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In the midst of festivals and services about miraculous and wondrous events, I thought it important to remind ourselves about the miracle and wonder of human reason and the scientific method it has given rise to.
I do this not to dismiss the supernatural, the miraculous or the wondrous, but to supplement them with another aspect of human mind.
I believe that reason alone is inadequate for human life. It can lead one to be coldly intellectual and anti-feeling. On the other hand, to ignore or reject reason is to be vulnerable to mob think and to acts of evil. Emotionalism run rampant is a frightening thing.
We have a triune brain; our need for ritual is in the brain stem, our emotions are in the limbic system, and our reason is in the neo-cortex. These are often in conflict with one another; we sometimes “know” we should do one thing but our feelings drive us to do something else. Perhaps one form of spirituality is experienced in one flashing, crashing moment when all three of these parts of the brain coalesce and are “in synch” with one another.
Polio is very nearly wiped out. That is an astonishing fact. It is nearly wiped out because of the polio vaccine. Yet today, in Nigeria, we face a grave test of our ability to finally eliminate this awful disease. In the northern sections of Nigeria, which are overwhelmingly Muslim, there is a prevalent belief that the polio vaccination program is a plot by western governments to either kill or sterilize Muslims.
It is a paradoxical and sad truth that false rumor travels faster than truth. False rumor travels faster than truth.
It is also a sad truth that our preexisting assumptions and fears rarely fall to genuine knowledge.
The fear of vaccination is not limited to Nigeria. People in the developed world also are challenging and questioning vaccinations.
One of the dangers of the Internet is that every crank with a computer can spread fears as facts and false beliefs as truths.
In Britain and the United States, this challenge takes the form of both belief and fear that vaccinations cause autism and other developmental problems. There is NO properly carried out scientific study that indicates any link between vaccinations and autism.
I think it is important to acknowledge that vaccinations have given us a nation vastly different than the one that existed a mere one hundred and fifty years ago.
The insistence that the Bible is a better guide to science than is science is growing in strength. Evolution is being challenged by an ever more sophisticated approach. Where once people insisted on teaching creation in schools, and then changed to what was called Creation Science, they now try to do the same with Intelligent Design, which is simply biblical faith in another guise, in a more palatable form.
We have an Administration in Washington that has political appointees who are not scientists rewrite scientific reports so they will support or at least not contradict administration policy.
From the New York Times, December 5, 2004: “The scientific opinions of a Bush Administration appointee at the Interior Department with no background in wildlife biology were provided as part of the source material for the panel of Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and managers who recommended against giving the greater sage grouse protection under the endangered species act.”
A second quote form the same article: ”The issue of political overseers modifying information from federal scientists that conflicts with policy goals has arisen periodically in recent years, most notably in the area of climate change.”
Among other things, the political appointee, Julie MacDonald, dismissed scientific studies and edited out references in the report. It needs to be said that the Fish and Wildlife Services received both the original report and the one reviewed by Ms. Macdonald. But that does not change the issue, which is editing scientific reports to support a political viewpoint.
Science, knowledge and Reason are under attack.
We Unitarian Universalists look back on the proud heritage of the two traditions that form and inform our religious movement: The radical love of Universalism and the history of adherence to the three principles of Reason, Freedom and Tolerance of Unitarianism.
I want to focus on Reason this morning.
We liberals tend to think that we have a monopoly on reason in religion and that our conservative brothers and sisters are irrational, even anti-rational. That is not true. The question is not adherence to Reason, but how it is used, what the limits are.
In Medieval times the Catholic Church that is, the Christian Church had several sources of authority in theology. These included the Bible, Tradition, Natural Law and Reason
Tradition was of great importance. Tradition included all of the approved previous research and thought and decisions by the church.
I took one course at Fairfield University some years ago. It is a school that was founded by the Jesuits. In researching a paper in the library I came upon a book. This book was a series of questions asked by scholars of a committee at the Vatican. The question might be something like, “May the star of Bethlehem be thought of as a comet?”. And there were one of two answers, either “Answer in the Affirmative” or “Answer in the Negative”. That was it. So some committee was deciding for a scholar whether or not that scholars thoughts could flow in certain directions.
The message here is that Tradition, that is, Institutional Wisdom and the institutional use of Reason are more important than individual use. Individual use could lead people into false theology and that could mean they lose their soul. The salvation of souls is the most important thing.
Now a Cynic would say that this was not about the salvation of souls, rather it was about the salvation of church power and authority; but even if one accepts that claim, the ultimate purpose for maintaining the Church’s authority was the salvation of souls.
At the time of the Protestant Reformation, the technology existed for people to read the bible on their own. That was the result of Gutenberg’s printing press. Prior to that time, the local priest was the only literate person in the village. So the priest would read a passage from the Bible, and then explain to people—using the Tradition—just what the passage meant.
Luther said to the people, you have the means to read the bible for yourself, so do so.
