In my book The Sacred Depths of Nature, I suggest an orientation called religious naturalism as emergent from a religious perspective on our scien­tific understandings of nature.  Since then I have had opportunities to present the core concepts of reli­gious naturalism in numerous venues: bookstores, colleges and medical schools, museums, youth groups, adult-ed groups and sermons in churches and synagogues, women’s forums, writers’ work­shops.  I have also received numerous letters and emails from readers.  Even after factoring in the obvious bias that persons who are resonant with the project are more likely to express appreciation than those who are not, it can nonetheless be said that there has been an outpouring of appreciation and gratitude, both for the scientific narrative itself (“I came to understand the nature of things for the first time”) and for my personal reflections on its reli­gious meanings (“Finally someone has written down what I have long felt”).

Of particular interest has been the response of fellow scientists.  Many have also expressed appre­ciation and gratitude.  But many have also expressed incredulity: How did I have the “nerve” to write such a book?  How did I “dare” to wander into the topic of religion?  Wasn’t I concerned, in so “ex­posing” myself, that I would lose respect as a profes­sional scientist?  Didn’t I worry that I might not get my grants funded or my papers published?

In this essay I explore these concerns, first analyzing the religion/science landscape from the perspective of a scientist, and then inviting scientists to join the conversation.  I examine some of the factors that discourage persons, and scientists in particular, from making contributions to religious dialogue, and suggest ways around these difficulties.

 

The Theological Reconstruction/Religiopoesis Spectrum

 

To most outsiders, and therefore to most scien­tists, the religion/science dialogue is perceived as a venture in what academic theologians refer to as theological reconstruction: a new insight about the nature of the universe is encountered through scien­tific inquiry, and adherents of traditional religious faiths then work to find ways to incorporate that understanding into the canon.  This cycle of chal­lenge and response, ongoing now for several millen­nia, has yielded religious traditions that are selected for their resiliency quite as much as for the potency of their Myth.  A conspicuous sector of the present-day dialogue continues in this vein.  Scientists are to my mind correct in regarding theological reconstruc­tion as outside their ken, since it requires a deep and nuanced knowledge of the histories and trajectories of particular faiths that most scientists—with notable exceptions—have not begun to master.

In a second kind of venture, the scientific under­standing of Nature serves as the starting point and its religious potential is then explored.  John Dewey, Teilhard de Chardin, and Julian Huxley are among those who have made important early contributions here.  A key stimulus for carrying such a project into present times is the transformation that has occurred in the nature of the scientific story itself.  Whereas science has, until recently, been segregated into discrete sectors of knowledge—Newton’s laws, thermodynamics, Mendelian genetics—there has emerged in the past 50 years or so a coherent cosmo­logy, fully as integrated as Genesis 1, that yields important insights into our nature, our history, and our constraints and possibilities.  The second project, which can be called Religiopoesis, takes this story and works with it.

I regard The Sacred Depths of Nature as a contribution to present-day Religiopoesis.  I stress the word contribution.  As developed more fully below, no one person constructs a religion.  But it is also the case that unless individual persons are encouraged—exhorted!—to offer contributions, there will be no “stuff” available to cohere into new religious orientations in future times.

 

The Perils and Opportunities of Religiopoesis

The poesis part of Religiopoesis comes from the Greek poiein, to make or craft, the same root as poetry.  Religiopoesis, then, is the crafting of religion.  The term religiopoesis has the advantage that its Greek-antiquity-ness helps disguise its mean­ing and hence obfuscates its baggage.  The phrase “crafting religion” is in fact deeply problematic—for at least two reasons.

First, many of us have been raised to understand that religious tenets come to humankind via blinding-light revelations, either to great/divine persons in ancient times or to mentally unstable/maniacal persons in modern times, and we feel no identifica­tion with either group.  “What, me, articulate a religion?  You gotta be kidding!”  We become embarrassed, uneasy, even talking about the idea.  Indeed, to many it can seem blasphemous.

The second problem is that religion is many different things—text, response, ritual, ideology, morality—and most of these topics have not been deeply considered by persons who have devoted their intellectual lives to understanding and contribu­ting to the scientific world view.  An honest re­sponse would be “Religion?  Don’t know a damn thing about it.  Stopped going when I was eleven.”  A more common response is “Religion?  What a lot of balderdash!  I like the Gregorian chants and all that but the rest is baloney.”  Neither of these responses is likely to generate enthusiasm for engag­ing in the project.

Counterbalancing these difficulties are the opportunities presented by a religiopoesis project in our times.

Whereas folk wisdom holds that religious cosmo­logies derive from blinding-light revelation, historians of religion tell us that most are in fact the product of interaction of cultural traditions and approaches: e.g. a story from Mesopotamia is combined with a story from Persia and modified to be coherent with Hebraic tradition.  In this respect, the fashioning of our scientific cosmology has been an analogous process.  We can attribute key insights to various persons—quantum theory to Bohr, evolu­tion to Darwin, regulated gene expression to Monod­—but we all know that these are incomplete attribu­tions, that the “revelations” experienced by these men emerged from a vast cumulation of understan­dings.

