Beauty is Why I Bring Science to Church

I've often mentioned my father, but it was my mother who gave me a particularly acute sense of beauty. 

Beauty means seeing things as they really are, being stunned by the structure, proportion, and being drawn to learn more. 

This is a profoundly important nexus for faith and science. 

And sometimes scientists and theologians sound strikingly similar. I'll being with the brilliant writer, C.S. Lewis--which is always a good place to start.

Consider next the words of Henri Poincaré, an early 20^th century quantum theorists (whom I've quote before, but it's worth repeating): 

“[The scientist] studies [nature] because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living….”

As Christian, we know this: 

We see the intricate patterns of the natural world and find beauty. We see in the natural world the beauty of God who is Beauty itself. 

The 18^th century Puritan Jonathan Edwards is a model. In his late teens (1723), he sent a scientific reflection on the spider, in the form of a letter, most likely to the Honorable Paul Dudley, a member of the British Royal Society who contributed often to its Philosophical Transactions. 

“Of all insects, no one is more wonderful than the spider.” 

As I mentioned in the previous post, I found beauty in the banana slug; Edwards found beauty in “flying” spiders common to New England. His observations about nature lead him to nature’s God. 

“For as God is infinitely the greatest being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.”

Because both faith and science find a source of inspiration in beauty. Beauty is why I bring science to church. 

And that’s good for our souls.

Why We Need to Bring Science to Church

Since the nonprofit organization I co-direct has a mission of “cultivating a stronger church through meaningful dialogue with mainstream science,” I thought I’d give the key reasons why the task of Science for the Church is strategic and valuable. 

Here are my top five.

1. Why: Because the Church needs a viable Gospel.
   • In their research, the Barna Group found one of the top six reasons emerging adults are leaving the church: They see it as “anti-science.” Too often this perception is accurate, and we need to stop this. Barna also found that 49% of church-going teens believe the "church seems to reject what science tells us about the world."

2. Why: Because, without this dialogue, the church loses the glorious insights of science. With it, the Christian community flourishes.
   • Following Psalm 19, as well as Francis Bacon in the 16^th century, and Francis Collins in the 21^st, we see that God has written two texts: the book of Scripture and the book of Nature. Since these have one Author, these two books do not contradict. Our task, as the church—as the people who follow Jesus—is to bring together “mainstream science and mere Christianity.”

3. Why: Because this is our heritage as Christians.
   • The Scientific Revolution arose in the Christian west. This, of course, isn’t to say that all of science arose from Christianity (that would discount Muslim science, for example). Still, I will say (along with many others) that the Christian doctrine of God’s creating a cosmos, and not a chaos, means that we can study it and understand it. This is our Christian heritage, and we must not forsake it. It’s also a key part of our American history. I think of the Puritan pastors, like Jonathan Edwards, who, as the most educated people of the day, regularly combined reflection on theology with “natural philosophy” (the name for science in those days).

4. Why: Because the United States needs Christians engaged in the sciences.
   • In order for the country to stay as leader in this world, we need the two-thirds of our population who names Christ, to be pro- science and technology. There are far too many examples of Christians denying science.

5. Why: Because, as people disaffiliate from churches, we need to Christians to be in the world of science and technology.
   • God gathers the church in worship, to be sure, but God also sends out the church scattered. This is naturally an evangelistic task, but also, as Makoto Fujimura calls it, the task of “culture care.”

Those are my top five. How would you prioritize them? Do you have any to add?

From the Cutting Room Floor: On Racism, Religion, and Science

I've been working on a Science for the Church newsletter, which will be posted soon, and here are a few ideas that left on the cutting room floor. 

The topic is the history of scientific racism.

First: We could of course talk about how our earliest American Christian leaders had racist ideologies—and I’ll pick on one of my heroes from the 1700s, Jonathan Edwards who brilliantly integrated his theology with natural philosophy (or science) also owned slaves. Here's a bit more nuance to that statement: 

"Though he recognized the cruelty of the slave trade and considered enslaved people his spiritual equals, Edwards himself owned slaves throughout his life and career." Princeton & Slavery

Second: We can't forget the extension of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection into social Darwinism, the theory that “sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (such as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence.” Darwin himself repudiated social Darwinism, but his cousin Francis Galton who coined the term "eugenics" in 1883 certainly launched a social Darwinist experiment in England and the United States.

Third: The implicit racism of anti-immigration sentiment today is shocking, but it's not new. When the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act allegedly sought to restore the racial composition of the United States, it set those standards on a census over four decades old, the 1880 census, before many Southern and Eastern Europeans had emigrated to America, who were not considered the same “race” as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

Fourth: Note Webster’s updating of their definition of racism to include systemic racism. 

