COMMENTARY : Between a Rock and a Hard Place

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The atheists who claim they just want organized religion to let them alone cannot seem to let organized religion alone. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have replaced the old lump of coal in our Christmas stocking with books that denounce religion and advocate atheism. New York Times columnist Nicholas […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The atheists who claim they just want organized religion to let them alone cannot seem to let organized religion alone.

Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have replaced the old lump of coal in our Christmas stocking with books that denounce religion and advocate atheism. New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof couples them as examples of an “increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive.”


Dawkins and Harris are drawing readers with the same hokey bravado displayed by the 19th century orator Robert Ingersoll. Known as “the great agnostic,” he earned his 10 fleeting minutes of fame by opening his gold watch and challenging God, if he existed, to strike him dead before a minute ticked away. Audiences loved it but God never took him up on it, and Ingersoll met death on its terms rather than his own in 1899.

This surge in atheist fundamentalism occurs against the noisy educational debate that pits science against religion in teaching evolutionary theory in school. These new books underscore the premise of the Darwin dispute that the object and language of science are completely different from those of religion. You can’t use religion, the atheists argue, to judge the age of rocks but you can, as Dawkins and Harris see it, use science to smash the rock of ages.

The Christmas season is the right setting for us to recognize what many scientists and some theologians do not: They are both interested in mystery and they both use the language of myth and poetry to describe the world spread out before them.

The real subject for both science and religion is the Mystery of creation and existence. The famous German theologian Karl Rahner once told me that he and scientist Albert Einstein came from the same part of Germany. Each was drawn to the mystery of the universe. “It frustrated Einstein,” Rahner said, “but it attracted me.” Their work represented different approaches to the Mystery that remains the same compelling subject for both science and religion.

Religion uses metaphor, the language of poetry and myth, to describe the Mystery of existence and of the long human experience with religion. The account of creation in Genesis is not that of a scientist but of one who used the language best suited to describe religious experience. People who take the metaphors literally destroy them in the process. Clarence Darrow could easily mock William Jennings Bryan at the 1925 Scopes trial for taking the biblical dating of creation as the literal truth.

What seems to go without notice is how science uses the word “mystery” and describes it in the same metaphorical language used by the writers of the Bible and the recorders of the myths, such as that of the Hero who, as Joseph Campbell notes, “has a thousand faces” and whose trials parallel those experienced by all human beings.

Waves and particles are a metaphorical rather than factual description in physicists’ successive efforts to explain the mystery of light. The Bible is filled with the same wonder of light. Nobody shies away from “black holes” or even “big bangs” as the metaphors that scientists use every day when they speak about the cosmos and the mystery of galaxies that stretch well beyond the Hubble telescope’s searching eye and our searching imagination.


“String theory,” currently fashionable in physics, leads, as Lee Smolin explains in his book “The Trouble With Physics,” to discussions of “preons” that may underlie “quarks” as subatomic building blocks that may be measured by a method like a Boy Scout’s knot-tying. “The result of all this high reasoning,” physicist Russell Seitz observes, “is something close to pure metaphor _ images that act as visualizing analogies to a complicated reality.” Mystery, wonder and metaphor are the common concern of both faith and physics.

That is why in reflecting on our first voyage to the moon, Norman Mailer anticipated the affinity of theology and physics by writing, “Yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.”

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

DSB/PH END KENNEDY

To obtain a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!