I was raised in a Christian home. I was also raised to value education and I received a good education in the public schools of St. Louis, MO. My parents valued that education, until they gravitated back to a more biblically literal approach to their faith. Then they questioned whether they had provided me and my siblings the proper education or had corrupted us with one too secular.
But I have
always appreciated my education, especially my exposure to and training in the
sciences. My love for science was midwifed in me by my 5th grade
teacher who shared with us her own love for science and experimentation. That
love was nurtured all through High School and into my early years of college. I
was a good student in my science classes and I was on a track to become a
scientist; until I felt a call to become a minister.
While my
education in the sciences ceased at that point, my love and appreciation for
science never waned. I never felt a dichotomy or adversarial relationship
between my faith-based approach to life and the scientific explanations for
life. Science explained the world and life. Religious faith provided meaning
and purpose to the world and life. They were complementary views and
understandings, not contradictory or competing systems of meaning.
All of
which is preface to the statement that I am befuddled by the current antagonism
toward science in our nation! Johannes Kepler, a 17th century mathematician
and astronomer once wrote about his own work: “I was merely thinking God’s
thoughts after him.” And Albert Einstein said: “All religions, arts and
sciences are branches of the same tree.”
Both
Religion and Science seek to provide a cosmology: an understanding of the
origin of life in the universe. For religion that cosmology is informed by
creation stories and holy writings. For Science it is informed by scientific
observation and tested theories. Whether that story is about a Big Bang, or God
speaking creation into being out of nothing, or thinking creation into being,
or bringing creation into being out of some cosmic battle or struggle, all the
stories are trying to offer an understanding of the beginning of the universe
as well as teach us something about current life and reality.
What current
scientific understanding teaches us about origins and life today through the theories
of the Big Bang and Evolution is that everything in the universe – and I do
mean EVERY. SINGLE. THING. – is intimately connected.
Canadian
blogger, Jim Taylor, once shared a reflection inspired by watching the bubbles
in his glass of Guinness separate into foam and dark beer. He recalled how one
cosmologist, Angela Tilby, in her book Science
and the Soul, poetically described the evolutionary process of the Universe
as “spacetime foam”. Out of the explosive beginning, as that foam of energy
particles expanded it began creating space and time. Eventually the foam began
settling into its components. Sub-atomic
particles coalesced into atoms, into molecules. Gravity began pulling molecules
together. Crushed closely, they generated heat; compressed, they began fusing
into more complex molecules. The fusion created more heat. In the fullness of
time, it blew some of those new starts apart and blasted heavier molecules out
into space.
Gravity
clumped some of those heavier molecules together, and formed rocky planets,
like ours. On these planets some complex carbon-based molecules continued
fusing. But instead of creating heat,
they created life – plants – which exhaled oxygen as a waste product. The oxygen
levels of this planet increased from zero to around 20 per cent. New forms of
life emerged from the seething stew to make use of this un-utilized raw
material – animals – us.
Everything that exists today derives from that
original “foam.” Everything, alive or dead; everything that was, or is, or will
be – we are all related by our common origins. But not just by our origins. Jim
Taylor also shared how Bob Sandford, chair of the United Nation’s Water for
Life Decade, started one of his speeches by saying, “Every time you take a breath, you inhale the exhalation of every
living thing on this planet since the beginning of life.”
We are all
intimately related. By our breath, by the elements that make up our bodies, and
by the fact that every molecule, every atom, can trace its origins back to that
original foam.
But now,
in the age of COVID, by our breath
is the key learning here. When we breathe we are breathing in common air. You
don’t have your own private bubble of air, nor do I. It is the same air which
has existed on this planet since the dawn of plant life which began exhaling
oxygen until it gave life to us. The oxygen on this planet – the air we breathe
– is a shared resource. It gives us all life. It also can carry illness and
death. Let us use the resource wisely and share as we were taught to do in
Pre-school and Kindergarten. And the way
to wisely share is by wearing a mask when I am close to you and intimately
sharing that air with you.