Fifth: My grandfather Nicholas Kutsonas, escaping persecution as a Greek in Turkish-occupied Macedonia, fled to this country as a teenager in 1915. He was considered, as a Southern European, to be the kind of “race” that the United States didn’t want. It’s no surprise, that when the 1924 Immigration Act went into effect, it led to a net decrease of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Put another way, because race has little or no basis in science, and particularly in genetics, it’s a concept that’s malleable and can be manipulated to serve racist ends. Nichole Phillips, Emory University theologian, recently spoke against “colorism”--the prejudice that privileges lighter skin over darker and that leads to racism, 

Reflections on the Challenges to the Concept of Beauty as a Nexus for Science, Philosophy, Theology, and Art

I’ve been there. I’ve been in the jazz combo, grasping for beauty, sitting and drumming while the upright bass thumps, driving the rhythm to my side, just to the left of my hi-hat. As my right hand rides the rhythm on the cymbal, the tenor sax soars and dips, improvising around the chord changes, my left hand and foot on the kick drum, alongside the piano, “comping” the soloist. 

And for some moments—and sometimes longer—it is truly magical: we find a right relationship among the rhythms and chords. We feel the groove. We improv. And beauty emerges. The beauty arises from the music while it is played. Beauty has movement and narrative. Beauty has a story. It is known by its dynamism. It is hypnotic and inspiring, luring us on. Somewhere in the process we find a truth.

And without beauty, what is the worth of truth? Augustine, with his voluntarist twinges, has convinced me that rationality, and its ability to grasp truth, must be accompanied by affections of the will, which is motivated by beauty. Playing jazz drums reminds me that it is when the combo actually finds that moment of rightness—where we groove and improv together—that I am lured to continue.

In fact, I'm convinced that beauty understood as rightness and telos, as reality fitting together—is a kind of beauty that can be grasped in science, philosophy, theology, and art. The beauty is a lure for theologians, philosophers, scientists, and artists.

I've presented previously, beauty stands at the nexus of these disciplines. But here—lest these initial musings make beauty sound irresistible in its allure and unmistakable and simplistic—l'll outline a few challenges to beauty. 

The first is the natural world itself. On many occasions, I walked through one of my

favorite sights, Upper Bidwell Park in Chico, California, struck by this realization: natural beauty doesn’t take us into account. In fact, nature frankly disregards us. 

Taking a walk on a misty, windy morning through Upper Bidwell Park’s rugged, bumpy, and austere lava rock, I felt like Jonathan Edwards as I encountered both Nature and Nature’s God where contemplation led him 

“... into a kind of vision… of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapped and swallowed up in God.” 

As I reflected on the natural world, I felt that I was understanding a bit more about God. God for Edwards is not a cozy Friend, but a transcendent and terrible Lord. Even more, I felt a bit like Simone Weil because I was most taken by the austerity of Nature’s beauty. It didn’t take me into account at all. And that fact was particularly alluring. This fact would give lie to the idea that beautiful things exist merely to please us in an unambiguous way. Beauty in fact may be stern and displeasing. When we come to beauty, we will do well to dispense with all types of sentimentality.

Just as challenging is the philosophical context. Though his work is well over a hundred years old, Friedrich Nietzsche laid down the gauntlet for Christian theologians to discuss beauty. He challenged the notion that Christians, following Jesus, care a wit about beauty. Beauty ought to be connected with power and nobility. We, he opines, care about notions of weaknesses and assign those to goodness. His complaints about the Christian notions of beauty and goodness swing into the twentieth century like a large, formidable door. As he put it,

"It was the Jew [Jesus] who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of-the gods and maintain, with furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that “only the poor, the powerless, are good; on the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!" Friedrich Nietzsche

Nonetheless, as the century progressed, it was not Christianity, but secular thought that disentangled beauty from art. While strolling contently through at an exhibit in the stunning Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in spring 2004, I came across a still life by the provocative twentieth century artist, Marcel Duchamp. The attached comment by The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, is bombastic but not idiosyncratic. He wrote in July 1969,

"Art is not usually edible, but it is known to satisfy certain hungers. In the last century, it was thought that Beauty, that vitamin concentrate, was what we were after. More recently, Duchamp taught us that art is simply habit-forming, like salted peanuts, and that Beauty all along was the glutton’s alibi…. Nothing about art has ever been honest except our hunger for it." Peter Schjeldahl

Like Schjeldahl, the twentieth century generally impugns the notion that art and beauty belong together. Beauty in fact becomes merely a lure for purchasing art.

