How to Have Faith …

Without Supernatural Belief

Adapted from a service at the

Second Unitarian Church of Omaha

Oct. 6, 2002

10/06/02

Prelude: Two Poets, Two Scientists

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

--Alexander Pope, "Essay on Man"

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
--W.H. Auden, "The More Loving One"

"What the world needs now is not merely a rationalist denial of the old but a religious affirmation of something new."

"We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself."

--Carl Sagan, scientist and humanist

Good morning. Thank you for allowing me to spend this time with you. I’m afraid I’ll leave you with more questions than answers, but then maybe that’s not a bad thing. As Einstein showed when he wondered what it would be like to ride a beam of light, sometimes the right question can change your entire perspective.

Children, of course, have a real genius for asking great questions, and often we’re left struggling for answers. Let me share a few examples that children have asked in Sunday School letters to God.

A little girl named Jane, for example, wrote: "Dear God, What does it mean You are a Jealous God? I thought You had everything."

A boy named Tommy wrote: Why is Sunday school on Sunday? I thought it was supposed to be our day of rest.

And here’s Jane once again: "Dear GOD, Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don't You just keep the ones You have now?"

Well, I don’t have the same knack, but about five years ago, in the midst of a Unitarian forum, I did come up with a question that has led me on an interesting path. Is it really true, I asked myself, that if we don’t believe in a supernatural Creator, we must accept that meaning is arbitrary, life has no purpose, and the universe is doomed? In pursuing answers to that question, I have come to believe that a rational case can be made for a resounding "no!" To put that case before you, I begin with another question.

Why are we here? For much of history, in one way or another, the answer has been this: we’re here to serve God. Since Darwin, the secular rejoinder has been that we are here for no purpose. In all humility I propose to offer a new answer. In doing so, I must shunt aside both the traditional religious answers and the contemporary atheistic ones.

I attempt this with great respect for the best that religion and science have to offer. But I have an even greater dread of the worst that science and religion in combination threaten. Science gives us the instruments of carnage, and religion supplies some the motive to use them.

In a world of fanatics, bombs and bioweapons, we have all been forced to ask yet another ancient question: What will become of us? The effort to find new answers to old questions, then, is no sophomoric exercise. It is an attempt to stave off the very real prospect of Armageddon.

Heaven knows, there are plenty of conflicting answers. To those who have faith in a living God, the matter rests with him. To the fundamentalist Christian, the Rapture may start at any moment. To the hopeful Jew, the Messiah will eventually return. To the devout Muslim, Mahdi is one day coming.

And in the minds of most who have a strictly scientific outlook, our destiny is set. We must in the end share the fate of our universe, a long unwinding that ends in the quiet twitch of lonely particles.

Who is right? In these postmodern days, it is not merely bad form but practically a form of oppression to say that anyone’s worldview is wrong. But I will say. Both science and religion are wrong.

Let me start with religion. At the risk of offending some of you, I must confess … I am certain the story told by revealed religions is wrong. In this brief talk, I cannot attempt to discredit every supernatural belief. Let’s just say that, for me, literal Christianity, the dominant religion in our culture, the foundation stone of Unitarianism, and the faith of my ancestors, may be set aside with certainty.

Here is one reason why. The central prediction of Christianity is Christ’s return. This is the key belief upon which Christians stake their faith. Yet the Bible not only says he will return, it says he will return soon.

I am not accustomed to citing chapter and verse, but since this is a church service, let me share a bit of Scripture with you. First, a selection from Revelations 22, the testimony of "John," relating what the angel told him. This is what he says:

"Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, because the time is near. Let him who does wrong continue to do wrong … let him who does right, continue to do right... (Rev. 22)

In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul is even clearer. This is what he says:

Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for you to remain as you are. Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife. … What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not…For this world in its present form is passing away.

(1 Corinthians 7)

Can anyone doubt that Paul thinks Christ is returning in a matter of weeks, if not days? Even if we make allowances, the Bible as a whole puts the lie to the part. Biblical chronology yields a fairly precise 6,000 year timeline. Following up on Bishop Usher’s biblical analysis, Vice Chancellor John Lightfoot of Cambridge University set the birth of Jesus at 4004 years after creation. And here we are, two-thousand and two years later.

You don’t have to be a mathematician to see that, in the Biblical frame, one-third of all time has passed since the crucifixion of Christ. Not even the most generous, optimistic, broadminded and dare I say liberal interpretation can keep the word "soon" afloat upon such a vast ocean of time.

