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Back to Sermon Index Mysteries of the Universe: A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale One of the great discoveries of this past year was that of the largest minor planetary body in the solar system. Out by Pluto, this object is 800 miles across, and because it's so big and Pluto is so small, the definition of a planet has been brought into question along with how we should classify the growing body of objects that we are discovering that circle our sun. The discoverer of this latest and largest minor planetary body decided to call it "Quaoar" (kwah-o-wahr) after a mythological figure of the Tongva people of California. According to the article in Discover magazine (January 2003), Quaoar "is the great force of creation, a being with no form who dances and sings to bring forth the Sky Father and the Earth Mother." (p. 63) The act of naming astronomical objects after religious and mythological entities is not a new thing. Every time we look up into the night sky, the planets and constellations remind us of Greek and Roman mythology: Jupiter, Orion, Cassiopeia. Now we have Quaoar, applying a little affirmative action to the cosmos. God, of course, is supposed to be everywhere out there, and though we haven't named any stars (that I know of) after Jesus, Mary or the Christian saints, they are said to be up there in the Heavens as well. The mysterious universe beyond our blue daylight sky draws our theological imagination as surely as it draws our scientific attention. Rational inquiry, both theological and scientific, has been applied to the mysteries of life and the universe for time immemorial. I was pretty amazed to read in the January 10 issue of The Week that two decades ago scientists declared that science and theology have nothing in common. The quote by the National Academy of Sciences in 1981 stated that "Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought." (p. 44) The article makes no distinction between religion and theology, and goes on to point out how things have changed since 1981 and the places where science and theology meet. The word "religion" usually refers to a belief in a supernatural power such as a creator of the universe, but also refers to an institutionalized system of belief. If the Academy really did just mean "religion" rather than "theology," I don't think they would have described it as a "realm of human thought." Theology seems to be the broader definition, and the one by which the author of the article chose to interpret the quote. In any case, there is no doubt in my mind that, just as humanity has applied the name "Jupiter" to the largest planet in our solar system, so do we apply theology to the great mysteries upon the edge of which science continuously finds itself. Theology is "the study of the nature of God," or "rational inquiry into religious questions." (Am. Her. Dict.) I found that last definition telling: "rational inquiry into religious questions." Theology is not just about imagination, or how we image our world, but also about the use of reason, a centuries-old precept of Unitarianism and Universalism. As theology applies reasonable thought to religious questions such as concern the origin and meaning of life and the universe, so does science apply a reasonable method of inquiry to the same questions. They are most definitely not "mutually exclusive realms of human thought." Science both affirms and challenges theology, just as theology affirms and challenges science. Religions do not have to adapt to the discoveries of science, of course, and many times do not. People seem to be able to live in parallel universes of thought, and perhaps that was what the Academy of Sciences was referring to. People seem to want to retain sets of religious beliefs in spite of, and even while supposedly accepting, modern scientific revelations that conflict with those. But just as our understanding of the universe expands, so do liberal definitions of God and ultimate being expand, and people search for the revelationary seeds of modern definitions within ancient religious texts. One of my favorites is in our hymnal, from "The Tao:"
This is almost a pre-anthropomorphized description of ultimate being, and the more we discover about our tiny but amazing place in the universe, the more ridiculous it seems to maintain any image of god built upon the image of the beings of our planet, much less the supposedly most intelligent beings, the human beings. Or even the male human beings. Out of the "100 Top Science Stories of 2002" as Discover Magazine describes them, I want to highlight just a few of the mysteries science is confronting and how such discoveries of understanding and mystery both affirm and challenge theology. The one that captures my imagination the most is listed as number two, and regards the great mystery of the neutrino. I am not a scientist. I'm not going to get this right nor even explain it to my satisfaction or yours, nor even understand it very well myself. Neutrinos are a "ghostly sub-atomic particle" that the sun emits through the nuclear fusion of hydrogen. These are so tiny that they pass right through the earth. Physicists thought neutrinos had no mass. The mystery was why they were only able to count so many fewer neutrinos than they calculate the sun should be emitting. It turns out that the one type of neutrino that the sun emits was transforming into two other types as they passed through space, and this meant that the neutrinos had to have mass. As the article puts it, "the finding is forcing researchers to revamp the standard model of physics, which describes the interactions of all the fundamental particles in the universe." (p. 53) It also helps account for invisible matter that they believe holds galaxies together. I don't understand how you can count something in the first place that has no