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:ROAM_ALIASES: "Light the Fire of Reason"
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#+title: Sermon - Light the Fire of Reason

- tags :: [[id:3d161391-6de9-474d-a8fd-134f4d8a9937][Sermon]] [[id:40d39a2f-dfda-47c7-82dd-59e3db46dc11][Church]] [[id:f583a84d-901a-4b2b-9ce2-b3143cd24775][Ignorance]] Science
 
* Teaser
Let's explore the chaotic intersection of science and religion! The foundation of science is ignorance. The foundation of religion is ignorance as well. Self-aware ignorance allows for the growth of creative thought. Creative thought, combined with compassion for all living things, lays the foundation for a good life. As Unitarian Universalists, our mission is clear, let's light the fire of reason.
* Welcome and announcements
* Prelude
* Opening Words
What if we were indestructible? A blaze of light and ground shaking thunder tears through our awareness and then nothing for a moment; sleep by any other name. And we awake years later coming to understand our new surroundings. A roll of dice and oak tree woods and the ocean are replaced by alpine meadows and pine.

Isolated from earlier experiences, how would we know? What choice do we have?

In a world where joy and sorrow live almost side by side, and where choices are often between bad and horrible, how can we be made whole?

What if we were indestructible? Our bodies grow, mature and die, but we never die. How many times would this have to happen for us to discover that the path to right thought was in front of us the whole time? Many times, is my guess.
* Opening Song - Be Ours a Religion
* UUCC Mission
* Joys and Sorrows
In our community we make time each week to share pieces of our lives with one another. We do this because each person in this community has value. Each person’s experience matters. We share our sorrows with one another today, knowing that sorrow comes into each person’s life, knowing that together we offer comfort.

We also share our joys with one another, knowing too that joy comes into all our lives, knowing that together our voices can rise in a chorus of celebration.

If anyone would like to share a joy or a sorrow we will virtually light a candle for you.

---

Not everything joy or sorrow can be shared openly in community, some must be shared eye to eye, or held in the heart. We further recognize that some do not have voices with which to speak the depth of their pain or the height of their celebration. We are called to remember the joys and sorrows we all carry with us as we go out into the world.
* Prayer / Meditation
Life is Always Unfinshed Business by Richard Gilbert

In the midst of the whirling day,
In the hectic rush to be doing,
In the frantic pace of life,
Pause here for a moment.

Catch your breath;
Relax your body;
Loosen your grip on life.

Consider that our lives are always unfinished business;
Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete;
Allow your life to be a work in progress.

Do not hurry to mold the masterpiece;
Do not rush to finish the picture;
Do not be impatient to complete the drawing.
From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process,
And always there is more to be done.

Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit;
Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day;
Do not fear that we are still in the making.

Let us instead be grateful that the world is still to be created;
Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are;
Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete;
For life is always unfinished business.
* Text
/Fruit flies, and God/
I had a friend in college. She wasn't a close friend, but she played ultimate frisbee and we hung out from time to time. She was a smart person. An exceedingly smart person. Her work on fruit fly genetics in the biology department at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest was good enough to be published while she was an undergrad.

She was also deeply religious.

Having grown up in an atheist household, I was pretty sure I understood that science and religion were like oil and water. You couldn't be a scientist and be religious.

/Isaac Newton spent more time on theology than science/
Of course, this is preposterous.

Just ask nearly all of the major scientific figures of the Enlightenment. Isaac Newton, the giant himself, had actually written more and spent more time thinking about the theology and the Bible, with a special interest in miracles, than on all of his scientific output.

Imagine that for a moment. The co-inventor of differential calculus and articulator of the theory of gravity spent MOST of his time exploring his Christian faith!

/Science is the expansion of our ignorance/
But is that really so hard to imagine?

Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, argues in his 2014 book titled--appropriately--/Ignorance/, that the bedrock of science is not the scientific method, but the question. He says a good answer to a scientific question should generate exponentially more questions. That means that our current knowledge is not the heart of science, the heart of science is at the edges of our current knowledge, our ignorance. Those questions propel us towards new knowledge, new understandings of how things work.

Kids know this. Kids ask a million questions. Some kids are more precocious than others, but it's hard to find a kid that has no questions. They are keenly aware of their ignorance of the world and hungrily chowing down on all the answers we can provide them. In a 2013 TED talk, Firestein notes that 90% of American adults have lost their interest in science. He argues that the deluge of facts and a broken education system that encourages memorization of those facts and a regurgitation on tests is largely to blame.

