The Pope Makes Peace Between Science and Faith
Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large for TIME.
(Enviado por Rosa Penna)
A divide that never needed to exist is at
last narrowing
Boehner Couldn't Stop Obama, So Republicans Stopped Boehner
NBC NewsRare Supermoon Eclipse Brings Wonder to the Night Sky NBC
NewsStudents Killed in Seattle Duck Tour Crash Identified NBC
News
Of all of the frivolous lawsuits that have come before the courts in the long
history of American jurisprudence, the most ridiculous has to be the one filed
by Madalyn Murray O’Hair more than 45 years ago. O’Hair was the exceedingly
vocal founder of the group American Atheists, and what left her so aggrieved was
something that left virtually everyone else on the planet deeply moved: the 1968
Christmas Eve reading of Genesis from the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned
mission to orbit the moon.
O’Hair’s gripe was that since the spacecraft was government property and the
astronauts were government employees, it was an unconstitutional commingling of
church and state for them to read from the Bible. The suit was meritless and the
court treated it accordingly. The founding fathers no more intended to prevent
three men from expressing their faith on a holy night far from home than they
would have forbidden sailors on a government-owned warship from holding a prayer
service the night before they go into battle.
But if church and state were not even within handshake distance during Apollo
8, church and science were in a new and transformative embrace. It was the
iconic photo of earthrise that the astronauts brought home that first revealed
the planet to be the beautiful, fragile, exceedingly destructible thing it is.
And it was that insight, in turn, that is widely credited with galvanizing the
environmental movement. Whether you believed the planet was created by the hand
of God or the violence of physics, you knew we had to take care of it more
gently and gratefully than we were.
That was the message too in Pope Francis’s celebrated climate encyclical last
spring, and it was the one he brought with him to Capitol Hill on Sept. 24. “I
call for a courageous and responsible effort to redirect our steps and to avert
the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human
activity,” he said. For those who needed things put more directly, he added,
“God will judge you on whether you cared for the Earth.”
This is nothing new for this Pope, who, in his encyclical, even went so far
as to prescribe a negotiated solution to the climate crisis. “The establishment
of an international climate change treaty is a grave ethical and moral
responsibility,” he wrote.
In the Pope’s twinning of the divine and the profane, there’s a lot more
divinity than there is profanity—but that doesn’t mean that Francis’s charge is
not also rooted in the solidity of science. The battle between the spiritual and
the empirical has always been less the work of the alleged combatants themselves
than of the fights other people want to pick between them.
There is the expediency of Sen. James Inhofe, of the Oklahoma oil patch,
denying the reality of climate change with the argument that, “God’s still up
there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to
change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.” Would he say the
same if he came from a state that was getting rich not on fossil fuels but on
windmill technology?
There’s the smugness of a Bill Maher declaring, “Faith means making a virtue
out of not thinking,” or a Christopher Hitchens, arguing that “That which can be
asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Did they mean
that? Maybe. Did they sell books and performance tickets when they did? Yes.
But the world, to say nothing of the universe, has never been as binary as
all that. Religion and science have always wrestled with many of the same
questions: birth and death, beginnings and endings, creation and annihilation.
If there’s a lack of rigor in the theologian who argues that all creation is the
work of God, so stop asking impertinent questions, there’s a lack of wonder in
the scientist who can look out at the universe—or back at the Earth from the
distant moon—and see nothing but physics and geology.
The fact is, the greatest leaders in both the science and faith camps have
often been the ones best able to look across the imaginary gulf that separates
them and see merit on the other side. “I do not share the crusading spirit of
the professional atheist,” wrote Albert Einstein in a 1949 letter. “I prefer an
attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual
understanding of nature and of our own being.”
In 1965, Pope Pius VI foreshadowed Francis, when, in a United Nations
address, he too spoke about the destructibility of the world at the hands of
humanity. “The real danger comes from man,” he said, “who has at his disposal
ever more powerful instruments that are as well fitted to bring about ruin as
they are to achieve lofty conquests.”
The growing relationship between science and faith has always been something
of an informal, common law marriage, but Francis may have consecrated it this
week. He deserves to be making news for doing so, but not because there’s
anything radical in his beliefs. You may prefer your universe with a God or
without a God, but it’s always been harder—and smarter—to accept that you just
don’t know and make room for them both. You don’t have to believe that’ll save
your soul, but it will do a lot to enrich it.
