The Interfaith Clergy Letter:
– An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science
Truth Matters
Science and Religion both explore truth, but in mainly different domains, often using different methods and language. In some ways, within each domain, truth can be considered sacred.
Science is an accumulating body of explorations and understandings of the world tested by experience and experiment. The scientific impulse may originate in awe or curiosity, which are also features of religious questions and encounters. Science and religion are complementary ways of approaching our place in the cosmos. While science may use a chemicals in a test tube and religion may use an image in a stained glass window, both can help us appreciate opportunities before us.
Religion consists of stories, the arts and other humanities, and many kinds of explorations enacted in rituals embraced by communities that reveal or point what our lives depend upon, what religions may call the sacred, sometimes in theistic language, sometimes not. One possible overview of the world's religions arises from asking of them where they go to find the sacred.
In general, with exceptions and qualifications, the Primal faiths find the sacred in the world of nature, the Asian faiths discern the sacred within the person, and the Monotheistic traditions find the sacred revealed in the history of covenanted community.
* In the Primal faiths we find ecological awe: nature is respected more than controlled; nature is a process which includes us, not a product external to us to be used or disposed of. Our proper attitude toward nature is wonder, not consumption. Our lives depend on nature.
* In Asian religions the awe of personhood is clear when our actions proceed spontaneously and responsibly from duty and compassion, without ultimate attachment to their results.
* In Monotheistic traditions, the awesome work of God is manifest in history’s flow toward justice when peoples are governed less by profit and more by the covenant of service. Our lives depend on community.
What, then is the place of science? Sciences like physics, geology, ecology, and climatology enhance our wonder of the natural world -- and show how easily we can corrupt and destroy this planet. Sciences like psychology, personal economics, and even computer modeling can illuminate moral decisions for wholesome personhood. Sciences like anthropology and sociology can guide us as we seek to repair the social and political crises of our time.
Just as we increasingly recognize that the domains of specific sciences have permeable boundaries, so the world's religions are increasingly shaped by each other. Even more broadly, advances through history in fields like astronomy, electromagnetism, chemistry, medicine, evolution, genetics, information science, and many others, and associated technologies, offer possibilities for the protection and enhancement of nature, the individual, civilization itself by showing us what our lives depend upon, which religions call sacred.
The mysteries of the universe -- the electron spin, the Krebs cycle in metabolism of the cell, the migrations of early hominids, stories of service and even sacrifice on behalf of others, episodes of wonder at the birth of a child, rituals that bring people together in a shared sense of decision-making or even destiny -- may typically lie in different domains of science and religion. Nonetheless, the increasing overlap of the various disciplines of science and the interpenetration of the worlds faiths as they come to know each other more clearly, bring religion and science together.
We believe that there is no conflict between these great domains of humanity encountering the astonishing phenomena of existence.
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Number of Listings by Location
Please note that institutions are named for identification purposes only.
If you would like to sign this letter, please send an email to mz@theclergyletterproject.org listing the following information:
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