An overpopulation of FACTS and the idea that knowledge (or more facts) is the goal has hidden a world from most of us that we often only experience in bits and pieces by walking in nature or in spiritual meditation. Why do trees only grow a certain height? Okay, but why this height right here, in Witherle Woods in Castine? Okay, but why is the soil less balanced in the nutrients here? Why is there shallow granite bedrock here? Where did bedrock come from? Why do we call it bedrock? How did the crust of the Earth form? How did the Earth form? When did life first appear? Why did life first appear? What makes our Sun special? Is our Sun special?

I can answer some of those questions. But I am also ignorant of many of those questions. If my 6-year old asked me most of them, I feel comfortable googling around for an answer, but not all of them. I'm willing to guess that the answers to the last two would be hard to find satisfying answers.

/Encountering really hard questions/
Kids are really good at finding big questions like this, too. I remember my twin sister having a really hard time in that bridge between pre-teen and teen with the idea of death. I never dove too deep into that pool of thought, but she got stuck there and kept asking my parents bigger questions than they could answer. This left her scared for a time. Eventually she came to her own understanding of mortality, but there were no easy answers.

Here's what I propose.

If science is walking into a big dark cavern of our own ignorance, seeking with a small dim light questions that can help light up more of the darkness, what if spirituality and religion are a way to be at peace with the darkness before we can find the light?

As we look for light in the darkness, we will find pockets where our light cannot reach, questions that exceed the grasp of the facts and evidence that science is built on. As humans, we cannot put those questions back in the proverbial tooth paste tube. We cannot pretend that we didn't ask why we exist, or when the universe will end. And like my sister, some of us will have a greater need for some form of an answer than others of us.

/Our Fruit Fly scientist on the infinite presence of God/
My friend in college was asking questions. She was doing the science part. Recently my partner, Emma, and I were reflecting on our experience with our biologist friend. Emma remembered asking her about her faith and how it fit into the science she was doing. Her answer was remarkably simple. Science did not erode her spirituality. At each new question she was just more struck with awe at the world that the creator that she believed in had made for her to explore.

/Light the fire of reason/
Did you know we still don't have a clue why our Moon exists? It's larger than every other moon in our Solar System, relative to the planet it circles, and we have some good guesses where it came from, but we still don't know.

Did you know sound can cause small bursts of light in liquid? And no one knows why!

Did you know that biological aging cannot be fully explained? Why do we have to get old?

No one knows why we yawn, or why we have fingerprints! Seriously?!

90% of adults have lost their interest in science. Firestein argues that the lack of interest in science is a border-line epidemic in a relatively wealthy, stable nation-state. And the style of education in our schools is largely to blame. Filling people with facts and expecting them to remember them dulls their ability to think creatively and ask more questions when their facts run out. I don't believe our fourth principle, a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, is a choice but an imperative. Let's ask big questions, lean into our ignorance and encourage others to do the same!

As Y.B. Yeats once said, "Education is not about filling buckets. It's lighting fires." Let's get out the matches.
* Hymn - Give Thanks
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* Closing Words
Words from Elizabeth Harding

We Unitarian Universalists don’t drink from our chalice. Instead, we use it to hold the flame. The circle of the chalice helps keep the fire small. The flame doesn’t blind us. It doesn’t burn us. It gives us light, so we can see all the different things in the universe: even the invisible ones, because the Unitarian Universalist flame is a light of learning.

The flaming chalice is a symbol of learning and of love. It’s our symbol: the symbol of Unitarian Universalism.

As you go out into the world this week, take along a joy of learning new things, and patiently share what you know willingly with others. Go in peace. Amen.
* Postlude
* Notes
** The pursuit of ignorance
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- http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/the-pursuit-of-ignorance-drives-all-science.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq0_zGzSc8g
- Science is a romp. It is a pursuit of our own ignorance.
- Scientist, shooting the shit over a beer, talk about what they don't know
- Marie Curie: "One never notices what has been done, only can only see what remains to be done."
** Orson Welles on Citizen Kane
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I didn't know what you couldn't do. I didn't deliberately set out to invent anything. It just seemed to me, why not? And there is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything. That was the gift I brought to Kane, ignorance.
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I didn't know what I couldn't do.
** On teaching Intelligent Design in science
https://manifoldlearning.com/episode-014-podcast/