A Sermon for West Seattle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
May 22, 2005
Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
CHALICE LIGHTING:
One of the old ones stood up in the morning light
And spoke to those who had returned to the community from the hunt—
Now that you have returned to this place, it is a good thing;
My life apart from you is not as strong.Yes, was the reply—
We have danced and we have told the stories at our distant fires,
And we have sung to all six directions.
But when we are gathered with you, dear friends
We know better who it is within us that sings.
Let us sing together: #389Gathered Here in the Mystery of this Hour
SERMON
ALBERT EINSTEIN: DISGUISED THEOLOGIAN
“Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
One morning Albert Einstein came downstairs for breakfast as usual, but he hardly touched a thing. His wife thought something might be wrong. She tells it this way:
I asked what was troubling him. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I have a wonderful idea.’ And after drinking his coffee, he went to the piano and started playing. Now and again he would stop, making a few notes then he repeated: ‘I’ve got a wonderful idea, a marvelous idea!’ I said: ‘Then for goodness’ sake tell me what it is, don’t keep me in suspense.’ He said: ‘It’s difficult, I still have to work it out.’ He continued playing the piano and making notes for about half an hour, then went upstairs to his study, telling me that he did not wish to be disturbed, and remained there for two weeks. Each day I sent him up his meals, and in the evening he would walk a little for exercise, then return to his work again. Eventually he came down from his study looking very pale. ‘That’s it’ he told me, wearily putting two sheets of paper on the table. And that was his theory of relativity. (p. 56—all page references from Max Jammer unless otherwise noted)
We hear in this story the intimate connection, for Einstein, between music and science. In fact, music had been a source of creativity for him ever since age six when he started violin lessons. His violin was his constant companion all his life. Reflecting on it he once explained that music was nourished by the same source of longing as his wanting to discover truths through science, and so he said that science and music complemented each other in the release that they offer.
As a child several influences would blend together with music to prepare him to change the world—we heard this morning a bout Einstein and the cows; other influences would be being taught to think for himself, being exposed to socialism, and experiencing the beauties of nature. Music, thought, society, nature and a sense of the harmony and mystery of the universe became intermingled inside him in a complexity of religious feeling. (Jammer p.18)
Let’s first look at how Einstein learned to be a free thinker. He was born in Germany to parents who proudly ignored their Jewish heritage. The freedom to think outside the bounds of the extended family’s religious traditions would be fundamental to his later free thinking. When they moved to Munich, Einstein attended a local school, where Catholic religious education was compulsory, and so he learned the stories of the New Testament, and the instructions of catechism. He was quite taken by the personhood of Jesus, but not by the church authorities. His father, though not interested in attending synagogue or in attending to Jewish rituals in the home, felt that if Albert was getting Christian indoctrination, he should also learn about his Jewish heritage, and so he hired a relative to tutor him in Judaism. Einstein learned to respect sincere religious sentiment. But he would also come to doubt many of the literal facts of the Bible stories and had no use for the teaching of dogma.
As Einstein entered his young adulthood, he hung around with radical student groups who were exploring the revolutionary ideas of Marx. He questioned whether the bourgeois observers of society and the socialist observers—two groups with very different life experiences and perspectives—whether these two different groups could describe a common social world or whether the events of the day would vary depending upon where you stood in society. The idea of social relativity would later be “transposed and projected upon the study of the physical world…in an overthrow of absolute space and time.” (Jammer p.. 30)
An awareness of social relativity would be a factor leading him to a hunch of spatial relativity.
So we see a strong stream of influences towards independence of mind—his parent’s example of religious independence, his seeing the sincere religious sentiments of different faiths, his radical student friends—all of which prepared him to follow a path to freedom of thought and intellectual independence, and so to have the courage one day to challenge established scientific beliefs, leading him to be able to eventually revolutionize physics.
Einstein’s growing distrust of authority, both his early distrust of religious leaders, his deep pain over Hitler’s massacre of the Jews, and an interest in Marxism—all this distrust of authority contained a bit of irony, for he later would reflect on his becoming an authority in physics with the observation that “to punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.” (Jammer p. 29)
Another influence in his religious development was his feeling for nature. The Einstein family home was surrounded by a garden in which he would spend considerable time, and later in life he would recall with great fondness the joy and closeness he felt in nature. He would be intoxicated by a feeling of the sublime in the garden, and of amazement for the marvelous order revealed in nature. It was, besides music, a major source of religious emotion—a mysterious sense of being connected to other life—and a sense of harmony in all of life.
As Einstein grew older, this would be enough for him; he rejected the idea of a personal God, a God with anthropomorphic qualities. In this he had support from his reading of Maimonides, the foremost Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages who, following the second of the ten commandments which prohibited worshipping images, rejected the concept of the image of a God with human like qualities.
Like the second commandment, his rejection of this personal God was never meant to be a rejection of GOD. In fact a Swiss Novelist friend of his said of Einstein that he spoke of God so often that he believed Einstein to be a disguised theologian. (Friedrich Durrenmatt).
Einstein had thought a lot about religion and humanity. He came to formulate three levels or stages of human religious impulse. He saw a first level of religious impulse as fear, fearing the wrath of God for misbehavior—this level he assigned to primitive people who knew little of the forces of nature. The second level is a desire for guidance, love and support—through a God like the Judeo-Christian God—the father god.