mass. I also don't understand how something can pass through the earth. Physicists say these things can happen and do happen, so I'll believe them. On the other hand, if they just discovered something that makes them revamp our understanding of how all the fundamental particles of the universe interact, well, what else are we wrong about? Science is a method of trying to understand, and is perhaps never completely correct in its attempts to describe the mysteries of the universe. This demands that everyone keep an open mind, something I know science espouses but that scientists aren't always so good at. This discovery about the neutrino is one that affirms theology's continual claim that the mysteries of the universe are vast and that miracles may actually exist. Our Unitarian ancestors would turn in their graves to hear that! Though I could exclude Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century who had an understanding and appreciation of the type of miracle in which nature continually engages. As of this year, the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered more than 50 billion galaxies. How on earth could they count them all? National Geographic says there are 100 billion galaxies and more beyond those. That's galaxies, not just stars! As they observe the behavior of the light traveling to us from all those galaxies, scientists realized that there is more of a gravitational pull on the light than can be explained by the mass of the stars and galaxies they see. They believe it is proof of the existence of dark matter in the universe, matter that we cannot see but which fills the spaces between the galaxies and even surrounds our own Milky Way galaxy, explaining the gravitational behavior of our own spinning mass of stars. When I took university-level astronomy twenty-five years ago, the universe was described as being mostly composed of empty space. If you traveled between two stars, you would travel through a void. This is so opposite to what we know of the universe today that it's mind-boggling how wrong we could be. I think part of my fascination with this poster of the Eagle Nebula is the depiction of gas and dust as huge pillars out of which are born stars. Why would we think all the matter in the universe must be of light, burning light, reflecting light. Why not dark matter, explaining the missing mass of the universe, which scientists have calculated to be about 90%? I don't know how they calculate that. They are calculating a lot of amazing things! Did you know that you can supposedly hear radiation left over from the Big Bang? TV static is that remnant radiation, according to National Geographic. Incredible! The Week, article says scientists believe that the universe came into being 14.5 billion years ago "in less than a second, from a point with no physical dimensions." How can our puny human minds grasp such mysteries? I say puny because we are, in the universal scheme of things, incredibly eensie-beensie, teeny tiny creatures, the frailest of beings, what we call intelligent life. How we struggle to understand what we discover as we send our thoughts outward into space, or, I should say, as we learn to receive and interpret the images coming to us from the universe beyond! As we learn how tiny and fragile we are, science challenges theology to broaden its concepts of universal being or of the possible nature of a god or gods, to re-evaluate the place of religious story in human society, to abolish any notion of there being a "chosen" people, and to discard the claims that one religion could have the only true handle on religious revelation. Did you know that in June an asteroid missed hitting the earth by only 75,000 miles? (Disc. p. 44) Was it just a hiccup that it missed us, that we humans are "given" another unknown bunch of years to play at being the dominant life form on the earth, at least as we perceive ourselves? The theory that asteroids have hit the earth more than once or twice and wiped out most of the life that had evolved to that point seems to me to be a warning for how much we should cherish our lives, and all of life on this earth. Every discovery of science challenges theology and, in a sense, demands a theological response. What does it mean that we are destroying the rainforests, melting the Antarctic ice-shelves, killing the frogs, polluting the waters, the earth, the air? What does it mean that people are dying of aids, of hunger, of over-population? What does it mean to clone a human being? That was the number one science story of 2002. Theology must help us to understand the discoveries of science and what they mean to the ways we live our lives on the earth, and theology must face up to the ways religious story and precept lead human groups down harmful paths in our new global community. Theology cannot ignore science, and science cannot ignore theology. Did you know that this year they discovered that humans have been intelligent for twice as long as they thought last year: 77,000 years instead of 35,000 years? Did you know that the cosmic coincidences that led to the establishment of our universe are so incredibly amazing that some scientists still believe that intelligent design of some sort is the only explanation? Did you know that those scientists who opt for other explanations have come up with theories as amazing as the multi-verse, multiple universes co-existing in dimensions we can't see? Science is filled with stories of the mysterious and the miraculous, maybe no less so than theology. The two realms of human thought may very well be the same, the same drive to learn and explore, the same need to make a better life for humanity, the same response of wonder and awe at this incredible universe in which we live. May we cherish them both, science and theology, for the gifts and the guidance they give. Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson |