Personal Statement:.
When I was a young boy, my Mother divorced my Father. Thereafter she was always looking for ways to put me in touch with father-figures. One time I was included in a hunting party of men and boys. We were hunting rabbits in the Fall in Connecticut. I don’t remember my companions but I do remember the rabbits. Somebody shot a rabbit. We tramped up to the body laying in the cold Fall grass. It was still alive! The rabbit looked up at its attackers trembling. One of the men shot it dead.
So this is what it means to be a man. This was being masculine. For me, it didn’t take. I was on the side of the rabbit... but I didn’t say so. It was clear to me that the rabbit didn’t want to die.
I haven’t spoken about this all these years. There are many reasons. I have known hunters who I respect as men for other reasons. I eat meat. Isn’t it OK to hunt game or fish if you eat what you harvest?
I haven’t taken a stand all these years. But now I shall. I believe that all sport hunting and fishing should be banned. The word “sport” is important. Sport in my vocabulary means “unnecessary”. Sport means killing another living being for personal pleasure. Sport means buying powerful guns, cars, boats, fishing equipment to help kill an animal that has only its survival instinct as defense. Sport means the unnecessary killing of another living being.
I regret that I do not have time in the three minutes allotted me to enhance my arguments about my position. I will welcome any discussion after church.
The principle I have developed for myself is that it is wrong to hunt or fish for any living being for personal pleasure. Therefore sport hunting and fishing should be banned.
Dave Voorhees
Sermon:
If you had the opportunity to chat with one of the great minds and souls of history, who would it be? I have this fantasy of sharing a pot of tea, a plate of croissants, and a long conversation with Albert Einstein. What a joy that would be! There are so many questions I would love to ask him, for instance, What was it like when you first conceived the theory of relativity? How do you feel about the atomic bomb? What do you believe about religion and God? Have you ever thought of becoming a Unitarian Universalist? My fantasy is that we would talk for hours about science, religion, ethics, philosophy and history.
In reading about Albert Einstein it’s clear that he struggled throughout his lifetime with many significant issues. Seeing his country being taken over by the Nazis, he left his homeland where he had become a renowned scientific figure for the relative anonymity of living in the United States. Then he watched helplessly as his country was destroyed and his race was almost annihilated.
In America, Einstein suffered the isolation of a scientist whose theories were too far ahead of those of his colleagues. Sometimes even Einstein himself seemed to be bewildered by the new world view he was uncovering.
Then Einstein had to struggle with the supreme irony of being a man who was committed to pacifism and democratic socialism but who was largely responsible for the invention of the deadliest weapon known to humankind.
But we cannot blame Albert Einstein or science for the atomic bomb. Science is the accumulation of knowledge, and to know more about our world is a great blessing of being human. Human beings may use that knowledge in a terribly destructive way, but the knowledge itself is a great good.
Einstein was not responsible for the atomic bomb, but he was responsible for delivering a mortal wound to an entire world view. For over 200 years Newton's mechanical model of the universe had glued together our vision of the cosmos. But Einstein’s concepts of relativity theory and atomic physics totally unglued Newton’s machine, and today we are still seeing the pieces come undone.
This year I’ve been doing a series of sermons on ways that science has transformed our modern day spirituality. Sigmund Freud proclaimed that humanity had been deeply wounded by three supreme events in our history.
The first event was the cosmological wound brought about by Copernicus and Galileo when they discovered that the Earth was not at the center of the cosmos but far off on the distant edge of the universe, a small and insignificant planet.
The second event was the biological wound inflicted by Charles Darwin when he revealed to us that God did not create us or endow us with a sacred mission. Instead of being earthly angels we are descendants of amoebas and apes.
The third wound was the psychological wound instigated by Freud himself. He showed us that the unconscious is filled with dark sexual desires and a primeval urge for power and violence.
Certainly there is no doubt that each of these major revelations have caused much pain and confusion to the human race. But Freud didn’t realize that for every great wound there is a great healing. That’s the purpose of truth: not to defeat us but to heal the wounds that threaten our existence.
We are not the center of the cosmos but by recognizing our place in the universe we can join ourselves with the cosmos, feeling our unity with the stars.
In discovering our lineage from amoeba and apes we can now affirm our kinship with all life on this planet and to the Earth itself.
And finally, our psyche does contain dark and dangerous desires, but we also know that there are regions of the mind that are so vast that we cannot come to the end of our possibilities as human beings.
I would add one more great wound and healing to the human race that came after the time of Freud. Albert Einstein effectively dragged us out of the rational and orderly Newtonian world into a bizarre and unbelievable dimension of curved space, quarks, and black holes. Our culture is still suffering wounds of alienation and cynicism, but Einstein also brought us a great healing if we will only open our eyes to it.
Newton’s universe is hard to let go. It’s so comfortable and neat. Everything fits so well into its proper place. First of all, there was absolute space which was always at rest and unchangeable. Space was three-dimensional and conveniently separated from the dimension of time.