But Einstein placed his beliefs on the third level –that of a cosmic religious feeling, quite separate from any dogmatic teaching. He said that “every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.” (p. 144)
His conception of God became a deep feeling and belief in a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the world, in the harmonious world of nature, in the world of the material. And he spoke of life as being an experience largely of mystery. Let’s listen to his own words:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
So Einstein’s religion was a cosmic religious feeling, and a sense of the mysterious structure of the Universe. With no fixed dogmatic images of God, he believed “it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”
Not all were receptive. His views were feared and attacked by many conservative religious. Anything Einstein said got lots of press. He once said that with him, every peep he made got the attention of a trumpet solo. (Dukas and Hoffmann, p. 22).
He would get very upset when he would read that someone said he was an atheist or even agnostic. He said: “In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say that there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for support of such views.” (p. 97)
His views were praised by liberal religious leaders. A group of Unitarian ministers wrote greetings of support to Einstein. Einstein was deeply moved by this expression of respect, and agreed to write an essay on “Religion and Science: Irreconcilable?” which he would present at their gathering and be printed in The Christian Unitarian Register.
He asked two questions—is there a contradiction between religion and science? and can religion be superseded by science? The answer to both questions he said was no. He said there is only a contradiction between religion and science if religion remains fixed on beliefs that are not essential to religious faith like whether the earth is the center of the universe; and he believed that while scientific results are entirely independent from religious and moral considerations, “those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe is perfect and susceptible to rational striving for knowledge.” (p. 117) So he summarized the relationship between science and religion in his famous dictum:
“Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
Science without a sense of the universe as being perfect and a longing to penetrate its mystery—is lame; and religion without the updating perspective who we are, of our relationships in the universe, from what we learn from science—such religion is blind.
MY REFLECTIONS
Einstein, having learned to be an independent thinker, having a religious sentiment that propelled him towards studying his intuitive hunches about the universe, having some sense of the relative nature of things, was poised to change the world. As we heard earlier, he came down to breakfast focused on a hunch, and dedicated two weeks of his life to get clear on the intuitive hunch that would unveil his theory of relativity.
Einstein transported us scientifically, adding to and amending the theories and knowledge of the Newtonian universe (Newton who was Unitarian by the way). Space would no longer be three-dimensional, and time was added into the equation. Tiny atoms were now understood to be interactive little universes in themselves with dimensions of space and time, bringing us into a world of relative relationships, dimensions of curved space, quarks, and black holes, and interconnections and interdependence.
Einstein transported us religiously to a new world of hunches about who we are: of interconnecting energy fields, wave-like patterns and probabilities of interconnections. Interconnections—in ways we don’t yet understand, in quantum ways that Einstein began to unveil but didn’t ever fully accept. But the new ways of thinking blast away the bipolar religious dogma of dualism-- of good and evil, mind and body, spirit and matter, and of human over nature. Matter is energy, not static; we are energy, we are dynamic processes living our lives in interdependence with others and with the rest of life on earth. We are not placed on earth to have dominion over other life, but are part and parcel to the whole of the earth, and connected in energy and stardust to the whole of the universe. We are powerful energy fields whose decisions have powerful interconnecting effects upon other energy fields. It is all very amazing and beautiful. It calls us, as our 7th UU principle states—to respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Einstein’s theories are not absolute truths, but are small glimpses of light within the darkness of mystery. As he once said, all knowledge is just a “maybe.” ( Dukas & Hoffmann p. 18) Just as he didn’t accept religious dogma, he did not accept scientific dogma, but saw knowledge as evolving and building upon, flowing from that which we already have discovered. Without Newton’s gravity there would not be Einstein’s relativity.
So it is with our lives. We build upon our childhood influences of who we are, and what we know, and we keep exploring and pondering, stopping not at absolute stations, but leaning upon light filled principles of love, justice, harmony, and beauty.
From this we hear our religious calling to honor the immense beauty of the universe and to advance the causes of harmony between people and between all of life.
But Einstein gives me more—he gives me a deeper understanding of the religious sentiment, that we need not give over religion to those who believe in a personal God. Rather, we may stand in awe at the amazing structure of the universe, with all the interconnected and interdependent energy fields and sense that we are a part of it all. And we feel a humility that we have only just begun to understand the power of the eternity of life, and the source of all beauty. Such experience of the mystery connects us to generations before and generations to come.
We need not remain at the first religious level, that of fear, known by the first generations of humans—for
(Sing) At this time when the earth is waking, to the dawn of another age, I tell you now, there is no reason…to be afraid.
We need not fix our gaze upon a jealous anthropomorphic God who picks a chosen people over others—
But rather, we may gaze at our lives in amazement and in curiosity, dedicating ourselves to enjoying the beauty in life, to advancing the causes of harmony, and to seeking more understanding of each other, of the universe, and to standing humbly in the mystery.
Here in the Fellowship we experience the mystery as we experience life together, as we influence each other towards good thoughts and good works. As we live and play, create and sing, discover and pray-- together. A part of the interdependence is lived out here in this community of memory and hope, in this truly religious community.
May it be so.
Amen
REFERENCES
Max Jammer. Einstein and Religion. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann. Albert Einstein: The Human Side, New Glimpses from His Archives. Princeton University Press, 1979.