Faith and the Compatibility of Science and Religion

Abstract

My religious roots were in 1930s Unitarian humanism, very much in the strong historical Jesus tradition of the times. Coinciding with our move to the Chapman community Candace and I experienced an awakening of our long-dormant interest in exploring the Judeo-Christian foundations of faith. Our extensive reading included the history of the first three centuries of Christianity. It became much more than an intellectual exercise; we became baptized Christians. In Hebrews, I found the text that inspired me to rethink the foundations of science and to better appreciate its truth-seeking roots in Christianity, driven by the curiosity requiring us to become as little children. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” is a proposition that comprehends twentieth-century physics in all its mystical richness, as easily as that of our religious experience. Relativity and quantum theory constitute the substance of scientific hope—mysterious flights of the imagination that explore the impossible but produce the possible. The evidence that reveals the possible is seen only inferentially through instruments that leave the traces that link sensible experience with the hoped for.