I suppose the one thing that unites all religious believers is a view of the world that understands human beings to be more than just “flesh and blood”; that there are more things in heaven and on earth than the mere mechanistic cause and effect of scientific explanation.
A scientist could go a long way to explain how all the instruments in the orchestra make the sounds that they do. Another scientist could explain what is happening in the human body and mind when we listen to music. But no one can explain or define the experience completely because the total music experience is more than the sum of its parts. This is, I suppose, similar too – if not part of – that which we call “religious”.
But the “religious” dimension is more than mere emotions. Religion is some sort of explanation for the whole experience we call life; an explanation coupled with prescriptions for making life meaningful, purposeful and, in some sense, “successful”. Religious explanations are in so many ways totally different from scientific explanations and yet people – particularly in our modern world – are mixing them up. Amazingly frequently people talk about religious explanations as if they were scientific explanations and then reject them because they fail as scientific explanations. This has led, in our own society, to a tragic loss of the religious sensibility, and in the States and elsewhere a terrifying fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism, very simply, assumes that the religious and the scientific explanation are the same type of explanation and are therefore competing with each other. The obvious example is the stories of Creation in Genesis (yes there are two creation stories). Seen as scientific explanations they directly compete with theories of Evolution though there is absolutely no scientific evidence that they are true as science Irrational religion: terrifying!
But worse, the person who sees these stories as mere science misses the profound and important truths which they do contain. As “religious” stories they convey such truths as: that we are dependent upon God; that the relationship between man and woman reflects something within the Godhead; that men and women need the Sabbath rest and (even more important) that the six day world of striving and work only finds its fulfilment when it comes to rest in God. And I could go on. Those creation stories are bursting with meaning as “religious” stories that the “scientific” explanation is incapable of conveying.
I passionately believe that, as human beings, we need these religious explanations to make proper sense of who and what we are. A religious explanation often presents itself to us in the form of a story or a picture. The ultimate religious picture, I would suggest, is the picture of something we call heaven. (It is really worth reading Tom Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope” to help us see that our popular “folk religion” view of heaven is nothing like the Biblical promise of Resurrection). In the New Testament we have the very beautiful and simple story of Jesus’ Ascension. It is a story we know so well that we often forget to ask what on earth it means.
Our mind’s eye picture of the Ascension – reinforced by pop religion and religious art – is of Jesus taking off like Elton John’s Rocket Man to find his new home somewhere “up there”. Of course our mind’s eye picture is not faithful to the picture painted by St Luke in the Acts of the Apostles: “and a cloud took him out of their sight”. We ought to know our scriptures well enough to know that the cloud here represents the presence of God: (The Pillar of Cloud in the Wilderness, the Cloud on Sinai and on the Mount of Transfiguration etc).
In other words, our mind's eye wants to paint a literal picture. But the truth which is conveyed is NOT a scientific truth. This is NOT a story of Jesus growing wings but, rather, a story about his life reaching its fulfilment in God’s presence. (This hope is held out to us all). If we say that he is “up there” without explaining that we are using language in a different way from the way in which a scientist uses language, then the end result will be that people will simply conclude that religion is not true. They will have shut themselves off from so much of what life is really all about.
Nobody would dream of interrogating the poet to ask him exactly how his love is like that red rose! We need to get ourselves out of the habit of assuming that religious and scientific explanation is the same. Religion is dealing with exactly the same world as the scientist, but it is offering an entirely different type of explanation.
