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Over twenty years ago, I was asked to take the USPS Conference Service at Birmingham. I preached on "Simplicity." That' s easy to remember, because most of my sermons are about simplicity. I' m not going to make that the main subject today, although people who are interested in psychical research, need simplicity as much as anyone, because they are beset with the opposites of hocus-pocus and pie-in-the-sky on the one hand, and bone-headed prejudice against all things spiritual on the other. This has given rise to books for and against – some bad, some good, and some unreadable. So we proceed on our quest – our questioning quest because it is natural for us to do so. If anyone asks me why I' m interested in such matters, I' ll answer them: "Because I can' t help it." But I always strive for simplicity.
We are here because we are searching, and we can' t help this natural curiosity of the human mind and spirit. Curiosity is one of the impulses of learning and upward development of the human being. Some of us started being interested in spiritual and religious matters at an early age, some later, and, over time, we composed our beliefs, our conclusions. It is these conclusions that help us to form an attitude with which to face life – and what we call death. I personally would not be here if I did not believe in a dimension stretching in and through and beyond the obvious physical world around us – and beyond the time that we appear to be travelling along. The words: "Life after death?," as in: "Do you believe in life after death?" trip easily off the tongue in a sing-song fashion, but we believe that there is more to it than that. What most of us are looking for is some strong indication, not only of life after death, but also that that greater life, that universal and ultimate life, is with us here and now, that we are in it already – always were, always will be – but, because of our limitations, we are unconscious of it for most of the time, but now and then receive hints and inklings of something greater than our limited experience – our experience of the sticks and stones of daily life.
There is more to it than we can see. If we believe that we are on the brink of understanding everything, we shall be arrogant – as arrogant as the people in the Middle Ages who believed that the world was flat, with a large inverted bowl over it, with holes in it, through which they could glimpse the light of heaven. They were sure. They knew it all. But what they didn' t know was that greater knowledge brings a greater awareness of our ignorance. They lived a few hundred years ago – a few hundred years in a human history of perhaps over two million, and a world history of something like four thousand million years. Modern science is only two hundred years old – more like a hundred and fifty, with the greatest steps taken in the 20th century - just one hundred years – out of two million? Aren' t we being a little presumptuous? What about the next two million, if we survive as a species?
I know some humanists – outside our Church – they are awfully nice people, but their minds are made up. They talk about "the God of the gaps," meaning that if we don' t understand something, we fill the space with God, implying that, in time, when we do understand everything – everything – there will be no need for God.
There are scientists now who are working on the ultimate formula which will explain everything – or at least all forms of force – as we know it. They believe that in a few years they will reach this goal. But so did the alchemists of the Middle Ages. I have been watching the programme about the brain on TV. The neuroscientist leading the programme gave the impression that she was looking forward to the day when everything about human consciousness will be explained in terms of the brain – not that the brain is an instrument used by a soul, but that everything begins in the brain, is caused by the brain and is limited to the brain, as if the horizon of that knowledge had no other horizons beyond it.
Let' s go forward five hundred years. Can you imagine the people of that time saying to each other: "In the year 2050 all the great questions were answered. Since then, we have discovered nothing of great importance." That seems unlikely. The people five hundred years from now will probably look back on the twentieth century as we look back on the time of Henry the Eighth. What further ideas and knowledge will there be in such a length of time? And, assuming that evolution will continue as it has done, what will be the extent of knowledge and awareness a million years from now? And, say, ten million years beyond that – in our species or in some other species we can' t even begin to imagine?
The God of the gaps? All right, but the more we know, the more we know that we don' t know. The more we learn, the more the gaps seem to increase. The higher we climb, the wider is our horizon. All our present answers may be wrong. Even our questions may be wrong. We are so out of our depth here that I am constrained to go back to my two favourite illustrations.
The first one is the picture of a man climbing a step-ladder and pointing at the sun and saying, "Look, I' m nearer to the sun than you are!"
The second is this: Some years ago, I read – I forget where – about a scene which put so much into perspective for me. It went like this:
Imagine the sea shore. Some way out at sea, down in the water, there is a small fish. O the land, there is a cathedral, and at the organ the organist is playing a Bach Cantata. What can that little fish know of the cathedral, the organist or the Bach Cantata? Yet they are all part of the same reality.
There is something in this story that grabs people' s attention. There are so many who never think in these terms, and so the story is something of a shock to them. This surprises me in reasonable people. This is where the arrogance lies. We are always standing on the brink of infinity, and yet there are people who like to think that they can look at what we call God squarely in the eye and be as dogmatic about their opinions as any medieval Christian. They say they want to look God squarely in the eye, yet they can' t even look at the sun for more than a moment.
