Cosmology and Faith
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, January 24, 2010

Reading: From Science and the Search for God
by Gary Kowalski

Reading: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Reading: From Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard

“God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.
Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things–unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”



Message: Cosmology and Faith

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Out of the stars in their flight,
out of the dust of eternity,
here we have come.

Here we have come,
with bones that link star and stone,
this universe, our home,
our cradle, our place of rest,
out of the stars we have come.

When I was four, I wanted to be a firefighter –
I guess that’s pretty typical.
But then I wanted to be an astronaut.
My mother tells a funny story –
and I think it’s a true one, even –
that when I was about that age,
four or five, maybe six,
she found me under the car
with a piece of chalk.

She say, Matthew, what are you doing?
Oh, I said, I’m marking the pieces I need.
The pieces you need for what, exactly? she wondered.
For my spaceship, of course. I replied.

I loved the planetarium, and my parents got me
a beautiful set of books about the planets –
there was also one about the sun, and the comets,
and the asteroids –
I think it was a time-life series.

I loved Star Wars and Star Trek and all the rest.
I wanted to go, to live on another planet,
to reach out to the stars.

And I remember the morning,
arriving at my elementary school,
hearing the news from friends,
late January, 1986,
the day that the O-Ring failed
on the Challenger space-shuttle,
and seven astronauts died
over the Atlantic Ocean.

Each generation has its own event like this:
a moment when innocence slips a little
and reality intrudes:
Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Kennedy and King and Kennedy, 9-11.
For us, it was Challenger.
And I stopped wanting to be an Astronaut.

Instead, I wanted to be a theoretical physicist.
I was ten.

I didn’t want to explore so much as I wanted to understand.
What was the universe made of?
Where did it come from?
What was out there?

When I was about 13, I read
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.
I think my Dad got it for me for a birthday.

I had been, the previous summer,
to Jackson Mississippi for two weeks
at Space Station Camp –
not Space Camp, like the movie,
in Huntsville, Alabama.
This was more science based.

I remember one of our lectures was titled:
why the things they do on Star Trek can’t be done –
in particular, they were talking about warp speed,
going faster than the speed of light.
I enjoyed it, but realized that I didn’t have the same aptitude as others.

Reading A Brief History of Time
was one of the many things that sent me
away from physics and into ministry.
After all the science,
the explanations of how time works,
and singularities, gravity and electromagnetism,
and all the rest,
Hawking wrote this – maybe you remember it:

If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.

For then we would know the mind of God.
I thought, then and there,
that I wanted to participate in that conversation –
but not as one of the few scientists.
If we were going to know the mind of God,
then I wanted to be a participant in the religious part
of that conversation.

So let’s talk about the universe,
and how it is structured
and what it means.

Scientists are divided on these questions,
and we just have theories.
The new supercollider on the Swiss-French border
should help us answer some of this stuff –
but it might raise just as many new questions.

But here’s a theory about the structure of things:
there are these tiny little loops of string,
really really tiny – about 10 to the twentieth power times smaller
than a proton,
which is already pretty small.
These little loops of string make up everything.
They make up matter –
electrons and quarks,
and they also make up bosons,
bosons are particles that
instead of carrying matter,
carry forces –
gravity, the strong and weak nuclear force, electromagnetism.

Bosons are important –
they are how things hold together –
from atoms to galaxies and everything in between.

Both types of particles – the ones that make up matter
and the ones that make up forces –
both types of particles are, in this theory,
strings.

Well, not exactly –
this gets complicated, more complicated than I understand,
but here’s the point:
a particle – whatever kind of particle –
is the result of the vibration of a string.

Everything is string – tiny, little strings –
and they vibrate.
There are many different possibilities for vibration –
like there are different notes.

So, if a string vibrates like this [tim play note]
well, that’s an electron.
But if it is this [tim play note],
that’s a positron, or an antimatter electron.

And this [tim play note] might be an up quark,
while other notes [tim plays five notes]
might be the other types of quarks:
down, charmed, strange, top, and bottom.
And very different types of notes
but the same kind of string –
make up the bosons –
the photons [play note]
the gluon [play note]
the W boson [play note]
the Z boson [play note]
and the most elusive prey of them all:
the Higgs boson [play note].
The Higgs boson hasn’t been discovered yet,
that’s one of the things they hope to find
with the supercollider,
the Higgs boson, if it exists,
will explain how it is that things have mass, weight,
which would, you know, be helpful.

Under this theory – and it is just a theory,
not yet proven and maybe un-provable
without a technological breakthrough we cannot yet imagine –
under this theory,
the whole universe is singing –
these different vibrations
make everything that is, was, will be,
nothing is static and solid,
but always moving and creating through movement.

And all these vibrations are related,
singing together –
particles separated across the vastness of everything,
but still someone related to each other,
turning together,
because, as the story correctly put it,
we are all the growth of a single seed,
a seed which began to grow
when the music was just right.