And there are more reasons to stop now: There is the argument from neo-Darwinian science that beauty exists merely a by-product of what creates fitness for survival. To this contention, I propose that pursuing beauty is central and definitive and that it solves the problem of good more effectively than a pure survival of the fittest. Just as there is the problem of theodicy, there exists the less discussed, but no less tenacious, problem of good: Why is there good in the world? The classic atheistic evolutionary perspective subordinates the elements of good and beauty to the ability to survive. Thus, for example, beauty in human beings must always relate to survival through fertility, strength, etc. But why then the purely creative elements of colored leaves in fall, the spectrum of the rainbow, the sound of the whales’ call? Hardcore evolutionary science must see this as a by-product. Instead, my research program sets beauty at the core of reality.

Is that enough?

For these reasons and more, many think that beauty seems like it's a far cry from being a viable candidate for bringing together theology, philosophy, science, and art. But, as I wrote above, I think it's a viable nexus. More on that next week.

Re-Animated Soul Dialogue, Part 2

As I mentioned last week, my brother Marcus, who is also a novelist, helped me rewrite one of my previously posted Soul Dialogues to make it funnier and more interesting. Since this blog most often takes up themes in religion and science, the topic of the soul fits right in. What is the soul? Is it something science can study? Is it a specifically religious concept? And what am I doing talking to my imaginary friend Dan? Why are we now in Chico's Upper Bidwell Park five miles away from where we started?
Questions to ponder...
I submit to you the part deux. In last week's edition, I'd just stated "it’s also what makes sense in the church."

Dan: So things are good?

GSC: Yes, so far they are. What are you thinking?

Dan: Well, I just have a feeling that you’d want me to do this, so I’m going to get all specific right now.What do you mean by “it”?

GSC: I mean the way that we bring together all we are—body and soul—under the power of the Spirit.

Dan: Got it.And, what about the Bible?

GSC: What about the Bible you ask?

Dan: Yes.

GSC: Well,glad you asked. I have one word for you.

Dan: Yes?

GSC: Philippians.

Dan: Philippians?

GSC: Philippians. It’s just 104 verses, but in it you can find the answer to almost every theological question. 

Dan: In just those 104 verses, everything you want to about God is contained! That’s amazing!

GSC: Thank you, Ed McMahon. (Last-century-Johnny-Carson-Tonight-Show reference.)

Dan: Dan.

GSC: Dan. 

Dan: Please, no applause. Just doing my job.

GSC: At any rate, it’s true—and in Philippians.

Dan: Yeah.  Heard that somewhere. So the Bible agrees?

GSC: It does. I think about chapter four and Paul’s emphasis on the mind, or our attitude: 

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Philippians 4

Mindset directs hearts. That’s how God made us.

Dan: Ok, that makes sense.  But that’s not all, is there? We’re not near the lunch place yet.

GSC: There’s more, don’t worry.I think next we need to take on a common misconception about life and happiness.

Dan: I see, a nice small topic before our meal. What are you thinking?

GSC: I’m remembering something I heard the other day in a sermon—“Christian faith isn’t all in your head.” On the one hand, Amen to that! On other, faith isn’t all in your feelings, either!

Dan: Not to be too philosophical, but no, duh.

GSC: I know, right? But people fall for the feelings trap. “If it feels good, it’s right.” To which I say, “Really?” Your feelings change. They’re not a reliable guide. Instead, put your faith in what you know to be true and the feelings will follow.

Dan: So, cart after horse?

GSC: Exactly.

Dan:  But wait, hold on, I am your imaginary friend, but I have to ask, as a friend,what have you got against emotion? Isn’t everything you care about based on emotion?

GSC: Good question! 

Dan: Again, just doing my job.

GSC: I love emotion. And like Jonathan Edwards’s famous 18^thcentury defense of “religious affections,” emotions or “affections” are central to most believers’ understanding of Christian faith and most people’s experience of life.

Dan: Sounds true. Or at least accurate. But is there a difference for Edwards between emotions and affections?

GSC: Yes. “Affections” for Edwards represented something a bit more substantial than ephemeral emotions. Still the point stands—it’s not all cold rationality. 

Dan: That sounds right. And makes sense. You’ve convinced me again. As Plato often comments in his dialogues, “Socrates, you are the wisest man alive.”

GSC: Thanks.

Dan: What are friends like me for? And I know you’re about to expound again, but one more thing.

GSC: Yes?

Dan: Aren’t these affections or emotions a gift to give us motivation?

GSC: God definitely gives us emotions or feelings. At the same time, it’s not feelings that define us. It’s actually walking in God’s way that does. As C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter in 1950, using “obedience,” a word not heard much today, 

“Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will and mustn’t try.” C.S. Lewis

Dan: No one writes letters like that anymore.

GSC: Or allegorical fantasy, for that matter, either.

Dan: Word!

GSC: Indeed.

Dan: And I get what he’s saying, but what do we do with someone like neuroscientist Antonio Damasio? He’s found that, without emotions, we can’t make moral decisions. 

GSC: Theology and science intersecting and complementing. Nice segue, my friend.

