Secretary Kerry speaking at signing of Climate Change Agreement (Apr. 22, 2016)

            (credit: U.S. Department of State from United States, via Wikimedia Commons)

Even as a child, I did not believe in “miracles”; that is, events that lie beyond all rational explanation. I still don’t. Nor do I believe in the divinity of Jesus. Or, to be exact, I believe he had a spark of the divine in him, but so do all living things. He just had a lot more than most of us. But he differed from us in degree, not type. And miracles? They turn out to have rational explanations in the end.

                  

I knew even as a child that the important thing to understand was what the new deal Jesus offered humanity represented. The principles being represented in the stories were what mattered, and they seemed to me absolutely bang on. His whole worldview, for me, said that if we apply reason and love to what we know of our own history, we can find a path to survival—that is, to humanity’s surviving the hazards of its own success. In other words, once a critical mass of humans shares a model of reality that shows them how to fit into the natural world, while still respecting their fellow humans, they will live on in greater numbers than the ones who promote ignorance and war. Decency, sense, and love will prove fitter than cruelty and folly.

My faith was not destroyed when I gained an understanding of the scientific method. Nor was my passion for Science destroyed by my spiritual beliefs. The two clashed at times, my faith wavered for a while, but I gradually worked out a way to integrate the two and then to synthesize them into a new belief system—a single, unified, coherent one, whose power to guide, nourish, and inspire is greater than any power residing in our old Science or our old Religion alone could ever be.

The question in this Age of Science is “How?” How can a rational human being in the modern era feel full, confident allegiance to both of these ways of viewing our world and our place in it, these two ways that are considered, by most people, to be incompatible? 

The answer is that they are so far from incompatible that the plural pronoun “they” does not work in this context. Only a single concept is being discussed here. There is a way of understanding and reconciling all that we know, a way that integrates it all, from our observations of events around us to the memories stored in our brains to all the concepts we use as we strive to comprehend what we see and recall, and then to design effective responses to all of it. In short, when correctly understood, Science is Religion.