Within absolute space and absolute time moved solid material particles that glued themselves together to form larger and larger matter. Newton described his world as it was created by a rational Unitarian God, for Isaac Newton was a Unitarian by belief.
For Newton, God had created, in the beginning, the material particles, the forces between them, and the fundamental laws of motion. God gave the whole business a big shove to get it going, and it has continued to run ever since, like a cosmic machine, governed by immutable laws.
Rene Descartes was the philosophical mouthpiece of Newton when he proclaimed to the world I think, therefore I am. Why not I feel, therefore I am, or I breathe, therefore I am, or I tell jokes, therefore I am? Why did thinking, for Descartes, mean existence?
Because Descartes, thanks to Newton's mechanical model of the universe, saw the world divided into dualisms. Mind was separate from body; spirit was separate from matter; and you had to take sides with one or the other. So the Newtonians, seeing matter as essentially dead and inert, spun the universe around the mind and the spirit, disembodying themselves from our world.
This mechanistic view of reality resulted in its own revolution: a technological explosion called the machine age, which we are now both benefitting from and which is perhaps dooming us. Our entire world view became that of a machine. Seeing our bodies and our earth as merely matter with no life, no connections to our minds and spirits, gave Western culture permission to oppress one another and to rape our earth.
While Newton's concepts have been useful and will continue to prove useful, Albert Einstein has offered us a more realistic, though challenging, way to see the cosmos and our place in it. That small man with a cap of windblown gray hair, carelessly dressed in rumpled slacks and a faded blue sweater, that gentle, humble man who always insisted on being treated like everyone else, was in actuality a revolutionary who tore down the walls Newton and Descarte had built.
He tore down the walls of either-or dualisms that left us with a fragmented view of ourselves and our world.
He tore down the walls between the creator and the created revealing our own role in the process of creation.
He tore down the walls between ourselves and nature, awakening us to our interdependence with the universe.
He tore down the walls between science and religion, opening our eyes to the wonder and mystery of the cosmos and our responsibility to treat it with respect.
Albert Einstein was a great scientist but to me he was also perhaps the most important theologian of this century. ''Science without religion is lame,'' he wrote. ''Religion without science is blind.''
Einstein’s work was scientific, and yet his vision was a religious one. It was a vision of interconnections, of all things tied to one another in a whole harmonious process. The galaxies and stars, the planets and oceans, the trees and birds, the crystals, molecules and atoms, are all part of the web of being that binds all things together.
Even time cannot be separated from the web of being. According to Einstein's relativity theory, space is not three-dimensional and time is not a separate entity. Both are intimately connected and form a four-dimensional/continuum, 'space-time.'
But Einstein didn't stop with the macrocosm. He also wove the microcosm into his relativity theory. He re-understood the atom in a radically new way as universes in themselves, universes filled with vast empty spaces.
Physicist Fritjof Capra pictures the atom this way: if you took one atom and made it as large as the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, the nucleus of the atom would only be as large as a grain of salt. And the electrons of the atom would be like specks of dust whirling about the dome.
What a radical, new way to see our world. The quantum mechanical view of reality strikes against most of our notions of reality. Even to scientists, it is bizarre.
Werner Heisenberg wrote: “I remember discussions with [Neils] Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?”
All these objects that surround us, this entire world that seems so solid, stable and individualistic is mostly empty, interconnecting fields of energy, or as the new physicists now see it, wave-like patterns of probabilities which ultimately do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections.
This is the basic clue to Einstein’s scientific and religious vision: interconnectedness.
As Capra explains, Quantum theory ... reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ?basic building blocks,’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole.
Werner Heisenberg, taught us that even the scientific observer can no longer stand outside the web of relations as an objective spectator. The Newtonian mechanical model put the scientist, and thus humankind, in a zoo where she could walk around comfortably gawking at all the phenomena inside the cages or under the microscopes. But relativity theory recognizes that the observer cannot be totally objective. If she is observing a phenomena, then she too is in the zoo, a part of the phenomena she is observing. There is no way that we can not be interconnected.
Einstein's revolution was too revolutionary for many – even for him. He wrote in his autobiography, All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this (new type) of knowledge failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.
And then he wrote to Max Born, in 1926: The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One [meaning God]. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice. Ironically even Einstein had a Newtonian view of God as a supreme being who stood over and above creation and ruled it in a supra-rational way. He may have opened the door for quantum physics, but Einstein was not prepared for the paradoxical and enigmatic conclusions of his own theory.
Nevertheless, Einstein brought about a tremendous revolution in helping humanity become aware of the interconnectedness in every part of our lives. For instance, in medical science which has traditionally focused more on specific symptoms and organs, doctors are now beginning to get a holistic perspective on the patient’s entire state-of-being. In ecology our society is realizing the extent of the crisis we have brought about by putting ourselves over and above nature. In economics the realization is coming that it will be disastrous to keep thinking in terms of our national economic system as being apart from the global economic village.