Dan: You’ve taught me well. And, come to think of it, how about Jonathan Haidt? He notes that often we, with our rational deliberation, are simply the rider on the back of the elephant of emotions. 

GSC: Tru dat as well! But the point is that, through taming our emotions, learning how to engage our rationality, and living in a good community, we learn to direct the elephant. I think Haidt is onto something, but takes it too far.

Dan: So both emotions and reason need to work together, but it’s how we actually live that defines our happiness?  Yes?

GSC: Yes, well summarize you, young Padawan.

Dan: Dan.

GSC: Dan. Much learned have you learned today.

Keeping Faith in a Science-Saturated Culture

Recently, I was asked to answer the question of how Christians keep faith--and even provide a witness--in a science-saturated culture.

I came up with three answers.

First of all, I'd learn from the great scientists in the past and present and be inspired by the heritage of Christians in the sciences.

It’s clear that almost every great thinker of the explosion of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth scientific revolution were deeply affected by the Gospel: Copernicus, Pascal, and Galileo. Does that last name surprise you? At least in part, he was trying to reform the Catholic church of his time so that they would take in the emerging sun-centered (heliocentric) universe, and in the process he made remarkable statements about faith and his scientific work:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei

And then, as science continued to develop, great thinkers like Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were both profoundly committed to their Christian faith as they made their mark on 19th-century science. Today this legacy is carried forward by Jennifer Wiseman, who is Senior Project Scientist for NASA’s Hubble space telescope, and by Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project and now heads the National Institutes of Health. 

“I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.” Francis Collins

Second, I'd remember the beauty in reading God’s two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Consider how this comes together in two verses in Psalm 19:

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." Psalm 19:1 

"The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul." Psalm 19:7

These biblical verses speak about these two books, which are complementary (though not exactly the same) and have one Author. God has written the law (or Torah) to direct human life and has authored the natural world, which leads us to see God's glory.

  

Third, I'd continue to learn worship through insights into the beauty and intricacy of the natural world. As the 18th-century theologian and natural philosopher Jonathan Edwards wrote about the beauty in nature: 

“All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.” Jonathan Edwards

On Creation, Beauty, and Science

I just finished up a manuscript for InterVarsity Press, Mere Science and Christian Faith. There's a round of editing to come before it appears in early 2018. Until that happens, here's an adapted excerpt on creation, beauty, and science.

We are created to relate to the creation around us. The thrill of scientists is that the natural world is exciting to discover. And that begins the process of science. There we almost spontaneously praise our Creator. Jeff Hardin, zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, summarized it so well at a recent BioLogos science and Christian faith conference: “Why be a scientist? Worship.” In this very sense, the Psalmist was acting as a natural scientist when he exclaimed,

What a wildly wonderful world, God!    You made it all, with Wisdom at your side,    made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.
Psalm 104:24, The Message

      

The study of nature is the beginning of science and thus the calling for scientists. But it’s really for all believers. Back again to the psalms, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1, NIV). Many of us have become dulled to nature’s divine speech, and scientists help tune our ears to the mystery of a starlight night, the sophisticated order of our bodies, and the glorious structures of physical systems. In a graduate seminar on theology and science, I listened to a Berkeley biochemist describe for us non-scientists the formations of polymers. (Full disclosure: Until that moment, I had never carefully observed polymers.) He showed us a magnified picture and in the midst of a careful description, he just couldn’t help himself with a surprising re-discovery of something he already knew: “Look how beautiful these are!” After forty years of university teaching, his wonder and excitement was still fresh.

This is wonder based on beauty. When we grasp beauty in nature, we are drawn to the Source of beauty. And the nature of beauty is that it draws us in. I was reminded by David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite that in Eastern Orthodoxy, theology begins with philokalia, or “the love of beauty.” I've also been reading Jonathan Edwards for the next book I'm writing, who, like the great Puritan pastors of the eighteenth century, studied both nature and Scripture as sources for finding beauty. Edwards wrote,

For as God is infinitely the greatest being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.

And there truth becomes beautiful. And I hope my meaning in that sentence isn't lost: rhetoric—as an engagement with beauty—should be used in concert with philosophy—as the pursuit of truth. Truth is only worth engaging if it’s beautiful, and beauty is that which allures us.

      

This is a particular beauty, the beauty of life’s making sense, of satisfying our need for deep abiding happiness, for Aristotle’s “human flourishing,” and for Jesus’s promise of “abundant life” (John 10:10). Drawing on these ancient, wise voices indicates that this obviously is not a new idea, and I concur here with the great French physicist Henri Poincaré,

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living….

Let’s can join hands with Poincaré and with the ancient theologian’s philokalia. Let's weave together mainstream science and mere Christianity into what is truly beautiful and beautifully true.