By the same token, the crafting of religious responses to the scientific world view can, indeed must, be a collective and dynamic project.  There are huge domains of knowledge to be considered, and there are millennia of religious quests to be explored, quests that articulate what persons seek in their religious experience.  Indeed, it is the collec­tive nature of the project that can serve to decons­truct our uneasiness about engaging in it: no one person is setting himself or herself up as the Guru; we’re all responding from our own perspectives, offering rather than professing.

 

The Duality Within Religiopoesis

Granted that religions are complex, we can recognize two poles, and an intervening spectrum, in any religiopoesis project.

The first pole can be called theology.  A theolo­gian, trained in philosophical discourse, uses this rubric to talk about ultimacy: What is the meaning of meaning?  How do we know what we know?  What are we talking about when we speak of purpose or evil or destiny?  These intellectual questions may strike some as sterile and uninteresting, but for others they represent the core of religious life.  Talmudic scholars have movingly described their studies of the Torah as deeply religious exercises in which they experience transcendence in their cogni­tive apprehension of God’s word.  The scientific cosmology certainly invites stunning opportunities for theological discourse.  How do we think about ultimate reality in an evolving universe?  How does our understanding of genetics inform our need to believe that we possess free will?  What do comput­ers tell us about ourselves?  Is there such a thing as a Meta-Ethics?  How are we to think about and decide ethical questions if no coherent meta-ethical framework can be found?

Scientists may argue that they lack the philo­sophical training to engage in such dialogue, but I disagree.  Our training has honed our ability to analyze empirical data and understandings, make deductions therefrom, and integrate disparate modes of reasoning.  We have much to contribute here, and if our language sounds different from theological language, this may not be such a bad thing.

The second pole can be called spirituality.  It is accorded romantic adjectives: emotional, intuitive, poetic, mystical.  It explores how we feel when we apprehend a cosmology—religious responses such as hope or fear or fellowship or compassion.  The new cosmology invites spiritual responses as well.  How does an understanding of biological evolution inform our understanding of empathy?  community?  grati­tude?  death?  How do we deal with its vast nihilistic underbelly?

Theological/spiritual dualities, and their many intergradations, are inherent in all religions and are seminal to religiopoesis.  It is the integration of the theology and the spirituality that forms the matrix of a viable religious orientation: the theology alone is dry as dust; the spirituality alone is self-absorbed, even autistic.  Indeed, one of the important insights from contemporary neurobiology is that these distinctions are at least partially false: without an emotional or intuitive component, theological/phil­osophical issues may have no meaning to the thinker in the sense that he will not be able to assign value or importance to alternative outcomes.

There is, of course, a whole other dimension to religious life, which is how we behave and why.  Religions have always been in the business of recommending or requiring modes of morality, and any new religious orientations will doubtless come to carry such directives as well.  But I have come to understand that directives only work if they flow from belief.  It is because we believe in the Amer­ican Way and the Constitution that we obey govern­mental regulations, and it is because we believe in the theological/spiritual core of our religious tradi­tions that we attempt to respond to their moral edicts.  To give an example in the current context, I would propose that the most enduring form of environmentalism will emerge from a theological and spiritual apprehension of our place in the scheme of things.  Scientists have important things to tell us here.

 

Belief and Reward

Religion is about Belief with a capital B.  A religious person adopts the most compelling theology and the most satisfying spirituality on offer, fre­quently the constellation encountered in childhood, and allegiance to those understandings is then called Belief.  There is, of course, an additional factor here, in that religious traditions have invariably included rewards for Belief: dwelling in the house of the Lord forever, the receipt of eternal grace, reincarnation into a better life, respite from plague and drought.

The scientific cosmology, authored by cosmic evolution and not by prophets or visionaries is not inherently a proposition that calls for belief or Belief.  One is not asked to believe in the Schrödin­ger equation or the genetic code; one is instead asked to examine the evidence for these discoveries and, if it is judged inadequate, to propose and conduct experimental tests of alternative models of reality.  Where the scientific accounts evoke our belief statements, then, is in the realm of our accep­tance of their findings and our capacity to walk humbly and with gratitude in their presence.

The Reward component is problematic because nothing now apprehended by scientific inquiry suggests the existence of the rewards offered by the major religious traditions.  One way out is to say that since our scientific understandings remain incomplete, these rewards may still be on offer and indeed may never be perceived by our limited human faculties.  A second response is to suggest that the awe and wonder generated by the understanding of scientific cosmology is itself its own inherent reward, a response that is not likely to carry much freight in our times since most persons find the scientific cosmology difficult and alienating.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Religiopoesis, in the end, is centrally engaged in finding ways to tell a story in ways that convey meaning and motivation.

 

Metaphor

Our scientific facts come to us as facts - DNA sequences, Hubble images, extinctions - but our understandings - scientific, theological, and spiritual - come to us as metaphors, either the metaphor systems we call language and mathematics or the metaphors we call the arts.  The richness of our metaphors indicates the depth of our understanding.