When that was done, when people read the Bible for themselves, they found that the Bible did not always support Church positions based upon Tradition. So, the Reform and Protestant response to that was: “toss out Tradition”. They claimed that the Bible is the true source, the true fountainhead, the word of God, so read the Bible and determine for yourself what it says.
The belief was that the Church had built a huge edifice upon false truths, so if it is not in the Bible, we need not believe it.
Note in passing that this opens the door not only to toss out Catholic doctrine and Tradition, but also other extra-Biblical sources: Natural Law and Reason. In the extreme, this can become an insistence that since only the Bible contains truth, only the Bible can be read and it must be read literally.
Early Unitarians read the Bible and did apply their own human reason to it, and decided that the Bible did not support the doctrine of the Trinity. Whether they were right or wrong is not my point this morning. I merely note that this confirmed the Catholic fear that individual reading of the Bible could lead one into heresy.
In the late seventeen hundreds and into the eighteen hundreds, many sacred texts from non-Christian traditions were being found and studied by religious scholars. Those scholars used the skills of historians to analyze these texts. They evaluated paradoxes and contradictions within them, saw interpolations, saw chronological and historical anomalies, and they reported on these.
Some of them, in particular scholars in Germany, then began to read the Bible through the same lens, through the same perspective. They began to use those same historical and other analytical techniques on the Bible.
There is an old Unitarian joke about the Unitarian who arrives at a crossroads. There are the crossroads are two signposts, one pointing towards heaven and the other pointing towards a discussion on heaven. The Unitarian imeediately sets out down the road to the discussion on Heaven. That quip was used of German scholars long before it was applied to Unitarians.
When scholars, using these new techniques, read the Bible, they discovered that the Bible itself begins with its own claim that it cannot be read as literally true. They noted that there are two stories of creation, Genesis one and Genesis two. In one, human beings are the final creation of God. In the other, the Human Adam is created first, then all of the other creatures are created in the hunt for a helpmeet for him, until finally, Eve is created. So, the Bible begins with paradox and contradiction. The conclusion of some was that it therefore was not necessarily the word of God, at least not in the literal sense.
These were early Religious Liberals. Prior to this time, Reason in religion was bounded by religion itself, that is, the Bible or Church Tradition. One read the Bible and reasoned from what was written there.
Now, the Bible was not the source of Reason, rather, outside thoughts and approaches were being used to analyze the Bible and question its authority.
This caused an even greater insistence upon the part of some that the Bible held literal truth.
At the same time, sacred texts from other religious traditions were being translated into western languages. These were seen by religious liberals as sublime writings of other human beings reaching for the divine, and so were seen as complementary sources of truth.
Since the1800’s were also the time when Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection and Freud’s theories of the unconscious were being published (including Freud’s view of religion as a sign of psychological weakness), religion felt itself to be under assault, as it was.
For liberals, all of these analyses and changes represented freedom, freedom from doctrines not just of the Church, but from the doctrines also of those who wrote the books of the Bible, and of those who selected particular books for inclusion in the Bible.
We liberals have many sources of truth, many sacred texts.
With science, we do not reject its findings if they contradict religious belief; rather we ask how those findings can inform our religion.
The science of today tells us that chimpanzees use tools. Not only that, but when they set out somewhere to do particular things, they know which tools they will need and they carry them with them. That is, they take along a tool kit.
We now know that South American monkeys use tools.
A zoo here in the United States—I forget just where—recently had a gorilla die. They used a practice previously used at another zoo. Rather than just dispose of the body, they allowed the other members of the troop to have a period of mourning. The body was laid out and they let the members of the band into the room where it was. The daughter of the dead gorilla came forward, placed her head on her mother’s chest and drew her mother’s arm over her own head. She then went to the other side of the body and did the same thin with the other arm. The next gorilla had a baby, and the dead gorilla had liked to play with the baby. So this one approached the body and held out the baby to it; she then stepped aside. One at a time, each of the gorillas approached the body and touched or stroked it or in some way said goodbye. Each that is, except for the dominant male; he kept his distance (but then men have problems expressing emotion).
Each of these bits of new knowledge challenge our assumptions about ourselves and our place in the world.
The claim that we are somehow completely different from our fellow animals on this planet, that we are somehow far above their level, with no real connection to them, is false. The rejection of the possibility of the “humanness” of the acts of these other primates, is a rejection based upon a pre-Darwinian point of view. It is the religious and Biblical point of view that we stand halfway between animals and angels. Science tells us that in reality we are cousins to all of the other forms of life otherwise that inhabit this planet.
Our liberal religion allows science to inform our religious beliefs.
We also include, or are free to include, in our list of sacred texts the writings of other religious traditions, to include poets and songwriters, natural law and our own souls and experiences. We include the sacred text of our own lives.
Your life is sacred; you are a living sacred text. Whether you engage in celebration or lamentation, your experience gives insight into the Divine.
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