We will continue looking at some aspects of science and its relationship to faith. Of course, central both to faith and science is the world for it is through the material world that we interact, live and think.

Why is there a seeming hostility between these two areas of human experience – science and religion? One of the most important is their relationship to the created world. It is unfortunate, but true, that to a large extent Christianity in the past has held a negative view of material reality. This was partially born out of the fact of an extreme exaggeration of salvation being directed to mainly people and the rest of the world was seen as of secondary importance. This ultra-anthropomorphic view was in fact challenged by science which considers and studies all of the created world and religion was seen as being too narrow and biased.

When one talks about human salvation, what of the rest of the cosmos? What happens to it? What role does it have, if any, to play in the eventual history of creation? Why is it there at all? These are important questions and science causes us to think about them. It is really unfortunate that material reality seems to have been relegated to unimportance because Christianity does really value material existence and this is reflected in much of the theology, as we will see.

What is coming to be more and more emphasized is that salvation is not a merely human concern but an event that impacts the whole cosmos, the whole of creation. Christianity views all of the material world sacramentally. A sacrament points to the depth that is hidden in the world and it always takes on a material expression. It is through this material substance that sacraments are ‘incarnated’ and are transmitted to mankind.

Unfortunately we have been taught to view sacraments in a very narrow manner limited to specific actions carried out in the Church. Sacraments, from the Latin word sacramentum (in Geek mysteries) remind us that this material world is a carrier of a divine imprint on it and everything has the capability to speak of God sacramentally. And it is this sacramentality of the created order that enables us to say three very important points about creation.

The first lesson it teaches us is that the world is good and that it was created by a loving God. This is in answer to the question that Einstein raised towards the end of his life. He stated that the most fundamental question that faces man is whether the universe is friendly. And of course, depending only on science, Einstein could not answer this question in the affirmative because there is another aspect to the world that we experience.

There is also the realization that the world contains evil and suffering and death. It is here that we see the origin of seeing matter as a carrier of decomposition and eventual death. This was espoused by the Gnostics who saw that the goal for mankind was to escape the fetters of materiality which is transient and death dealing. The Manicheans also saw only negativity in matter which was to be shunned.

This gave rise to the classification of some parts of creation as sacred and others as profane. But Christianity has always professed that nothing is excluded from being sacred because everything can be used to glorify God. Note that in the most important prayer to the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Church it is clearly stated that the Holy Spirit fulfills everything and He is present everywhere, without any exception.

The realization of the presence of evil and corruption tells us that things are not the way they are to be – this is an obvious truth – everything absolutely requires transfiguration but not destruction and avoidance.

The third aspect of the sacramentality of the whole world is that it in fact has been redeemed through the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ.

All three aspects of creation come as a package and if we try to drop any one of them, we will lose coherence which is what often happens when people look at the world without faith to inform their view.

It was the disenchantment of the world in claiming that it is nothing but molecules operating at a mechanistic level that opened the door for science to become a dominant way of dealing with the world. And gradually, through deism, it became more and more seen that God, if He even existed, was a god who was at a distance from the world. The tension that Christianity saw in creation – good and evil, an imminent God and a transcendent God – were kept together through the view of the world as sacramental. But once this position was dropped, the world came to be seen in a very different light as something to be used (and sometimes abused) for the greater domination of other people. The world was again being seen as rendered apart and the results are the pillage and abuse of the earth, which are often portrayed as economical outcomes, but are in fact theological problems.

If hell has been defined as a place where God is absent, then we are creating hell on earth by banning God from our lives. In a sense, we have desacralized the world with the rationale that the world can be studied by breaking it down through the reductive study of natural phenomena. There is some truth in this in that we are right to assert that the world is not God – God is present everywhere and keeps the world in existence but we should not claim that the world and God are identical as is claimed in pantheism. But we have gone too far by totally excluding God from the world and thereby, excluding God from our lives. This is the heart of the problem that is sometimes stated as the conflict between religion and science. There is no conflict here because what in fact causes friction is that there is a conflict between religion and naturalism. Naturalism is not strictly speaking science – it is more of a philosophical position which states that there is no god. The only thing there is, is nature and the material world beyond which there is nothing else. Naturalism has become almost the default position of most people today thereby giving the impression that science and religion are at loggerheads. This claim is simply not true.

There is something else that faith brings and that is the importance of the personal. In science, there is no room for the personal as the objective is to look at the world devoid of personhood. This is one of the main weaknesses of the scientific approach to the world – it denies one of the most important characteristics of mankind. Scientific training starts very early where students are taught to write their reports in a passive form: instead of I did something, they are told to write something was done. But by denying the reality of our personhood, we are greatly impoverishing our view of reality.

What a sacramental view of the world does is to return the balanced view of God and the world. The world is seen as testifying to the presence and existence of God everywhere and this should renew our view of the world and our respect for the world. The ecological problem that has arisen can be, at least partially, attributed to our denigration of the world which is seen as a commodity or a source of raw materials for our comfort and domination of other people. It is not that the world is divine but that it is a carrier of divinity. Many who have raised their voices against the mindless plundering of the earth have, however, banished the divine from any consideration of the question of the value of the earth. This is a serious shortcoming and almost ensures that these efforts to save the environment will fail.

What a sacramental view of the world does is that it enables us to hold onto seemingly contradictory ideas about the world – what is held in our field of vision is the visible and invisible, the spiritual and the material, and above all, it adds to our acceptance of what the Incarnation means. God has come to take on materiality and it is all seen, as mentioned in Genesis, as good. It enriches our tools for dealing with the world and broadens our horizon as to what is out there. And it also enriches our personal lives by causing us to consider the vertical dimension, as well, as the horizontal aspect of our lives. And in the Church we have to stop limiting sacramentality to identifiable, and limited in number, sacraments. This strict limitation is contrary to the deepest insights and thoughts within our theology and the richness of our sacramental lives has to be proclaimed in that all of the earth, without exception, is sacred ground for God’s activity.

Interestingly, in Genesis 1 and 2, there is already an indication of this conflict between the different ways of seeing the earth and our relationship to it and this will be something worthwhile for us to consider in the next letter.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas