Finding God in scientific inquiry
03/03/16 05:28
One of the podcasts to which I listen that often contributes to my ideas for the blog and sermons, is “On Being,” an interview show about spirituality and religion hosted by Krista Tippett. Tippett is a masterful interviewer whose calm questions elicit deep responses from those with whom she speaks. I’ve heard interviews from leaders in many different religions and in other fields. It is typical for her to begin the interview with a question about the subject’s religious and spiritual upbringing. The answer to that question often sets the tone for the interview that is to follow.
This week I have been inspired by her interview with Dr. Robin W. Kimmerer. Kimmerer is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs drawing on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge. She is a botanist, whose scientific research subject is the ecology of mosses.
As a teacher, Dr. Kimmerer has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues and a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation.
She is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
What was so fascinating to me about the way she came across in the interview with Tippett was her words about the restoration of relationships. She spoke passionately about how we have become disconnected from the ecosystems that sustain our lives. Children grow up with the ability to identify over 100 corporate logos knowing how to identify less than ten plants. She mourns the fact that we aren’t teaching our children to pay attention to the world in which they live. We go through our lives without making connections to the plants that support us. We eat without understanding the food that we place in our bodies.
Science, she states, is very good at understanding some of the mechanisms of plants, but often ignores relationships. There are, in nature, many symbioses where plants excel in groups and in relationship to other plants. Understanding these relationships not only helps to understand the plants, but also to inform human life and relationships as well.
In the interview, Dr. Kimmerer recalled entering the forestry school at the age of 18 and stating that the reason she wanted to study botany was because she wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. The depth of their beauty revealed to her something about the order and harmony of the universe. She was told by her teachers, however, that beauty was not an appropriate inquiry for science and that art school was the place to study beauty. She persisted, however, and discovered that even in the scientific arena where emotions are set aside in pursuit of objectivity, there is a good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together. It turns out that the purple and gold colors together attract far more pollinators than if the two groups were to grow apart from one another. It turns out that there is significant science behind the nature of relationships. It also turns out that aesthetic beauty is a factor in the way plants and animals develop and evolve.
I’m no scientist, at least not in an academic sense. Even my few inquiries into psychology, sociology and anthropology fall far short of being rigorous in academic terms. My fields have been philosophy and theology that once were considered to be chief among all of the sciences, but in the modern university are considered to be less scientific and more speculative in their approach. I am, however, deeply concerned with relationships. My theology is very relational. My understanding of God is based in relationships. My christology is deeply relational. I see relationship as critical to meaningful human existence. Perhaps that is why I responded so well to Tippett’s interview with Dr. Kimmerer.
In her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Dr. Kimmerer writes: “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow.”
In the interview, Dr. Kimmerer spoke of her sense of grief at some of the wounds and scars that humans have inflicted on the natural world. She mentioned clear cutting forests, mountaintop removal, and other processes that we have used to extract the resources we need to sustain our lifestyles. She spoke of her grief over our overconsumption of the earth’s resources and the need to restore balance. As she spoke, this acclaimed and widely recognized scientist was treading in territory that is very familiar to a theologian. The relationship between grief and restoration is a theme that has been the story of the people of faith for millennia. Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about Old Testament themes of ideology replaced with reality, denial replaced with grief, and despair replaced with hope. From this point of view, the grief Dr. Kimmerer expressed is evidence of a spiritual maturity that demonstrates she has traveled a long way down the road of relationship with God. As a pastor, I know that grief is not the enemy. It is, in fact, a step in the journey towards hope and restoration.
The interview concludes with a statement by Dr. Kimmerer that reveals the depth of her understanding of this process: “And so one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn.”
In the universities of the renaissance, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. It was believed that any other scientific exploration would eventually lead to the big questions of the nature of the universe, the reasons for human existence, and our relationship with God. Krista Tippett’s interview with Dr. Robin Kimmerer certainly reinforced this view for me. A botanist who really takes her study of moss seriously will find in the moss lessons about the nature of the universe, our relationship to that universe and the source of all creation.
This week I have been inspired by her interview with Dr. Robin W. Kimmerer. Kimmerer is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs drawing on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge. She is a botanist, whose scientific research subject is the ecology of mosses.
As a teacher, Dr. Kimmerer has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues and a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation.
She is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
What was so fascinating to me about the way she came across in the interview with Tippett was her words about the restoration of relationships. She spoke passionately about how we have become disconnected from the ecosystems that sustain our lives. Children grow up with the ability to identify over 100 corporate logos knowing how to identify less than ten plants. She mourns the fact that we aren’t teaching our children to pay attention to the world in which they live. We go through our lives without making connections to the plants that support us. We eat without understanding the food that we place in our bodies.
Science, she states, is very good at understanding some of the mechanisms of plants, but often ignores relationships. There are, in nature, many symbioses where plants excel in groups and in relationship to other plants. Understanding these relationships not only helps to understand the plants, but also to inform human life and relationships as well.
In the interview, Dr. Kimmerer recalled entering the forestry school at the age of 18 and stating that the reason she wanted to study botany was because she wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. The depth of their beauty revealed to her something about the order and harmony of the universe. She was told by her teachers, however, that beauty was not an appropriate inquiry for science and that art school was the place to study beauty. She persisted, however, and discovered that even in the scientific arena where emotions are set aside in pursuit of objectivity, there is a good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together. It turns out that the purple and gold colors together attract far more pollinators than if the two groups were to grow apart from one another. It turns out that there is significant science behind the nature of relationships. It also turns out that aesthetic beauty is a factor in the way plants and animals develop and evolve.
I’m no scientist, at least not in an academic sense. Even my few inquiries into psychology, sociology and anthropology fall far short of being rigorous in academic terms. My fields have been philosophy and theology that once were considered to be chief among all of the sciences, but in the modern university are considered to be less scientific and more speculative in their approach. I am, however, deeply concerned with relationships. My theology is very relational. My understanding of God is based in relationships. My christology is deeply relational. I see relationship as critical to meaningful human existence. Perhaps that is why I responded so well to Tippett’s interview with Dr. Kimmerer.
In her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Dr. Kimmerer writes: “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow.”
In the interview, Dr. Kimmerer spoke of her sense of grief at some of the wounds and scars that humans have inflicted on the natural world. She mentioned clear cutting forests, mountaintop removal, and other processes that we have used to extract the resources we need to sustain our lifestyles. She spoke of her grief over our overconsumption of the earth’s resources and the need to restore balance. As she spoke, this acclaimed and widely recognized scientist was treading in territory that is very familiar to a theologian. The relationship between grief and restoration is a theme that has been the story of the people of faith for millennia. Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about Old Testament themes of ideology replaced with reality, denial replaced with grief, and despair replaced with hope. From this point of view, the grief Dr. Kimmerer expressed is evidence of a spiritual maturity that demonstrates she has traveled a long way down the road of relationship with God. As a pastor, I know that grief is not the enemy. It is, in fact, a step in the journey towards hope and restoration.
The interview concludes with a statement by Dr. Kimmerer that reveals the depth of her understanding of this process: “And so one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn.”
In the universities of the renaissance, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. It was believed that any other scientific exploration would eventually lead to the big questions of the nature of the universe, the reasons for human existence, and our relationship with God. Krista Tippett’s interview with Dr. Robin Kimmerer certainly reinforced this view for me. A botanist who really takes her study of moss seriously will find in the moss lessons about the nature of the universe, our relationship to that universe and the source of all creation.