seeking subservience more than light? If truth be one, as we believe, is there any one so in touch with the whole of it that he or she has no need to learn from another? Science in pursuit of the truth is having increasingly, it seems, to deal with mysteries beyond its reach. And we religious types often hide from the same mysteries by offering facile answers to complex problems thinking thereby to defend God, who does not need our defense.

Sitting awhile before a picture like the one above, taken by the Hubbell Telescope from space, would do all of us good if what we are really seeking is truth and not our own advantage. Parabolically, wouldn't it be interesting to know if the divides between exponents of science and religion are due more to our distance in loving and humble relationship with each other than they are to matters of either fact or faith. Maybe God is teasing us into the kind of humility that awe alone creates in those seeking greater understanding on both sides.