And so sinks the crucial prediction of the Second Coming, and with it all reason for me, at any rate, to invest faith, hope or credence in Christianity. Nor does any other story of a deity-in-charge hold water for me.

What of science, then? I suggest to you that being wrong is an essential part of science. I am not just talking about Karl Popper’s falsification theory of how science works. I am saying that science is incapable of doing more than giving us ever-improving approximations of nature. Isaac Asimov put it best in a brilliant essay called "The relativity of wrong." This is what he said:

…when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Even if it’s wrong, science, with its ever-improving approximations, gives us highly reliable predictions, and when we look along its sightlines at our prospects, we come to a chilling conclusion. History is against us. At least 99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Our own record of species-destruction is unparalleled except by the comets, and we may now be on the brink of killing ourselves. Even if we’re clever enough to beat those odds, the sun is running down, and will eventually die. But, like many of us, as it ages, the sun is getting fatter and, as it goes about its work, it is getting hotter. In about a billion years, it will be so close and so hot that the seas of the earth will boil away, and with it all life.

Even if we somehow survive that, there’s worse to come.

"Things," said the poet William Butler Yeats, "fall apart. The Center cannot hold." How right he was.

The universe is expanding at an ever-growing rate. With each tick of the clock, it grows a little colder, a little more disordered. In the long run, the very atoms of which we’re composed may be unstable. Things fall apart.

Listen to Harvard-trained astronomer Brian Schmidt, speaking on the PBS program "Nova." This is what he said:

"In the distant future there will be nothing in the universe left to see, there will just be us. And that seems to me to be the coldest, most horrible end that I could think of. It is...it is just...I don't know. It's creepy." (NOVA, Nov. 21, 2000)

Insights such as this led Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg to his most notorious remark. This is what he said: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

And that’s the story science tells. No wonder so few people are willing to accept it as the last word. But if science is so right on the credibility continuum, why shouldn’t we accept its verdict on our fate? What has been overlooked? Anyone?

As Neils Bohr, the father of quantum science, once noted in a moment of exasperation, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

When you look at it up close, the universe turns out to be downright bizarre. Particles pop in and out of the quantum foam, photons simultaneously travel many paths, and the fabric of space-time rolls up into 10 dimensions, tears and folds back in on itself. Very strange. But of all the weird, unpredictable things in world, the most difficult to anticipate, the wild card in the deck, is us.

Humanity is the one thing we know of that could alter the fate of the universe. And so, we come to the heart of rational hope. I told you at the outset I would offer an answer to that deepest question of all time, and you have waited patiently for me to do so. Let me get down to brass tacks.

There exists a strange consensus among religionists and nihilistic atheists that without God, all meaning, values and sense of purpose are -- like the languages we speak or the songs we sing -- ARBITRARY. This, I suggest, is profoundly wrong. I propose to you that, deep within our DNA, lies a single value on which our entire civilization is built. This is what it says: "Life is good."

DNA, you recall, is a double-stranded self-replicating molecule that can encode instructions for a living creature, anything from a bacterium to a potted plant or a human being. But why? What’s the point?

There’s only one reason: DNA exists to perpetuate itself. Not by the action of any intelligence, so far as the evidence shows, but by default. All the DNA that didn't seek to perpetuate itself is presumably long gone.

DNA imposes its one and only value on all its creations, including us. It does not give a toss whether any particular individual survives, suffers, or finds happiness. It only acts to insure that life rafts of DNA continue to flow down the river of time. To meet the challenge it tries variation after variation on a handful of themes: microbes, plants, animals. One of the strategies adopted by DNA is to create animals with self-awareness and what Richard Dawkins calls "vast executive discretion." That would be us.

In doing so, DNA has granted us minds. Now, we’re obviously not the only animals with minds, but ours have a special cultural property. We’re the only creatures with the power to discover DNA and tinker with it. No other living thing on earth has the slightest idea that its body is full of double-helixed molecules telling it what to do. No other creature has the ability to wonder what it all means. No other creature has the power to do something about it.

Of course, that power gives us options. Among these is self-extinction, through aggression, idiocy or apathy. But if we accept DNA's dictate as the root of all our values, then we at last have a rational, nonarbitrary tree of values to guide us in our choices. And here are its fruits: Life should endure. To endure among those who have a choice, life should be worth living. To be worth living, life should be pleasurable and purposeful.

If we extrapolate from this ethos, we can justly claim that humanity does have a larger purpose: to keep life going.

But if we examine what it would take to keep life alive, it soon becomes apparent that that we may well need a deity to get the job done. Among other challenges, we’re up against the most fundamental force in the Universe: the tendency toward disorder.