And to say that the world – or the universe, even – is a great computer, as some do, may be no truer than a chimpanzee saying that it is a great banana. In the nineteenth century, people said that it was a machine. This is where we should learn to be humble – when we realise, through evolution, that the universe is more than anything that our present ideas can contain, be we an ignorant person or a professor – at the bottom of the academic step-ladder or at the top. They say that there is only one point difference between the genetic makeup of human beings and chimpanzees. What would be the effect of a single point improvement on the human being – or ten points, or a hundred?
When we feel humiliation, there follows fear, and so we hedge ourselves with assumptions and certainties, to bring order to our chaotic world and to comfort ourselves.
And this is done in science as much as in religion. Science may be no farther up the ladder than religion. A different ladder, maybe, but they are all pointing in the same direction – upwards – and if there is any difference in height, only a few steps in either direction separate them. The knowledge of the scientists is awesome – to people like me, and I respect it. But what will it seem like five hundred years from now? Of course, science helps us in more ways than one. Apart from its obvious purpose, it helps us to place grid-lines on an uncharted wilderness. It offers something to hold on to and so gives us comfort. It even satisfies the aesthetic nature of many people, because there is beauty in science as well as in art.
But there are scientists who try to bring us down to size by telling us that we live on a grain of sand going round one of ten billion stars in an average-sized galaxy among billions of other galaxies. But it may be that the understanding of Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Hawking and any other great mind may be relatively no greater than the understanding of that little fish in the sea! The galaxies may not exist as we know them. Anyway, I' m very glad that we are only a speck in infinity. I wouldn' t like to think that the universe was restricted to the extent of my humble perception or imagination. On the other hand, it is the job of religion to help us to be at one with that infinity so that, as our awareness of it grows, so also does our hope for our own potential.
Our experience of reality is bound to be limited. The world, the universe, the human brain, may not exist as we know them, because we can only know them from a low evolutionary level. I was glad to see that Peter Mullen mentioned this in an issue of the USPS journal. Of course, in order to live our daily lives, we have to make assumptions that things are as they seem. But we are very limited – even the cleverest among us.
I don' t find this depressing. Rather do I find it exciting and uplifting. I certainly wouldn' t like to think that the universe – all that is – is limited to my poor understanding, nor even the understanding of the best human brains alive today.
But we have to have something to hang on to, and we do this in faith and with humility, whether we are scientific people or religious. Faith and humility – two religious qualities. We have faith that our learning, our intuition, our genius, if you like, points us in the right direction. Whether we do this from a religious or scientific standpoint doesn' t matter, as long as our faith is accompanied by that other quality humility. False or destructive humility is no good. True humility lies in knowing where we stand, which isn' t very high, if we think in terms of a million years of evolution.
If I say that God is not and Old Man in the Sky, but lies in the centre of the Big Bang, I may be no nearer the truth than the people who said that the sun was the centre of the universe and not the earth. True humility will teach me to allow other people to believe according to their personality and their needs and not make destructive comparisons with what I consider to be my superior knowledge.
In time, we all become out of date – thank goodness! If we are arrogant and are in danger of being proven wrong, this leads to humiliation, and then to fear – conscious or unconscious – and this in turn leads to bad science and bad religion – narrow fundamentalism. Wrong attitudes lead to wrong beliefs. But good science and good religion go hand in hand – not on the same track yet, perhaps, but each traveling its own road, parallel to the other, and respecting the other. And one day, we hope they will meet. That is why I love to see open-minded scientists taking an interest in psychical and spiritual matters, and religious people taking a similar interest in science.
Good religion can teach science a lot, as science can teach religion. But, as I have said, humility and faith are essential. True humility brings a recognition of our worth in a vast universe, which is spiritual as well as physical – and maybe something else that we can' t even imagine. And faith is something that points us in the right direction.
Humility is not humiliation. Humiliation is destructive, but humility may be uplifting. We can be humble and at the same time be uplifted – filled with hope and power and glory. We feel humble because the power and the glory are greater than we are; but we are uplifted because, in some wonderful way, we are part of it.
And faith is not something that can be weighed in a laboratory. It belongs more in the field of poetry and art. It comes to us through inspiration. We get inklings, hints, vague impressions, which, though vague at one level, at a deeper level are as real as anything in the world of sticks and stones of the materialist world – more real, in fact, because without the world of subjectivity, the world of consciousness, the world of imagination, feelings and the spirit, there would be no knowledge of the world of sticks and stones.
And it is knowledge of the world of the spirit – knowledge of God, if you like – that enables us to feel both humble and uplifted. And as we approach the end of our earthly lives and we are running out of sticks and stones, and feel that there is less and less here for us on earth, our awareness of the wider horizons of the spirit – the power and the glory – are the greatest, the ultimate consolation.
In and through and behind and beyond everything that we can experience in this world, there lies Something, of which we are conscious in our quietest moments, and in our prayer. In it we live and move and have our being. For want of a better word, we might call it the Word of God, if you like – and poetically we might expand it and say: "the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."
Roger Tarbuck is minister to the National Unitarian Fellowship.
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