Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. These two short Latin prayers were said at the beginning of the Old Catholic Mass. The priest begins with, "I will go to the altar of God" to which the altar boy responds, "To God, the joy of my youth." I was nine and in the fourth grade when I first learned these prayers, and they were the joy of my youth. Fourth grade in my parochial school was the traditional age for altar boy training, and most of the boys in my fourth grade class learned those prayers during after school sessions. We memorized both the prayers said by the priest and the responses that we were to make and learned all the various tasks we needed to perform for Mass service.
I made memorizing these prayers fit rather neatly into my nine-year-old life. We had moved to a new neighborhood the year before, and now that I was feeling settled in our new home and my new school, I started exploring the town by walking as far in every direction as my feet and my courage would carry me. As I walked along I kept repeating these prayers to myself. If I tried this today I would no doubt be seen as just another babbling, lost old man. But as a grade school child I could walk and repeat those mysterious Latin words to myself over and over with no one else being the wiser. Needless to say when my turn for class recitation came I had no trouble with the lessons.
The air of mystery that hung over these Latin prayers spurred me to spend some time reading the English translations of the words I was reciting and other prayers regularly said by the priest at Mass. I was fascinated by the Creed, which was the Nicene Creed and different from the Apostle's Creed that we learned in religion class. I was particularly taken with the first line of Nicene Creed, Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipoténtem, factórem caeli et terrae, visibilium ómnium et invisibílium, with the traditional translation: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and all things seen and unseen."
Sometimes the last words were translated, "all things visible and invisible," which I liked better as a child because they made a familiar connection with English words I knew. So much of the religion I was learning was tied up with the unseen world hiding behind the seen world of everyday existence: an almighty and invisible God, and the visible signs of sacraments that conveyed God’s invisible graces to their recipients. And in my child’s mind it was also tied up with my favorite radio program. On Sunday mornings I attended Mass with its mysterious connections with the invisible God, and on Sunday afternoons I listened the radio broadcast of the The Shadow, in which the ever-vigilant Lamont Cranston used his hypnotic power of invisibility to thwart the "evil that lurks in the hearts of men," a catch phrase that was followed by the famous all knowing, almost sinister "Shadow Laugh" that I never tired of hearing.
As the school year went on, the altar boy training continued. In early spring, while on one of my exploratory walks, I realized that my birthday was approaching. I decided that I was really getting older since when I turned ten it would take two digits to write my age. Now, almost sixty years later, it still takes just two digits to write my age. It was around this time that I served at my first Mass. It was an early morning, weekday Mass, a precaution just in case a few points had been missed in the training. I knew that the nuns who had trained me would be in attendance to point out any mistakes. I arrived early, put on my black cassock and white surplice, and watched with interest as the priest put on his Mass vestments. The Mass started and all seemed to be going just as I'd practiced.
When consecration time came, the holiest part of the Mass in Catholic tradition, I went up the altar steps and knelt behind the priest. The priest took the communion wafer in his hands and bent low over the altar to pronounce the words of consecration, words that I had never heard spoken before. He said the words in low voice pronouncing each word clearly and separately: Hoc, est, enim, Corpus, Meum. Then he genuflected and held the consecrated wafer aloft while I rang the altar bells three times. This was the point at which the unexpected arrived.
I experienced what the visible sign of the bread was meant to invoke, the invisible presence of the divine, of the holy. It was a feeling of awe, transcendence, mystery, and peace—the feeling that Rudolf Otto calls in his religious classic, The Idea of the Holy, the numinous. The hymn, Panis Angelicusthat we heard this morning, expressed the same idea in the words, O res mirabilis (Oh, miraculous thing). For me it was an intense feeling that only faded slowly. After Mass one of the nuns said to me that everything had been okay until the consecration then I seemed distracted, and she admonished me to concentrate more in the future. I didn’t try to explain. I had no words at that time to explain what I didn’t really understand myself. I just said, "Yes, sister," and went home.
In a famous quotation from the First Epistle to the Corinthians Paul writes: "When I was a child, my speech, my outlook, and my thoughts were all childish. When I grew up I had finished with childish things." Perhaps. When I grew up science became both my occupation and my preoccupation. As we learned in today’s reading from Sir Arthur Eddington, science also deals with an unseen reality lying beneath the surface of the seen. As an adult I have never experienced the numinous in a formal religious context, but I have experienced something similar in doing scientific research.
