Religion, Science, and Our Image of God

Sermon by Rev. Gabrielle Parks


Let me tell you a story:

It had been a successful summer for her hunter-gatherer group. Skins had been preserved to make clothing and shoes. Enough meat had been preserved and wood gathered to survive a rapidly approaching winter. Fire had been captured from the forest, now smoldering and jealously guarded in their fire pit.

At these European latitudes winter could be brutal, even fatal. Previous winters had ravaged her group. Now her mate, her children and only a few other small families remained to share a cave. Other groups had fared much worse. Most had been obliterated. But climate was steadily improving. The great ice sheets were beginning to rapidly withdraw. Lakes that had been permanently frozen, were now ice free, at least in the summer months.

She sat on a great boulder, under the shade of a towering tree, remembering with wonder and awe the miraculous event that had sat the forest ablaze that summer, provided them the fire that would sustain them through the winter.
On the day the fire had been captured, her group had been gathering blueberries. The sky was alive with the towering white giants who often threw blazing spears of fire toward the ground, in a terrible, deafening roar. Why they did this she could not understand. She thought perhaps the white giants were hunters, like themselves. But on rare occasion when a person had been struck dead by their terrible bolts of blinding light, no one had come to collect the body. Then why? It made no sense to her really. But awesome was their power.

On that day no one had been killed when out of blue a white giant hurled its blazing spear, striking the forest a short distance away, setting a tree ablaze. This miracle, which sometimes took life, would this time give them life through the winter. She reflected on this deep mystery. From when did the awesome white giants arise? They seem to grow out of nowhere. And disappear as rapidly as they had arrived. They cast death and suffering down upon her people. Yet provided life-giving water and fire. And how did they turn trees into fire and smoke? One second leaves and limbs that could be touched and held, the next second fire, deadly to touch, then the next second, disappearing into wisps of grey, like the giants who had cast down the fire! This, and many other things like it were to her truly wondrous, marvelous, unfathomable. And so, one day she gave it and other things like it, a name.
All humans seem to feel the need to name and explain these mysteries. This need is reflected in the many creation stories from all over the world. Let me give you a few examples:
The Judeo-Christian creation story in the Bible tells us, “In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” And so, the Hebrews had named the unnameable, Yaweh. But it was a name so sacred that it was not to be spoken.

At roughly the same time, the Egyptians created myths to try to explain their place in the cosmos. “In the beginning there was only water, a chaos of churning, bubbling water.” Egyptians named the chaos Nu or Nun. From this chaos the life-giving sun god Atum arose on the first hill of earth- just as the subsiding of the Nile flood causes hills of mud to appear with their promise of life-giving harvest. Atum created the goddess of moisture and Shu, the god of the air. Their daughter, Nut, was the goddess of the sky, and her brother, Geb, who was also her husband, became god of the earth.

Greek and Roman Mythological stories start similarly: Before there was earth or sea or heaven, there existed only chaos: shapeless, unorganized, lifeless matter. There was no sun, no moon, and no air. Elements existed, but they had neither form nor character. Finally a god, a natural higher force, separated earth from heaven, parting the dry land from the waters, and dividing the clear air from the clouds, thus organizing all things into a balanced union.

A creation story from Hinduism starts with a vast dark ocean washed upon the shores of nothingness, licking the edges of night. A giant cobra floated on the waters. Asleep within its endless coils lay the Lord Vishnu. Vishnu awoke. As the dawn began to break, from Vishnu's navel grew a magnificent lotus flower. In the middle of the blossom sat Vishnu's servant, Brahma. Vishnu spoke to his servant: 'It is time to begin.' Then he commanded: 'Create the world.’ Vishnu and the serpent vanished. Brahma remained in the lotus flower, floating and tossing on the sea. Brahma split the lotus flower into three. He stretched one part into the heavens. He made another part into the earth. With the third part of the flower he created the skies.

Australian Aborigines believe that when the earth was new-born, it was plain and without any features or life. Waking time and sleeping time were the same. There were only hollows on the surface of the Earth which, one day, would become waterholes. Around the waterholes were the ingredients of life. Underneath the crust of the earth were the stars and the sky, the sun and the moon, as well as all the forms of life, all sleeping. The tiniest details of life were present yet dormant: the head feathers of a cockatoo, the thump of a kangaroo's tail, the gleam of an insect's wing. A time came when time itself split apart, and sleeping time separated from waking time. This moment was called the Dreamtime. At this moment everything started to burst into life.