And yet, there is no plausible evidence that an interventionist deity exists out there. Guinea worms devour children from the inside. Lightning strikes far more golfers than criminals. Tornadoes flatten churches and brothels alike. Unless and until divine intervention occurs, we must strive to grow God from within. No easy task, I grant you. But there are excellent reasons to have faith.

Wait a minute. Faith? That’s a funny word for a nonbeliever like me to use. But faith has many meanings. When a bettor says, "I have faith in this horse," he’s not making a religious profession – even if there’s prayer involved. I define faith in its most elemental form as the unshakable belief that in the end some good will come of it all.

Let me pause here to give a name to this faith. I call it DeoLogic. It is grounded in the realization that we may not be the children of God, but we are all the potential ancestors of a Supreme Being, one capable of mediating the fate of the universe in favor of life. And it is the faith that we can make that potential real.

How? I can only give you the shoddiest sketch. I hope better minds than mine will hereafter bend to the task.

To survive, we must achieve a peaceful and sustainable global civilization. That much, I trust, is clear. Eventually, we will have to learn how to protect the earth from the huge impactors that every so often smash into our planet and kill off most of life.

Within the next billion years, we’ll have to learn how to steer the earth to a more distant orbit, to prevent the bloating sun from boiling off our seas.

Even those heroic efforts will not be enough. Sooner or later, intelligent life must move beyond this beautiful planet and indeed, beyond this sunny solar system. To do so, it will necessarily change from a caterpillar into a butterfly.

And it’s all because of Einstein. He's the man who showed us that everything's relative. If you went strolling off into the stars in a steadily accelerating spaceship, you could approach the speed of light within about a year. And at that speed, you could explore large tracts of the Milky Way in just 25 years. Unfortunately, though, when you got back you wouldn’t be able to brag about it to your friends. For while you were out gallivanting near the speed of light, 2 million years would have passed for those of us left behind on Earth. Relativity. It's truly a time-consuming theory.

So to become a galactic civilization, intelligent life will have to jump platforms. We humans may go on living out our brief little lives, but Mind must get beyond these old-fashioned, short-lived brains and become something not only greater but much more enduring. Now we are forced to contemplate the emergence of a higher-order intelligence, with its own self-awareness and sense of purpose.

We can know almost nothing about this greater intelligence. But we may assume this: it must have the same mission, to complete the journey from DNA to deity. Remember, the only likely alternative is the extinction of life, followed inexorably by the slow death of the universe.

Once a higher-order intelligence arises, we will be in the presence of something very much like what Moses met in the desert. Except that this will not be a wrothful tribal god, nor even a supernatural being.

It will just be DNA’s descendent, doing its thing. Life, after all, may be defined as the self-organization of matter and energy into patterns that seek to preserve themselves. Only now we’re contemplating patterns on a cosmic scale. So, as DeoLogic tells it, God, like life itself, is an emergent property of the Universe. More specifically, God will be the purely natural consequence of life's struggle to beat the odds and break the seemingly unbreakable law: Things fall apart.

Of course, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may well prove unassailable. But there is an escape hatch for our hopes. It may be that our galactic-scale god will be able to bring about the birth of a new universe through a black hole. Not only that, but it may be possible to set the initial conditions in such a way as to seed it with life anew. Indeed, once we conceive this, a startling possibility leaps to mind. Perhaps we are here because some godlike civilization created the bio-friendly conditions of our universe. Of course, we cannot know this and probably never will; we can only have agnostic faith that it may be so.

Whether we are the first seed or the latest harvest, our obligation to continue the cosmic cycle of life is clear. Without us, the universe would have no meaning, no purpose and no hope.

If we accept DeoLogic and aim for the stars, will we succeed? Who knows… On the one hand, we have the implacable forces of nature, especially the dark side of human nature.

Yet, on the other hand, we have the remarkable achievements of civilization. A thousand years ago our proudest accomplishments were not particularly distinct from what termites, ants and crickets do: build structures, go to war and make music. In just 100 years, the typical human has moved from the farm to the city, from reading by candlelight to watching TV by electric light. In my lifetime, we have become a spacefaring species and given birth to the Internet.

If we do accept our mission, this generation will strive for a just and democratic world government, it will constrain the human population, and it will protect the natural environment on which we all depend. If we then get through the rapids of history, if we can become a peaceful, planetary civilization intent on universal progress toward a Supreme Being, there is surely every reason to hope we will succeed.

So, why are we here? This is what I say: we are here to prepare the way. We are here to enjoy being alive. We are here to become worthy ancestors of God.

[END]