For most of my career in science I was involved in developing physical theory and computing what I hoped were useful results from the theory. A science project can seem like a very long exercise, stretching sometimes over years through proposal, peer review, approval, funding, working up the theory in detail, cajoling experimentalists to get you some data, and finally doing the matching calculations, which might take days of computing time. Finally, the critical day arrives when you have both the measurements and the calculations in hand. You compare them and know instinctively that you’ve got it right. Some small part of the universe has been laid open to your understanding. It’s a powerful confirming experience: a connection between the seen and the unseen has been made, between unseen ideas expressed as mathematical symbols that describe unseen physical entities, and measurements that show how some part of the physical world actually behaves. It’s an opening of the mind to the awe inspiring, the miraculous, and the sacred in Nature. One gets just a glimpse of what Albert Einstein meant when he said, "What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."
Whether kneeling before an altar, hunched over a computer terminal, or just walking down the street we find ourselves immersed in a world in which the mystery of the unseen emerges from the seen. The whole of reality, as we perceive it, is a construct of our minds, and usually we just take the existence of the seen and the unseen for granted. There is, I think, a natural tendency to take the unseen as a less certain part of reality than that which we can see or sense directly. I think this is more a matter of prejudice than reasoned thought. But it is a prejudice that is well entrenched in our culture and comes out in familiar expressions such as, "Seeing is believing," or "Show me the money." To some extent both religion and science use the seen as an indication of the unseen, but in quite different ways. Now, I’d like to consider some aspects of the ways in which the seen and unseen are dealt with in both religion and science and then reflect on the relationship of these two great systems of human thought.
Let’s start with religion since it far predates science in the history of human thought. Lets go back four or five thousand years to the time of the biblical patriarchs. I’ll stick to the Judeo-Christian tradition since it’s the only one I can lay any claim to being familiar with. The concept of God as one, all powerful, creating, and unseen is one of the great, dominating ideas in the history of Western religious thought. But it was an idea that took hold only gradually in communities of the ancient Middle East where it had to compete with the older Pagan Deities who were given concrete existence in the form of well- developed cults, ritual images, and idols.
Perhaps, it was the total abstractness of this unseen God that initially gave little comfort to the religious communities of the time. And while Pagan Deities were often associated with the various forces of nature the new, unseen God stood outside of all nature, which nonetheless as its creator he could control. So how would this unseen God show his presence? Well, through various signs called epiphanies or theophanies such as pillars of fire or pillars of cloud, a burning bush, the rush of wind or whirlwinds, and tongues of fire for just a few examples. Out of this list I’m going to pick wind as a particularly relevant example and sketch its relationship to the seen and unseen first from a religious point of view and then from scientific point of view.
It's not hard to imagine how wind came to be a primitive religious symbol. Even though it's invisible, you can feel the wind against your body, feel it blow through your hair, and whistle past your ears. And the wind produces visible effects such as sand or dust or water being blown around. Surely this must have fired human minds with an aura of wonder and mystery from the earliest times.
In this connection wind appears very early in the Bible. In the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis, we find two variant and religiously revealing translations of the Hebrew text. In the New English Bible, my favorite English translation, we read, "the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the waters." A footnote gives the alternate translation for the last clause of the verse, "and the spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters." And if we go forward just a little in Genesis to chapter two, verse seven the theme is amplified, "Then the Lord god formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Thus the man became a living creature." The connection between "wind," "spirit," "life," and "breath" made in the early part of Genesis is one of the great themes in all of biblical literature.
For many of us a familiar example of this thematic connection is the Christian ritual of Baptism by immersion. The person to be baptized is immersed in water where no breath can be drawn and undergoes a symbolic death of the old life and is then raised out of the water to breathe in the spirit of a new life. For the Christian believer it does as Marilynne Robinson wrote in our story today, "look like a birth or a resurrection."
The scientific view has much less emotional appeal. Wind is the bulk movement of air, which is just a mixture of gases. One of the gases in this mixture is oxygen, which we breathe in to support the biochemical reactions that sustain our life, and we breathe out principally carbon dioxide and water vapor that are the byproducts of these biochemical reactions. The scientific view is that not only are the gases themselves unseen, but the gases are made up of other unseen entities, molecules. Molecules are made up of atoms, but for our purpose this morning we’ll regard molecules as the ultimate entities we need to deal with.
