I look forward to Trinity Sunday because it’s maybe the one Sunday each year when I allow myself to geek out on science as an entrypoint to faith. Because the more we learn about the universe, and how relationship is at the heart of it all, the less the Doctrine of the Trinity seems like some dead, irrelevant philosophical exercise, and more like a beautiful poem about the nature of reality.
That has only been enhanced this year by the wider cultural conversation about artificial intelligence, and the conversation Shaun Kell and I are leading this month during the Sunday school hour on a book by Fransican Sister, theologian, and neuroscientist, Ilia Delio, entitled, Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI needs Religion.
In reading for our discussion this Sunday, I was struck by a few sentences from the first paragraph of the first chapter. She writes, “Twentieth-century science has renewed our fascination with nature. Like the ancient philosophers, we are impelled to study nature once again to learn how to live in the human sphere.”
For generations within the church, we have largely been taught to be suspicious of science and scientific inquiry. This perhaps began with Galileo, when leaders within the church felt threatened when his discoveries about the shape and order of the cosmos seemed to contradict their interpretations of the creation accounts in Genesis.
This antagonism has been to our great detriment as people of faith, and I would argue has also been to the detriment of science (recognizing that even to speak of these as two opposing camps is a drastic and ultimately inaccurate over-simplification; for a while there a majority of the Biology department at a local university were regular attendees of our church).
For people of faith, the general rejection of our suspicion toward scientific inquiry and discovery has meant that we have ceded what at one time was perhaps our greatest gift to the world, which was a sense of awe, transcendence, and mystery.
When religion and faith are centered more on order and obedience than beauty and wonder, faith dries up at the root.
Science, at base, is the exploration of the natural world, a world that we proclaim is the creation of a loving and still very present Creator. To my mind, then, scientific inquiry is an incredibly powerful tool to help us learn more about creation, and thus learn about ourselves, each other, and the God who created all of it.
Without question, some scientific discoveries may challenge our understanding about the universe and our place within it. Good. Let’s be open to learning more about this world of which we are a part that is turning out to be much bigger, more complex, and more mysterious than we could ever imagine. Then let’s ask what that tells us about the God who is behind and within all of it.
SHD