Episcopal bishop shares experiences at OSU lecture

Few people have the expertise needed to speak authoritatively about both religion and science, but the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori does.

Schori is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, a post she's held since last fall after serving five years as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada and seven years as assistant rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis. She is the first woman to hold the position of presiding bishop.

Before her ordination as a priest in 1994, however, she was a marine biologist with master's and doctoral degrees in oceanography from Oregon State University.

On Thursday night, before a crowd of about 250 people at OSU, she drew on her experiences in both worlds - the scientific and the religious - and concluded that both are essential.

"Both science and religion have important things to say to all human endeavor … and at this stage in human history, we may not develop an adequate response to the dilemmas of existence without attention to both ways of knowing," Schori said.

Schori described recent attitudes that have treated the two spheres of knowledge as either "fundamentally opposed" or "fuzzily identical." Neither approach, however, serves the best interests of science or faith, she said.

The initial approaches of science and religion are different in that science suspends judgments about the world until a hypothesis is tested and evaluated, while religion encourages making value judgments because "those values offer a framework that can encourage people to live in one way rather than another," Schori said.

Science finds its proof in quantifiable experimentation over time; faith is proven through experiential analysis, she continued.

But there is a "commonality to the quest" of both science and religion, explained Schori, in that both seek to know, understand or be in relationship with "all that is."

Turning to why the two disciplines find each other so threatening, Schori said, "We could call it either arrogance or sin, but it's basically the prejudice that only one way of looking at the world is appropriate or adequate.

"I would suggest that in this era of human history, we can no longer ignore or repudiate any less-favored way of seeing the world, because each has important and even essential gifts to offer for the ultimate survival and flourishing of the planet and its inhabitants," she continued.

The survival of the human species on Earth depends on interconnectedness, a concept common to both science and religion, Schori said.

"If there is anything that science has been teaching us for the last hundred years, whether in physics, ecology or chaos theory, it is that everything is connected to everything else.

"Interconnectedness is also a fundamental truth of most religious traditions - how I act affects both my neighbor and my relationship with the divine," she explained.

That shared understanding of how everything is related ought to enable partnerships between science and religion that will benefit all of creation, according to Schori.

She cited examples of the impact carbon outputs among developed nations are having on the lives of the poor in Bangladesh and the Solomon Islands and the effects of man-induced climate change on people in low-lying, flood-prone regions facing rising sea levels and harder-hitting storms.

"Science is showing us how this grand system works, and religion is beginning to say more loudly that we have a moral responsibility for those vast consequences of our behavior," she said.

"Scientists have no trouble engaging the idea of an emerging or evolving universe. … Theologians and people of faith are interested in, and variously committed to, existence in which suffering is eliminated or reduced," Schori said. "Together, and in dialogue, these two spheres of human knowing have the possibility to accomplish part of this vision in very pragmatic ways. I do not believe that either sphere, religious or scientific, can accomplish it alone."

The goal of building community and caring for that community is one that ought to be embraced by people no matter where they fall along the theological-scientific spectrum, according to Schori.

Religion can motivate people to think far beyond themselves and seek healing, peace and justice in the world. Science is necessary in understanding the causes and developing solutions to disease, overexploitation of resources and environmental degradation, Schori argued.

Both realms of knowledge are crucial. Science alone cannot inspire human responsibility because "we are not purely rational or mechanistic creatures," she added.

Theologians, on the other hand, must recognize the "best of recent science" as essential to creating a healed and more healthy world, she said.

"We have the technical ability and capacity to vastly decrease our use of fossil fuels and the accompanying carbon load on the atmosphere, but we have not yet found the moral and political will to do so. Together, scientific wisdom and religious wisdom may be able to generate enough political will to respond," Schori said.

Creating a world of peace and justice and one in which human beings can survive physically depends on the ability of science and religion to talk to each other and build alliances that can respond to suffering the world, according to Schori.

"Both science and religion lead people to see the world with enormous awe. The response can either be a burning desire to understand the workings of the physical world, or an equally burning desire to connect with whatever has brought this world in existence.

"Both kinds of passion can help us to care for this world and all its inhabitants and both are going to be needed if we are going to relieve the suffering of many and bring increasing hope to our own species and all others," Schori said.

Carol Reeves covers religion for the Gazette-Times. She can be reached by e-mail at carol.reeves@lee.net or by phone at 758-9516.