Star Island, Rye, NH, August 2006

Without science I couldn’t be religious. (Ps. 104.24-30)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

April 28, 2024

To my father, the cultural anthropologist. To my partner, the chemical engineer. To my advisor, the radical empiricist. The question isn’t “How could religion and science go together?” but “How could they not?”

Reverence.

After nightfall, they gathered in the lecture hall. Its light shone across the small island making it easy to find. Guests walked along the cut path. Off to the side, the local loosestrife and knotweed grew.

They had a good look at the island earlier in the day. A small, rocky shoal that sounded of wind, waves, catbirds, and gulls. The old clapboard hotel was smoothed and seaworn. A great porch filled with rocking chairs overlooked the sea.

It was an easy place to revere. To be slowed by and attend to. A place to breathe and be and feel an elemental sense of belonging. It didn’t seem clear that a lecture was necessary. But they filed in all the same.

On the first evening, a philosopher told the story of cosmic and terrestrial evolution. He called it everybody’s story, a tent big enough for them all. The philosopher knew his audience: other philosophers, scientists, researchers, and clergy. They were members of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, gathered to think about the big questions. And they began with the philosopher’s context.

Everybody’s story was the story of the evolution and emergence of life. All life. All of it interconnected. The scientist. The shoal. The wind, the gull, and stars blinking into view overhead. The philosopher couldn’t help but be moved by it. His voice slowed and his eyes widened. He held out his arms. They were all a part of a story that went farther back and further down than anyone imagined. They were all connected to everything else in myriad ways, seen and unseen. They were invited to glimpse this truth and revel in it.

Wonder.

Midway through the week, they gathered again. By then, they were more whiskered and wind-blown. The island had little fresh water and so there were no regular showers, only basins of warm water delivered each morning. The rustic setup made them feel like sailors, the island their boat. They tumbled into the lecture hall to hear from the geologist.

The geologist paced back and forth and told the story of the Earth itself; how it formed and subsequently changed over time. He wanted to impress upon them the unlikeliness of it all. How, of all the planets circling all the stars, our Earth was positioned at just the right distance from our sun so as not to be too hot or too cold. It was a Goldilocks scenario, he explained. A kind of cosmic jackpot.

Thanks to the just-rightness of Earth after it cooled, and in between its great ice ages, conditions were conducive to the emergence, evolution, adaptation of life in numberless forms. The geologist was enraptured by the story and so were they all by the end of it. Their senses of wonder, curiosity, and delight came to life. Walking out into the evening again, they felt their good fortune to have such a lovely island underfoot. By which they meant the planet.

Awe.

They spent the week attending lectures, learning about their place in the great story. They boarded boats. They catalogued the island’s plants. They painted in the art shed, worked crosswords in the rocking chairs. And they went to chapel.

The stone building with its worn pews and plain windows was more than two centuries old. It resonated with the memory of all the philosophers, scientists, researchers, and clergy who had been there before. Yet it was also filled with the devotion of the current group. They had learned so much, experienced such beauty, and the chapel was a place for them to respond.

They sang old Unitarian hymns and read Mary Oliver poems. The Reverend guided them in scientifically-informed sermons. They shuffled happily in their seats. Tapped their sandals to the music and the message. A few salty scientists even said, Amen.

After one of the last services, they received word that a storm was blowing nearby. Everyone was waved to the main building where they huddled in the great room. The timbers shook and a couple of windows shattered in the gale, but afterwards they emerged to watch the sun set again. A hundred shades of bright color set against a calming sea. And then, as ever, the stars. One by one, followed by the whole planetarium. They stood beneath the sky and just looked up. It was awesome.

Humility.

It never occurred to them that religion and science didn’t fit naturally together. That was a given. What occurred to them, and what they talked about and even experienced, was that each complemented the other so fully. They had come as scientists who wanted a certain soulfulness and as clergy who wanted a certain grounding. Put another way, a science that was religious, a religion scientific.

Yet what they meant was what old John Dewey wrote about. Dewey spoke of the religious as the quality of an experience. It would help us find our place in the world and spur us to discover and be more. Dewey thought that the religious sensibility, when healthy, would help us to better adjust to life and its conditions. He had little interest in particular religious traditions. Rather, Dewey wanted people to have that broader religious experience. He knew that good scientists were onto it because they were curious, persistent, and, ultimately, humble.

Dewey’s philosophy was naturalistic, and he placed his faith in the human enterprise when generations of people applied their knowledge and skill to advance a shared understanding. It was an optimistic theory developed before many of the horrors of the 20th Century. Yet its method held. To think of the religious in terms of the quality of an experience followed by the effects achieved by that experience. . .well, that’s what the group was doing on the island.

They took what they learned, along with their newfound senses of reverence, wonder, awe, humility, fragility, and responsibility with them as they boarded the ferry home. In a new way they understood that they had never actually left home, had been there the whole time.

The old psalmist once sang to a Mystery whose name he could not say. That was the Hebrew word trick; vowels that couldn’t be pronounced to remind that the sacred couldn’t ever be fully apprehended. Experienced, yes. But told, no. Not really. O Mystery, he sang, how manifold are your works. In wisdom, you have made them all. They are innumerable. They are fragile. They are related. Amen.

And all the old philosophers, scientists, researchers, and clergypeople joined and sang in their own languages as well. Darwin’s exquisite prose. Goodenough’s cellular biology. Kaufman’s grappling with serendipitous creativity and where it all came from. . .

It may not have been the most conventionally religious language, not quite a canticle or psalm, but it might have been deeper still, something common to them all. The experience of interconnection that held them. The relationship between all things. The great partnership in the search for truth and meaning. And the hope of learning to live a new and different ethic with the whole show, everybody’s story, in mind.

May it be so.

See John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934).

The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science — http://www.iras.org/

Religious Naturalism — https://religiousnaturalism.org/anotherhome/

The Religious Naturalist Association — https://religious-naturalist-association.org/

with our dear friend, The Rev. Barbara Pescan