In the brief 5000 years or so since pen was first put to tablet, this gift of human curiosity has led to a remarkable understanding of, how we got here and where we are in the scheme of things. It has led us from a very mythic, myopic understanding of an earth created a few thousand years ago, about which the entire cosmos whirled just above on a black vault, and over which humans have dominion, to a picture vastly different.

Through the acquisition of knowledge, supernatural explanations were slowly replaced by natural ones; we went from a world/cosmos that is finite and small to one which is infinite and eternal. The invention of the microscope led to the telescope that had permitted Galileo to resolve what seemed to be bright points of light in the heavens and to see that these bright points had dimension. Galileo saw that Jupiter was not a point of light, but rather was disk-like, and had moons rotating about it, proving that there were exceptions to the exclusively geocentric cosmos of Ptolemy and Aristotle, where every celestial body must rotate about an Earth fixed to the heavens. Peering through his telescope, Galileo also saw that the moon had terrain, much like the Earth. When Galileo pointed it toward the cosmos, and combined this most marvelous sight with his power of human reason, he realized and eventually convinced the world, that the Earth was not the anchor of the entire cosmos, a pivot about which all else revolved, but rather a grain of sand, a mote of insignificant matter among uncountable others. This radical new knowledge about the Earth’s lowly position altered forever our human perspective.

Humans could no longer see themselves as the center of creation. Neither were we God’s sole focus anymore. This was scary! Our feeling of being a significant part of the universe was destroyed. We were as grains of sand, insignificant, lost, in a vast cosmos. This new view of creation gave God a new role: more powerful, more mysterious: In a small, sell-contained universe God’s world was more understandable (he created the world just like humans build houses, he created humans in the same way humans sculpt statues, etc). At the same time God became less explainable and less present in our lives. God became transcendent. And God became less “necessary” because we could now explain a lot of the mysteries of creation.

Following the revelations from Galileo, curious humans turned their attention to what sustained the heavenly motions. In the mid 18th century, an English scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, wondered what caused the heavenly motions described by Copernicus and Kepler and by other men who had been scratching their heads over these questions for centuries. Newton found that he could describe the motions of the planets using a very simple set of laws: Newton’s laws of motion. Instead of angels turning cranks, there now was an even more mysterious force, a force we still do not understand today: Gravity.

In the centuries before Newton, humans used to believe that something or someone had to move everything, including the sun and the stars. The concept of an “animus” required to keep things moving actually dates back to Aristotle.
Now Newton discovered that what caused movement was gravity. This meant that in a way everything is mechanical, and God is not really necessary! There suddenly is less mystery and less imminence; we have the image of the “watchmaker” God who withdraws after creating the watch.
Even so, we could still hold on to the idea that we humans were the center of God’s creation. The ultimate aim of creation. But even that was about to change with Charles Darwin.

The pre-Darwinian view of the creation of life was that it was a predictable, orderly process, governed by a divine plan, with evolution toward a pre-ordained goal with human beings, the pinnacle of creation. Each species was created at almost the same time, within 7 days at least, with each then evolving along parallel lines. On the basis of fossil evidence collected by Darwin on his journeys aboard the HMS Beagle, he replaced this view with a radically new perspective. Creation had begun in the distant past, billions of year ago, with the creation of but one single life form!! Not many. The radical diversity of life we see now, trillions of species, had risen from that single life form! We all shared the same ancestor! Instead of a predictable, orderly process of creation overseen by God, Darwin showed that evolution from this first life form, was instead a chaotic, random process. With branches of life splitting, some branches being wiped off the face of the earth all together, including some human branches. For example the Neanderthals very much like ourselves were driven to extinction somehow. It may have been that our human branch itself hung at one time by a thread, only a few thousand having survived the great ice ages. It appeared then that instead of being shaped by the loving hands of a fatherly figure, that humans were the accident of a long, tortuous, even cruel process; and perhaps an unhappy one at that.

