The Way Things Really Are

I'm realizing as I get more enthusiastic about my reading how much the impulse that first attracted me to Unitarian Universalism is also pulling me into the history of science. Both of these attractions have developed around a core belief: that knowledge is a human undertaking that is emerging and evolving, rather than an a priori entity.

What started me down the road away from my work with the space program and toward ministry was the recognition that faith is more than I had thought it was -- rather than being an unchanging possession, I came to see it as an evolving quality of human life. By faith I mean not belief, but ultimate trust in a center or centers of value and power, "our way of finding coherence in and giving meaning to the multiple forces and relations that make up our lives" (kudos to James Fowler for his definition). Reading that someone else recognized that faith is not a thing that we find or lose, but an evolving quality of relationship and commitment, was a thought liberating enough to inspire me to a change of career.

My seminary studies helped me to understand the same about religion, the institutional expression of faith and belief -- it too has evolved across the course of human history: prophetic voices have been embraced or disregarded, newly-discovered statements of wisdom upheld or censored, official canons constructed and promoted. Even the most revered sources have a story.

This has not been an uncontroversial claim. When early liberal theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher (right) tried to reconcile the worldview of the Enlightenment with Protestant theology, they came to see that religion could be more fruitfully unpacked when they used the tools of historical research upon it. Searching religious scriptures for misspellings, additions and deletions, stylistic evidence and other artifacts has helped us to better understand their true authorship and the time and place of their writing and incorporation into their accepted canon. Religious studies have thus become more than just accepting the official version and trying to understand its importance for our lives -- instead, we are drawn onto a winding trail of cultural influences, politics, and poorly-known sources. In my mind, this makes religious life infinitely more interesting, but others would disagree with me, and some quite strongly. To portray scriptures as a body of messages that have been cobbled together, edited with a variety of agenda in mind, and accepted or rejected based on the vagaries of church politics -- well, some feel that this robs religion of its power. If it's not divine and incontrovertible truth, they say, what good is it? What's the point?

I would reply, the point is that it's true to life; the point is that it is a product of time and place, just like everything else in our lives.

I reminisce about discovering these ideas in the religious world because I'm now drawn to the same ones in the history of science. In my training in physics, I swallowed the conventional understanding of science, that we were just reporting on the world as it was. It was this objectivity, we agreed, that gives science its authority and its success in helping us to understand and manipulate the world around us.

This sentiment is summed up in the words of German historian Leopold von Ranke (right), who spoke of writing history wie es eigentlich gewesen, "as it essentially was". von Ranke's work marks the beginning of modern history, when we began to question the objectivity of historical reports and to recognize that they, too, have a story.

Even science has a history. This is undoubtedly the point at which the most people get hung up on when I tell them that I'm studying the history of science. Rather than portray science as knowledge waiting fully-formed for us to discover it, successive theories have acknowledged in more and more complex ways how it too has evolved. Not surprisingly, I find these far more interesting than viewing science as simply "the way things are".