Gary Kowalski says that we are all varied expressions
of one great energetic occurrence –
and this is right.

Now, you could stop right there.
I think strings are pretty cool.
I think the idea that we might have a grand unified theory,
or theory of everything,
where little vibrating strings are the basic structure of existence,
I think that’s neat.

And you could stop right there.
That’s where science stops.

But I’m not a scientist, I’m a theologian,
and I want to know what it means.
What does it mean?

Here’s a sketch of a possibility –
you’ll need to draw your own conclusions,
this is just a suggestion.

My philosophy of existence –
my ontology –
is deeply informed by the ancient wisdom of the Taoist tradition –
Lao-Tsu and the Tao Te Ching.

I believe in a spirit of life, a power and presence
which is holy and beyond our power to name,
let alone categorize or explain.

String theory helps us to talk about this:
Lao-Tsu, writing twenty-five hundred years ago,
says of the Tao:
The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
and this:
Its rising is not about light, its setting not a matter of darkness.
Unnameable, unending, emerging continually,
and continually pouring back into nothingness,
It is formless form, unseeable image, elusive, evasive unimaginable mystery.
The Tao is unending – like a loop,
infinitely long,
and the Tao is describes as a force
that flows, that moves back and forth –
which sounds to me like a vibration.
The Tao is described as the way of things,
the something that gives birth to all things,
and to which all things return.

The Tao isn’t a personality,
and it isn’t an architect.
It’s just the way, it’s the motion.
It’s the vibration,
which is expressed in all these different notes.

The teachings of Taoism are not the only way to get at this.

Early in the previous century,
a mathematician named Alfred North Whitehead
began to speculate about what relativity
and quantum mechanics might mean
for theism.
This movement, which became known as process theology,
was often led by Unitarians –
although the Methodists were really into it, too, for a time.

Process theology says that God is a verb, instead a noun.
Instead of a fixed object, an unchanging power,
God, they said, was the principle of relation,
the most-related of all.
God was relation itself, and so was always changing,
since everything else was changing too.
The only part of God that doesn’t change,
process theology says,
is that God is related to everything,
and that God is loving and compassionate.
But all the details change all the time,
because everything is vibrating.

Other theologies –
various indigenous traditions,
Jewish mysticism,
Buddhism,
Islamic Sufism,
to name a few –
other theologies play well with string theory too.

It doesn’t matter which one you work with –
if Unitarian Universalism means anything,
it means that –
it doesn’t matter what theological language you use.

What does matter is this:
the new facts of cosmology are an invitation to participation,
an invitation to sing along with the singing universe.
We are vibrating strings,
which are related to all the strings that vibrate
in the whole universe.

This is an invitation:
and invitation, first, to wonder.
We sit under the night sky,
lay down in the forest
where the white fire of the stars
float light as moths among the branches,
we go out into the mystical moist-night air,
so that we might remember,
like water returning to the ocean as rain,
so we might remember who we are,
and where we come from.

The universe is an awesome place.
Absolutely awe-some.
It is larger than we can imagine,
and older.
And, if the scientists are right,
everything in this so-huge place,
everything that ever was and will be,
everything is connected.
The growth of a single seed.

That’s awe-some.
But our faith,
and the insights of cosmology,
call us to go further.

We are called, not just to wonder,
but to right relationship.
This wide universe is our home,
we are part of it,
we vibrate with it,
and we should treat it, and all things which live,
including ourselves,
with respect and justice.

We are part of the whole,
a strand in the web of the cosmos,
and what we do effects everything.

That’s another insight of modern physics:
what is sometimes called chaos theory,
or, better, complexity theory –
which simply means
that small changes have big effects,
that systems can change,
and it doesn’t take a lot to do so:
butterfly wings in East Asia
change the weather here in Rockford –
systems are vibrating together,
and when we participate with love,
who knows how that vibration might spread.

I love the passage by Annie Dillard,
about the stars and the night sky,
how, like God, she says,
the stars don’t need you to be in the dark,
like God doesn’t need you to look the fool for love,
to make peace and do justice,
but that it is, instead, a life of participation
which requires these things.

I love that passage,
but it is wrong.
The fact is that the holy does
need our participation.
The fact is that we are already participating –
we always already were participating in the universe,
it can be no other way.

The question is what kind of participation
will we engage in.
Will it be passive, ignorant?
Or will it be aware? Struck by awe,
motivated by love and compassion,
seeking relationships of more depth and joy?

The universe is our home,
for each child that’s born, a morning star rises
and our bones link stone and star,
so now what?

The universe is singing.
It is my prayer and hope
that we will sing along,
that we will sing for joy, and peace,
and wisdom,
and all that is good and worthy.
It is my hope that we will dance with the dancing cosmos,
that we will look up at the stars,
and remember who we are,
children of love,
fathers and mothers of time,
at home, here in this place and time,
the still-flowering seed of everything,
agents of possibility,
seekers of truth.

Amen. Blessed Be.