Any grade school child today could tell you about molecules and atoms, but it wasn’t always so. For nearly the entire nineteenth century scientists debated about whether these unseen molecules and atoms were real or just a convenient way of thinking about the physical world. At the beginning of the twentieth century the French physicist, Henri Poincaré, wrote a book in which he listed three unsolved, fundamental problems in physics. Albert Einstein, who had been thinking about the same problems for many years, read that book in 1904, and in 1905 he published a series of scientific papers that solved all three problems. 1905 is a famous year in the history of science and is called Einstein’s miracle year
One of the problems that Einstein solved in 1905 was that of Brownian motion. The botanist Robert Brown had observed early in the nineteenth century that when particles, too small to be seen with the naked eye but large enough to be viewed under a microscope, were suspended in water they moved in what appeared to be random zigzag paths through the liquid. These zigzag, random Brownian motions went unexplained for nearly eighty years until Einstein tackled the problem in 1905. Einstein assumed that the molecules of the liquid were in constant motion and colliding with the particles in such a way as to produce the zigzag paths that were observed. He worked out the equations that described the motion of these particles and when experimentalists actually measured what was happening they found Einstein’s theory to be correct. So the zigzag paths of the particles that could be seen were shown to be produced by the motion of large numbers of moving water molecules that were unseen. As a result of the work of Einstein and other scientists the reality of molecules and atoms became established science in the early twentieth century. Today, as I said before, any school child can tell you that atoms and molecules are real.
Religion and science give us two very different pictures of the world. I won’t belabor the large and obvious differences between the two. Both science and religion are human enterprises, both start with intuitions about the world, but the way that those intuitions are worked out and become accepted as true are vastly different. Yet Albert Einstein said, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So in spite of these vast differences, religion and science need each other according to Einstein. One certainly wouldn’t know it after listening to some scientists and some religious people today. The questions may well be: What kind of religion? And, What kind of science? I think the question in our time is mainly: What kind of religion?
Perhaps, you think that by singling out religion in this way I’m being biased. So, let me explain at least a little. It has to do with rates of change. The philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that religion does change. Whitehead cites a Roman Catholic writer from the seventeenth century who shows that theologians of the first three centuries used religious formulations that have been considered heretical since the fifth century C.E. So religion changes, but modern science since its inception in the seventeenth century has changed much more rapidly and dramatically. Religion simply has not kept up with conceptual change in science and other areas of human thought.
In fact, much religion has resisted change and accommodation with new knowledge. It seems to me that fundamentalism, which has taken root in many religions throughout the world, is at root a fearful refusal to acknowledge and accommodate change; and it’s brought about a disastrous turn to violence among some of its adherents. In the end I don’t think fundamentalism can hold, but in the interim it is a movement to be reckoned with. Literally, in my opinion, a vast number of human lives hang in the balance between finding a religion and a science that complement each other and continuing the current war between religion and science.
Scientists often say that there is a need for better education and understanding of science in the general public. While I agree with this, I think better education and understanding are even more critical for religion. Ask, who were the outstanding physicists of the twentieth century? Names such as Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman and others would be readily given. But ask, who were the outstanding theologians and religious scholars of the twentieth century? How many people would be able to name just one? Good modern religious scholarship and new thought provoking ideas are available; but who’s paying attention? Many religious people are firmly wedded to the idea that religion does not, and ought not, change; and they work to keep it so. Some old answers are also ignored. Nearly ten centuries ago the Jewish philosopher, Maimomides, taught that if the bible is true and science is true, then some way could be found to interpret the bible so that it is consistent with science. It’s an interesting idea, and the twenty first century would seem to offer a grand opportunity for its exploration.
Since not all of us are steeped in religion and science, one might reasonably ask: Is there a more universal message in what I’ve been saying this morning? I think there is. On our Earth it took a few billion years to evolve human life, which gave the universe the conscious power to look at and reflect on itself. Societies developed religion and science as responses to the reality in which humans found themselves immersed. Surely among the first discoveries made by early humans was the variety of things seen and unseen: animals, plants, stars, planets, moons, languages, imagination, dreams, hope, music, art, stories, love--a seemingly unending list. The sheer human joy of being alive, conscious, and a part of this grand universe are some of the universal human feelings that gave rise to our modern formalized institutions of science and religion. Today there is still comfort and solace to be had in giving these feelings a conscious place in our lives.
Summer is now waning; soon fall will be here and the leaves will be turning colors. Leave the altars and the computers behind. Take a walk outdoors. Feel the wind against your body, feel it blow through your hair, and whistle past your ears. See what’s to be seen; reflect on the unseen. Take some deep breaths, invite your soul, and be in communion with Nature. O res mirabilis!