Our fragmented view of the self has led to a fragmented view of society, and it’s this splintered vision that has caused a great many of our social, political, and psychological crises today. And those problems can be solved only when we see the world as Einstein saw it, as a harmonious web of interconnections.
Religion is probably the area that has most ignored Einstein’s revelations. In the Newtonian mechanistic model of the universe God was separated from humanity and humanity was separated from nature. The soul was divided from the body and God was a duality to Satan. The result was that the world was divided between the sacred and the profane; the church controlled the sacred and left all the miscellaneous profane items such as starvation, war, and injustice to the politicians.
But Einstein tore down these walls too, revealing to us the interconnectedness and sacredness of all life and a God that is no longer separated from us but a mysterious, creative force that is interwoven within each one of us and in all of nature.
The cosmologist Stephen Hawking said that If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. Now that gives you something to think about, doesn’t it? This creation is so incredibly precarious. What a miracle that we exist at all!
Einstein certainly valued the wonder and mystery of creation. In fact, his revelations closely parallel the convictions of mystics over the centuries from a variety of religious traditions. It may seem incongruous to us at first but Einstein’s theology is in essence a reincarnation of Eastern mysticism.
Both Eastern mysticism and quantum physics are opposed to the Newtonian split of mind and body, spirit and matter, time and space, and all the other dualisms that have fragmented our society. The view of ourselves as isolated little egos swimming in the pool of external experiences is seen as Newtonian ignorance by quantum physics and illusion or maya by Eastern mystics.
The Eastern mystics also proclaim a dynamic universe, as did Einstein. Whereas Newton saw the atom as a solid, individualistic particle, Einstein discovered that the atom, and thus all matter, is actually energy that is continually darting and dancing.
Einstein revealed that matter is essentially a verb and not a noun. Mass is nothing but a form of energy. Even when an object is at rest, in actuality it is doing the quantum boogey, it’s atoms and molecules dancing til the cows come home.
Most of us are used to seeing and thinking in terms of things, objects, and substance, but this is deceptive. There is no such thing as a thing. What does exists are processes, activities, and inter-relationships which in turn appear to us in various forms that we interpret as things.
We too are verbs rather than nouns. Who we are is what we do, not what we look like or say we believe. We too are of a dynamic nature, continually prancing the dance of birth and death, of creation and destruction. We are not things, objects, evolved billiard balls that are bounced around a cosmic table by forces we have no control over. We are workers and players and lovers and thinkers and feelers. We are verbs. We are energy systems that have the power to transform reality.
This dancing theology which Einstein has passed on to us is not easy to wrap our minds around. Our language and brains fall short, but isn’t that the way it is with any transformative theology? We have to stretch ourselves to meet it.
As difficult as it may be to change world views, for the sake of our own survival it must be done. Einstein and the other quantum physicists have given us a new world view, a new healing vision. It’s a vision of wholeness, of interconnectedness, of interdependency, of harmonious unity, of the cosmic dance which is life. It’s a healing vision that can transform ourselves and our society if we can only incorporate it into our lives. And I believe it’s a revolution our own Unitarian Universalist faith is well equipped to lead. Why else would one of the principles of our faith read, “We ... affirm and promote ... respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”?
Is God in a quark? That’s a Newtonian question, not one for the age of relativity. If I could sit and chat with Einstein today, I would guess that he would say God is the quark as well as the supernova and the daisy and sun, moon and stars.
And I feel certain he would share his words from his Confession of Faith, that The most beautiful and profound thing which humanity can experience is the sense of the mysterious. It is basic to religion and to all serious efforts in art and science. Those who have not experienced it seems to me, if not dead, at least blind.
May we too be awed by the mysterious nature of life and moved to be a part of its transformation.
Amen.
Resources:
Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity by Howard Gardner, HarperCollins Publishers
Creators, The–A History of Heroes of the Imagination by Daniel J. Boorstin
Leadership and New Science by Margaret J. Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Tao of Physics, The by Fritjof Capra, Shambhala Publications
Turning Point, The by Fritjof Capra, Simon and Shuster
PRAYER
In our lives we seek answers to many unanswerable questions.
We wish to know the origin of the universe,
whether life exists on other planets,
and whether intelligent life exists on our own.
Is it too much to ask for us to understand relativity theory
and why quarks do what they do
– and by the way, what is it that they do?
What is the purpose of black holes and mosquitoes?
How is it that light can be both a particle and a wave?
And will we ever be able to use warp drive to explore the cosmos?
We have so many questions and so few answers.
But the most important question of all is, Why are we here? What is our purpose?
We give thanks for the beauty and wonder of this earth, this universe, this cosmos.
May we always have a multitude of questions to ask about the world we live in and every once in a while an answer or two.
Amen.