Our image of God became even worse with Darwin: The original image of God as a potter had been replaced during Newton’s time by God as watchmaker who is un-involved, and it is now being replaced by a “randomly designing” God who is even more removed. This seems to be a god who is less hands-on, and has less control; God seems to become even less necessary, except maybe as a catalyst, because everything seemingly happens by random accidents and natural laws.
But did this new theory really detract from the miracle of creation? Darwin himself writes at the end of his “Origin of the Species”, There is a simple grandeur in this view of life with its several powers of growth, reproduction and of sensation, having been originally breathed into matter under a few forms, perhaps into only one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling onwards according to the fixed laws of gravity, and whilst land and water have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the selection of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved. Darwin’s discoveries only increased his awe.
Yes, our image of God had become badly shaken by now. But at least the world still made logical sense. Everything had its space. Everything its place and time. “To everything under heaven…,” the writer of Ecclesiastices writes, “…there is a season”.

But even our common sense world was about to be demolished by new discoveries, new revelations as to its real nature. In the classical world of Newton and Galileo, everything in the universe was located in space and time with respect to some absolute place, or reference point. Somewhere in the cosmos, there had to be something that did not move. A place perhaps where God lived. In pre Galilean times, we know that someplace that did not move, was the center of the earth.
In Newton’s time it was believed that there was some kind of transparent fluid, like water or air, in which the earth, moon, sun, planets and stars were immersed. It was this that was fixed, the Emperium Realm. The motionless fluid was even given a name. Aether. In this realm there was space and things moved through that space in time. Time and space were considered to be different, separate things. Space was fixed, immutable, the same today and tomorrow and the day before. Time passed somehow, flowing smoothly like a river, running at the same rate everywhere, on Earth, on the moon, at the furtherest reaches of the cosmos. A clock on Pluto, would run at the same rate as a clock on earth.

But the era of Albert Einstein shattered even those perceptions. Einstein asked: If there is Aether, and it is fixed, motionless, what is it motionless with respect to? Is there really a greater, ethereal power to which all can be referenced? Einstein answered, no.
Einstein showed that there is no fixed frame. That the motion of a body can only be referenced with respect to another body and neither can be considered to be still. You and I cannot settle the argument, who is moving faster, without asking, with respect to what?
In Einstein’s relativity, time becomes simply another dimension of space. Space is not possible without time and vice versa. Space and time become space-time interchangeable with each other. Motion through space steals from time, making clocks run more slowly. Space-time Einstein finds is a fabric in which we are all embedded, and even more strangely, is warped and bent by gravity. When gravity is strong enough, it can warp space and time to the degree that holes are ripped in the fabric of space-time, and things in our universe, suns, stars, entire galaxies can fall into the holes never again to be seen. Finally, Einstein shows that the only absolute in the universe is the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster. He finds therefore that light defines a limit, a boundary between eternity and the temporal. If you could ride on a light beam, time for you would cease all together. You would move beyond the temporal to become part of eternity. Eternity is not an infinite amount of time, as so often presumed theologically. Eternity is the cessation of time altogether.
With Einstein we realized that time was a human, not a divine construct. This significantly changes our image of eternity; we also realized that God exists outside of time, beyond time. And yet, God lives within it. So God becomes an antimony, that is, “two apparently correct and reasonable concepts that do not agree and therefore predict a contradictory and illogical conclusion. The God of relativity seems to be forever removed, and yet imminent.

At the turn of the last century, things became even stranger: In Newton’s universe, what physicists call classical reality, things existed whether there was any one to observe them or not. In this view, the cosmos existed before humans arrived to observe it. Particles, molecules, planets, lions and tigers had a place, a position, a speed and a path.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, based in quantum physics, describes reality with a deeply mystical model. A model that doesn’t seem to make sense. Why? Because:
In quantum physics, no thing exists until an observer observes it. And until the act of observation is performed, things have no position, no speed, no trajectory, possess no properties, exist only as a potentiality. In quantum physics, the act of observation creates reality itself.

So is it not God who creates reality? We wonder: does God even know the outcome? Quantum physics replaces a material cosmos consisting of trillions and trillions of atoms, each with definite trajectories governed by “Newton’s laws of motion” with a cosmos that can only be described by an ethereal quantum wave function, limiting predictions to probable futures, where any outcome is possible! Instead of a god who reigns over matter, now we have a God who reigns over mystery.

So now we’ve come full circle, back to the deeply mysterious god image of the first woman who wondered. It seems to me that what we thought we knew about God was only a projection of our own experience.

What do you think? Don’t we still create God in our image of the world we know?

Yes, and for me one thing is true: the more that is revealed to me about the universe, the more I am in awe of God.