Travis, how cool. Wish I could have participated. It certainly is an area where the theologian and the scientist have much they could learn from each other.

I was recently given a t-shirt with the following inscription:

AND GOD SAID,

(here follow Maxwell’s equations describing electricity, magnetism, and radiation)

AND THERE WAS LIGHT!

Science? Theology? Both?

Good stuff!

In my view, science has much to offer theology at this moment in time.

Modern theology can benefit from the freedom, power, and integrity flourishing in the language of science.

I really appreciate the distinction offered between a secret and a mystery. That’s a very interesting train of thought.

The real issue, I suppose could be put this way: How do we teach people that Mystery is a good thing? What prompts this question is a bumper sticker that used to be fairly prevalent: “God Said It; I Believe it; That Settles It”

If a person believes that there is no mystery, that everything is settled, that all that is known is enough, then what? And, to me, this is the root of fundamentalism. We might sing about an “Awesome God”, but do we really appreciate what the Awe or Fear of God is really about?

Sorry, I’m asking more questions than I’m answering this morning. Perhaps I’m exploring a mystery .

Here are some Mysteries that we are wrestling with in our world:

When does a fertilized egg become human? and the corollary: What does it mean to be human, anyway?

How can we reconcile the randomness seen in Quantum Mechanics with the high level of causality we see in the visible world?

How can we reconcile the creation stories of Genesis with what science tells us about the ages of things and so on?

Fundamentally, how can we come to accept that we actually KNOW almost nothing?

“….We see in a mirror dimly….” is a tremendous statement about mystery, is it not?

We may use the language again, much as science does. It does require a level of integrity around the language that science has embraced, and theology may have abandoned.

Science is in its natural environment in the physical world, theology, not so much now, may have been at one time. Yet the integrity in a language created around the physical world may lead us back again to the integrity in the language of theology.

For example, faith is not considered a physical fact, as in an object, it is trust and confidence, a way of being. Yet faith may be no more a mystery in the way of a child with a mother than the science in how we sit in a chair. Both real, both measurable.

Science is the language of the physical world, the relationship of objects, and our agreement in our observations of them. There is an elementary view to developing a language and integrity around the building blocks of the physical world that surrounds us.

One possible story is that this elementary view of ourselves as beings may have existed more powerful in the beginning, and a language of faith and belief was created in the beginning and maintained with integrity.

It easily became the foundation for science as we began to explore the physical world around us. In our giddy abandon with the wonders and glories of this place we call earth, we “forgot” the integrity of the language in being.

We may be inspired by this integrity in the laguage of science to restore it to the language of theology.

The temptation is to take advantage of this current lapse in integrity in theology and claim authority over agreement and acceptance. It is much more of a challenge in science to claim the apple falls up because you say so.

Now what is very appealing to me, is the possibility that faith exists as a physical entity, an observeable, measurable force, and predictable force. I believe that this is possible as an outcome of our study in Quantum physics.

To be fair to theology, there is a lot of bad science.

Another: I would suggest that there is less bad science than you think. It IS a language problem, and it both more simple AND more complex than you might suspect.

There is the language of science, and the careful statements that scientists use when they discuss their research. They make very careful distinctions between what they know and what they think. When their statements make it to the popular press, this distinction is lost. Further, the population at large doesn’t want to deal with the distinctions, so they move from statement to statement with no ability (or desire) to discern the differences.

It does, in my mind, come back to the great difficulty inherent with mystery. We WANT hard facts, simple rules, and clarity. Inherent in the human condition is serious discomfort with the mystical, spiritual, and the unknown. EVERY culture has granted great power to those who commune with and can explain the mysterious. The downside is what happens when the shaman is proven to be a fraud?

I see what you are saying. The level of risk due to loss of integrity (bad science) being much less in the physical sciences. The failure to measure the rate of fall of the apple is much less of a concern than the loss of power of a human being in their life.

The knowledge and skill in the development of the atomic bomb or a frontal lobotomy is science. The choice to do so and use it is the realm I am concerned with.

I do hold theology to more accountability than the physical sciences. Managing the conversation around what is so is easier than what is possible.

This is what I find most appealing and curiously timely about quantum physics turn to possibility.

Science is a self-correcting system. There is bad science. Fortunately, science is based on observation and testing. As time goes on, bad hypotheses get tested more and more. If a hypothesis is wrong, evidence stacks up against it and it is ultimately abandoned.

I don’t know much about theology. I know theology is often used as code for “Christianity” or other specifics on religion. Religion is not a self-correcting system. It is based on authority, not observation and testing.

Simian

Simian, excellent observation about authority. One can claim the same authority exists as truth in science. It isn’t right until it is right. We can not claim authority over what occurs naturally. Its authority exists in that it is as it is.

Agreement in science is more easily observable. An apple falling is an apple falling.

Judging what is right and wrong by outcome is not so easy. The connection between what we witness and say demands a higher level of integrity. The compulsion to look good and right often overcomes who we say we are.

Actually, I would contend that religion is a self-correcting system too. Two examples: 1) the 16th century Reformation as a self-correction of abuses within the western church. 2) the response of various theologies to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Religion, at least as it is practiced in the three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), can do this because its authority is not in persons but in texts. This textual authority requires interpretation, and interpretations of texts are revised to fit new circumstances and events. To my amateur ears, this doesn’t sound very far from how self-correction happens in science too.