This season of Lent is, in my experience, best a season of true wrestling, searching, deciding, changing.  I hope you find what I share today true to this.

It begins with a disturbing report on Radio Canada as I was eating my fruit bowl breakfast.  Fascinating and yet hugely challenging to my way of life and perhaps yours.  In short, it said the more you practiced religion the more likely you would have a negative view of science and less knowledge of science.  I went to the source of the report and found it is two years old, titled: Religiosity predicts negative attitudes towards science and lower levels of science literacy by Jonathon McPhetres, Miron Zuckerman 2018.

Using two large, nationally representative datasets from USA.  They conclude: (And in context think of the dubious religious reactions in some cases to the threat of Corona Virus) in view of the present findings, the challenge is how to increase science knowledge in the face of religious disinterest or actual opposition. Improving science knowledge and literacy will allow people to make more informed, evidence-based decisions about choices, beliefs, and activities, as well as about the products and services they use or avoid. According to the present result, the recent decline in religiosity [48] might help but, given that the majority of the world population still defines itself as religious, it behooves us to find a way for people to keep their religious beliefs and yet open their minds to science.

There is also an admission the study is limited to the USA but the scale of it makes it significant.

I groaned as I heard this discussed. It goes against my whole adult life and ministry.  My approach as been an awareness that you can find in places such as the National Centre for Science Education (California USA) In public discussions of evolution and creationism, we are sometimes told by creationists and opponents of religion alike that we must choose between belief in creation and acceptance of the theory of evolution, between religion and science. Is this a fair demand? Is the choice that stark? Can one believe in God and accept evolution? Can one both accept what science teaches and engage in religious belief and practice?

These are complex issues and deserve thoughtful consideration before a decision is made. Theologians, clergy, scientists, and others belonging to many religious traditions have concluded that their religious views are compatible with evolution and are even enhanced by the knowledge of nature that science provides.

Let me bring this interesting dilemma to the Bible readings we heard today.

Jesus responds to a sympathetic Jewish leader, Nicodemus, who comes to him under cover of darkness, saying you have to be born a second time to know the sort of power and life he knows.

I ask what is this second birth? just as Nicodemus does, and that is John’s intention in telling us the story.

We are a long way from the thinking of the author of Genesis, where God (El) not yet known as Yahweh, disturbs the life of an aged Abram with the promise he and his descendants are to inherit the world.

Jews did not think like Greeks, Hebrew thought is different, without needing to separate matter and spirit.

Yet what if these two great promises to Abram, to Nicodemus by Jesus ARE addressing the same fundamental experience?

You have heard me say here that the insights I am making with an interest in Christian Green thought has brought out systems-thinking, a scientific perspective that finds reality is interactive and connected, with repeating patterns and dynamics that make it a better way of describing the universe, to past concepts, such as Newton’s atoms.  Science is gradually realising ways to escape its own dominant method of ‘analysis’ that reduces things to component parts.  The words of Aristotle (perhaps) ‘we are more than the sum of our parts’, is being realised in scientific terms of holism and is especially obvious in ecology and biology where living phenomena are clearly better described in terms of systems and relationships.

Suppose then, Abram’s inheritance and Jesus’ birth a second time, is the realisation of our belonging to the universe and its consequences, above tribalism, above religiosity.

Does this offer me the hope that science and religion are moving towards each other, at last.  This would make my disturbing breakfast report more digestible.

Searching for the original report on science and religion, I found another article that gave me hope AND more to think about: This time it is an online report of research from Forbes, under healthcare: A Sense Of Oneness May Be A Key To Happiness.

People may think of certain religions as being more about oneness than others—in Buddhism, for instance, a central concept is nonduality, or the connectivity between all things. But according to a new study from the University of Mannheim, no matter what religion a person identifies with, a feeling of oneness is linked to greater satisfaction with life.

The study was published April 2019 in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

“The feeling of being at one with a divine principle, life, the world, other people or even activities has been discussed in various religious traditions but also in a wide variety of scientific research from different disciplines,” said study author Laura Marie Edinger-Schons in a statement. “The results of this study reveal a significant positive effect of oneness beliefs on life satisfaction, even controlling for religious beliefs.”

In the first of two studies, Edinger-Schons had participants answer a number of questions as part of a psychometric scale she developed to measure feelings of oneness. Questions included, “I believe that everything in the world is based on a common principle” and “Everything in the world is interdependent and influenced by each other.” Other questions measured oneness in a less direct way, having to do with social connectedness, connectedness to nature, empathy to others, and life satisfaction.

It turned out that her scale was a valid instrument to measure a person’s sense of oneness. And importantly, people’s answers were similar six weeks later, suggesting that a sense of oneness is a stable part of one’s makeup, rather than a fleeting state.

John’s Gospel claims Jesus has this state: The Word from God, of God, All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  Jesus praying for the unity of his followers 17:11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one;

By contrast it is no surprise Jesus criticized the corruption of the gift of inheritance of the world offered to Abram.  It arrives in the drama of clearing the Temple.  My Father’s House is a place of prayer and you have made it a den of thieves.   A place of the consciousness of the presence of God, of relating to all, versus its corruption to a place of control, even exploitation and fear of losing control.   

This Temple drama makes me think of the tension, in the significant USA report, between science and religion, when Jesus was aware of the Unity of all things.

This awareness comes again and again, beyond Christian control, so I found this quote in the book The History of God, by Karen Armstrong, page 155.  Do you know where this comes from?

‘We believe in God and in that which as been bestowed from on high upon us, and in that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac  and Jacob and their descendants and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus and that which has been vouchsafed to all the other prophets by their sustainer, we make no distinctions between any of them.  And it is unto him that we surrender ourselves.’  Koran 2:136

It is from the Koran, the revelation of God given to Mohamed.  The Muslim tradition he founded has made huge contributions to science, mathematics, philosophy; it is arguably more unifying than either Judaism or Christianity and modern experience of fundamentalism and extremism is a corruption akin the Jesus’ lament for the Temple.

But we are where we are: many scientists are atheists, as they look at the anti-scientific attitudes in many religious traditions and the active opposition to science by some in the name of God. 

At a time that science is finding truth in the underlying unity and connectedness of things, it is valuable to wrestle with the promise of inheriting the world and the second birth we are to go through as people who connect to that promise.

I believe that Jesus was suspicious of any religion that put itself beyond the common good, common humanity and common earth.  Better to have no religion than bad religion; no religious codes or laws but rather Abram’s faith, seeing the stars above, of the promise to re-inherit the world.  Let us expect, long for or nourish this rebirth.

Amen.