Perspectives
 Science
and Religion
A Unitarian Universalist Perspective
Helen Lutton Cohen
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Stem cell research, reproductive technology, cloning, death with
dignity, ever faster and more complex means of communication—the
successes of science help us to understand ourselves and our world
and make many new things possible, but they also challenge our sense
of what it is to be human beings, our ethical understanding, and
our priorities.
Though the popular media often presents these questions as science
vs. religion, Unitarian Universalists have historically viewed science
and religion as compatible. Growing up in the First Unitarian Congregational
Church of Cincinnati, Ohio, I was proud that members of my religious
faith embraced knowledge of all kinds, were ready to learn and change,
and wanted to hold an understanding of the nature of the universe
(their theology, I would call it) in harmony with the latest scientific
understandings.
One of my favorite Sunday School curricula was Sophia Lyons Fahs’
How Miracles Abound, which explored everything from leaves to the
solar system and celebrated our world and our ability to learn about
it. My first truly spiritual experience, I think, was looking at
the solar system that my Sunday School teacher had drawn on the
blackboard and feeling both overwhelmed and lifted up; I was beginning
to grasp the immensity of things, my own smallness, and a sense
that I was “held” by the immensity.
Embracing Science
In order to understand ourselves as a religious movement, to know
our roots, we need to understand how vital to its formation this
openness to science and all new knowledge was. Both Unitarianism
and Universalism emerged out of Calvinist Protestantism at the end
of the eighteenth century, embracing the sense of human possibility,
progress, and reason that had developed during the Renaissance and
the Enlightenment. Our movement was founded in the context of a
growing curiosity and optimism about the world. We believed with
Unitarian minister Samuel Longfellow that “revelation is not
sealed.”
Scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley, one of the British founders
of Unitarianism, said,
Let us examine every thing with the greatest freedom, without
any regard to consequences, which, though we cannot distinctly
see, we may assure ourselves will be such as we shall have abundant
cause to rejoice in. . . . We scruple not to plant trees for the
benefit of posterity. Let us likewise sow the seeds of truth for
them. . . . Distrust all those who require you to abandon [reason],
wherever religion is concerned.
Unitarians and Universalists alike worked to adapt their religious
understanding to the growing, sometimes astounding discoveries of
astronomy, geology, and biology.
But even for nineteenth-century Unitarians and Universalists, there
were questions about the proper use of science: Would it destroy
religious faith? Does it neglect or dismiss the spirit? Can its
discoveries undermine as well as support human morality? The first
great Unitarian preacher, William Ellery Channing, passionate advocate
for reason and education that he was, wrote,
In truth, nothing is more characteristic of our age than the
vast range of inquiry which is opening more and more to the multitude
of men. Thought frees the old bounds to which men used to confine
themselves. It holds nothing too sacred for investigation. . .
. Undoubtedly this is a perilous tendency. Men forget the limits
of their powers. They question the infinite, the unsearchable,
with an audacious self-reliance. They shock pious and revering
minds, and rush into an extravagance of doubt more unphilosophical
and foolish than the weakest credulity.
In addition, over these two centuries, groups have risen up within
our movement that have found science inadequate and sometimes arrogant
in its limited picture of what is true. Transcendentalists, Unitarian
Universalist Christians, feminists, and recent advocates of spirituality
have argued that science ignores the immeasurable truths of the
spirit. A divide has arisen in Unitarian Universalism between deductive
and intuitive approaches to truth, leading many to question whether
science and religion are always compatible.
The Challenge of the Twentieth Century
A general acceptance of science, and of the technology it makes
possible, continued to grow among us, however, well into the twentieth
century, along with a belief in the goodness of human nature and
its continuing improvement through education. These beliefs led
to the bold Unitarian affirmation of progress onward and upward
forever. In the mid-twentieth century, the theologian Henry Nelson
Wieman argued in The Source of Human Good that science and technology
will eventually solve the major problems facing humankind.
But at that same moment, human beings were facing the horrors of
twentieth-century technology made possible by science. The great
Universalist minister Clarence Skinner wrote in 1947,
We have seen in Europe how education can be prostituted and made
to serve the ends of destruction. . . . Our culture has trusted
too much in facts. It has let science go where it will, serving
heathen gods. But we are suffering for our sins. We are enslaved
in an age of enlightenment because our enlightenment is not total.
We are one-eyed philosophers and have lost the ability to see
more than one thing at a time.
At the end of his essay, Skinner concluded, “Righteousness
must be founded on truth. It must square with reality. It must harmonize
with what we know of the universe. But truth must be righteous.
It must serve the good and not the evil. It must seek the Kingdom
of Ends. It must serve the moral law.” He was clear, as Channing
was, that the scientific search for provable facts and their applications
should be guided by our ethical understanding.
Human nature has not changed significantly, and it can still turn
any tool or cause to evil. Science cannot be our religion. We need
all our ways of knowing—love, reason, experiment, history,
psychology, ethical understandings developed through human history—to
figure out how to live our lives. We need them all to decide if
something is good or bad, whether it is done in the name of science,
religion, patriotism, or any other worthy but limited allegiance.
Learning and Wonder
I continue to believe passionately that science and religion are
compatible. Individually we may be more comfortable with one approach
or another, but we can still recognize that any one approach is
limited and needs others. We can rejoice in what they accomplish
together.
One meaning of unitarianism is the belief that all that exists
is ultimately one, whatever form it takes: matter and energy, body
and soul, mind and heart, all living and non-living things, deduction
and intuition, emotion and intellect, love and reason, science and
religion. We may prioritize our loyalties by the things we feel
closest to, but then we use our reason to remember that we are all
one. The Big Bang, while we cannot claim it as proven scientific
fact, is a metaphor that harmonizes with a belief in unity.
Universalism entails a belief that everything belongs. Science
has uncovered enough about genetics to show us that we belong together
within the human family, among primates, among all living things,
among the stars. We are at once so small and so securely held by
and connected with a vastness beyond our comprehension. I felt as
a child, and I feel now, the attachment between me and each thing
I encounter. In some sense, I love the whole world. God is in the
details. When we live in the world with this understanding, there
are few simple answers and fewer absolutes. We must be ready to
open our minds and hearts to change, however convinced we are. We
must also be ready to act, according to our best understandings
and with humility.
Science and religion together reveal to us a world of wonder. They
make us grateful to be part of it, even in the face of the fear,
pain, loss, and evil that are also part of it. So it is that the
Unitarian poet minister Robert Terry Weston wrote, at the end of
his poem on the evolution of the universe,
This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space; out
of the stars swung the earth; life upon earth rose to love. This
is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know; Out of your
heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.
Helen Lutton Cohen is minister emerita of the First Parish in Lexington,
Massachusetts, which she served from 1980 to 2002. She is a life-long
Unitarian Universalist and the daughter of a research chemist and
history teacher.
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