Today would have been my mother's 100th birthday. At her memorial service last year, family and friends sang "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." The verses powerfully captured the loss I felt as a grieving son, but the chorus offered reassurance: "Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by? There's a better home awaiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky."
My mother had an amazing ability to recruit others to a shared community. Along with my teacher/scholar/director/musician dad, she created an amazing community of theater, music and art in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Being included meant being inspired to do more than you dreamed that you could. It meant being welcomed right away and given an important task. "Where community is real, there is communion," mother wrote in an essay. "Good things can happen. People talk to each other ... There is zest. There is laughter. There is even compassion."
As I reflect on her legacy, I wonder how we could put those same principles to work in encouraging a new and vibrant community dedicated to finding the truth in both science and faith. The shrill voices at the poles of the science and faith discussion that claim the scientific and spiritual worldviews are incompatible have their own organized communities. But what about the vast majority that seeks a third way? What about the people who are convinced that science is a reliable way to understand the natural world, but who also seek answers through faith to more profound questions about the meaning of life and the existence of God?
There are encouraging signs that people who trust both God and science are beginning to create such a community. In the United Kingdom, molecular biologist Denis Alexander, biophysicist Alister McGrath and the Rev. John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist, are turning out marvelously thought provoking reflections on science and faith. In North America, astronomer Owen Gingerich, Denis Lamoureux,professor of science and religion at St. Joseph's College in the University of Alberta, and biologists Kenneth Miller and Jeff Schloss are doing the same. And in November, The BioLogos Foundation will bring together scientists, theologians and pastors to pave the way for a science-informed theology that celebrates God's goodness and creative power and to develop a more cohesive strategy to explore this "third way."
These are just initial efforts to help catalyze a community devoted to seeking harmony in science and faith. We'd love to hear any ideas that could help in building this community and welcome discussion in the comments section below.
My mother detailed her own struggles to merge her love for the artistic world, her dedication to reason and her intimations of the spirit in her journal. "To believe in God", she wrote, "is not to comfort your soul with an easy immortality, nor to put aside the world of the flesh, but to understand that in God's eyes life or death is of little consequence." For a time she was deeply troubled by this realization. "And I closed the door and went away awhile, pretending I hadn't seen. And I went another way, in another direction, running -- but soon running toward not away -- toward other annunciations, other journeys, other adorations. Only a few days ago, I find I have come upon the closed door from another direction, and the door is open, and there is nothing to fear."
Dr. Francis Collins is former director of the Human Genome Project and founder and president of The BioLogos Foundation.
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A more effective approach would be formulate and conduct a decisive, rigorous, empirical scientific experiment which conclusively falsifies Materialism. The root of fundamentalist scientific dogma, Materialism is fatally flawed by its logical absolutism; it requires that *Nothing* exist outside of 4-D spacetime. To disprove it does not require a sophisticated and complex defense of 'God', merely One Element of Irrefutable Evidence that *Something* else is 'out there'.
The proposition that Consciousness, at least at the subconscious level, is a Quantum phenomenon is gaining ground because it is supported by a variety of empirical findings. Such diverse spiritual aspects as ESP, EVP, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Precognition, Psychokinesis, Near Death Experience, Life After Death, After Death Communication, Mediumship, Ghosts, and Reincarnation are all the subjects of ongoing research, and each have hard laboratory data suggesting they are real. The dynamics of each of these are consistent with phenomenology enabled by Quantum Consciousness. If a transcendental human Soul exists - and we know it does - it functions through principles of quantum mechanics, period. This is the why and how that the 'spiritual' is as firmly 'real' as anything envisioned by science.
*ANY* of the above aspects of the Spiritual, if concretely established by an irrefutable and replicable experiment, would falsify Materialism in its entirety. Richard Dawkins isnt the British Biologist colleague of yours whose contribution matters on the subject; Rupert Sheldrake IS. Dawkins is committed to the atheist ideal that we live a 'meat bag' existence, out of dogma alone, whereas Sheldrake actively generates experimental data that such is not the case. His data establishing the Morphogenic Field form one of the best arguments for a 'fact-based Spirituality', able to win over the majority of those in science who reject 'faith' as mere superstition, but who are open to empirical evidence of a more inclusive "Greater Reality".
The front lines in the battle do not include the dogmatic fundamentalists of either Science or Religion. Those "Faitheists" arent the ones driving the immediate future of human evolution. The trenches are filled with the Technologists, who seek to create transcendence electronically through neuroscience and cybernetics where they believe none yet exists, and the Spiritualists who deal with the reality of our transcendental nature and its post-mortem existence on a practical basis. Between them - and only them - is a collaborative synthesis possible, or even useful.
Right now, Man is about to become 'road kill' on the evolutionary highway from "Animal" to "Machine". As we approach the technological Singularity, it is crucial to the survival of organic humanity that the trajectory of Artificial [General] Intelligence and Brain/Computer Interface technologies be guided by certain knowledge of the spiritual. 'Faith' alone does not equip the Religionists to conduct an adequate battle on behalf of spirituality, since an appeal to faith is lost on the scientific Materialists, by definition.
But Materialism is a falsifiable proposition, and its logical rejection as a result of the scientific discovery of the Soul - or even concrete clues as to its nature - would be the one development which can bring the schism between Science and Religion to a desireable conclusion.
IN UNITY THERE IS STRENGTH...
THANK YOU.
I recently attended a talk by Fr. Robert Spitzer (president of Gonzaga University) in which he said that we live in a very exciting era because science will prove the existence of God. It was inspiring.
Your tribute and your calling are both honoring to the special lady many of us knew as a “second mom.” May God bless your efforts to reconcile and unify in His name.
Thank you for your effort to shed light on alternative explanations for life, God and the intricacies of belief and doubt. Clearly you came by this drive naturally given your post about your mother. I and I think others are hungry for hope that God does have us in the palm of his hand and that we are not simply dead at the end of our existence here. That thoughts of faithfulness to God can be reconciled with what is simply fact, evolution. I know exactly how your mother felt, I am sure that I have traveled some of the same lonely roads as she ( and still do). Each time I wander too far I look to the skies for a celestial navagation sign to bring me home. That sign is seemingly of God since it brings me back to that place between faith and doubt where I apparently must remain until I meet the living God face to face and he calls my name.
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