Pondering the Apple Logo

As I mentioned last week, “Proceed with Caution” ought to guide us when we consider science and religion. 

As my colleague Drew Rick Miller put into our Science for the Church Newsletter last week, we can’t simply take recourse in slogans like “emotion vs. reason,” and “value vs. fact.” It's "Not That Simple." 

As the great mathematician and metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead once commented, science and religion are "the strongest forces which influence" us as human beings. I'll add that we won’t get their relationship right until we realize that religion and science often serve as proxies for negotiating cultural values. And, like any negotiation, this takes great skill.

In his book, Redeeming Culture, James Gilbert ponders the Apple logo, and decides that it evokes two trees, the tree in Trinity College, Cambridge where an apple is alleged to have fallen on Issac Newton's head initiating his theory of gravity and the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil" in Genesis 2. Simply put, science and religion.

But Gilbert wasn’t finished because he realized that the interplay of religion and science is also very American. 

“The dialogue between science and religion in America expresses essential ideas and deep-seated structures of culture. It reveals a theological problem and a profound concern of philosophy; it also shapes a significant portion of everyday popular culture. It provides categories for thinking about modern existence: to structure the world as divided between science and religion, or to imagine it united with their convergence.” James Gilbert

I know I'm mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating: The great Harvard philosopher and scientist A. N. Whitehead quipped, 

“Seek simplicity and distrust it.” A. N. Whitehead

To look at religion and science in America, both historically and contemporarily, is to hear a narrative in which no generation ever arrives at a fixed relationship between these two cultural forces, but one of continual negotiation. It’s less clear than simplicity, but, to my mind, more exciting. It’s my related conviction that human beings flourish with this same combination. As do Americans. 

And from everything I’ve read and seen, this is not about to change.

Pondering a No Year's Resolution

Here's an excerpt from a piece that just appeared on our Science for the Church website.

An enthusiastic admirer once rushed up to the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. What was his secret? How did he sculpt The David, the epic 17-foot statue of the biblical king and hero that now stands in the Accademia Gallery in Florence? 

Michelangelo’s answer was simple and profound: He looked at the unformed block of marble and “chipped away all that wasn’t David.” His indeed was the work of negation—the art of No. And through this Michelangelo found the deeper beauty, the more profound yes. That’s why on this December 31, I’m pondering my “No” Year’s Resolution.

This New Year’s Eve I’m looking to Scripture and science to tell me where my life is a block of unformed marble that needs some chipping away.

It all begins for us with the power of no in God’s gift of Sabbath—whether that’s for a day or something much shorter. In these times, Scripture tells us that God gives us a new vision and energy: 

“For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa 30:15, NRSV).

Honestly, the brain science behind this is easy to grasp. When we take breaks and reduce stress, we think better. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School suggests that this comes from the release of nitric oxide that fires up feel-good neurotransmitters and slows down stress hormones. 

“It’s a matter of learning to shift our internal biology at will so that we increase production of nitric oxide and the neurotransmitters associated with well-being and increased creativity” Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review

Will you join me in making a No Year's Resolution?