Science & Religion

I've been meaning to send this to you for some time, Bush. I've mentioned it a few times in the past, but I never could remember the exact wording. To me, it puts all the arguments about evolution, stem cell research, and the medical science around human reproduction into such a sane and beautiful perspective that I thought you ought to read it.

I'd like to tell you, though, where I first found it, because it seems like such an unlikely place: it was in the rest room of one of our major local galleries, L A Louver--which happens to have been the brainchild, almost thirty years ago, of a good friend of mine. While he started out representing mostly younger, lesser known local artists, his stable has expanded over the years to include a number of international superstars, including the British artist David Hockney. (I doubt that you'll have come across it, Bush, but I wrote the Abbeville Modern Masters book on Hockney's work.) At any rate, the Carl Sagan quotation that I'm sending you appears in a print by Hockney (above,) a tribute to Sagan, which hangs on the bathroom wall at L A Louver Gallery. The text reads as follows:

"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better that we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more sublte, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge."

Beautiful, no, Bush? What possibilities such thinking opens up, for both science and religion! Does it not offer you the framework to say, of stem cell research for example, Yes, the great spirit of the Universe (call him/her God, if such be your inclination) has come along to offer us this unprecendented opportunity to perform healings that once would have been considered miraculous. We have been granted the gift of a medical tool of as yet such unimaginable power, it would be a sin against our divine origins to spurn its infinite possibilities. Let's seize upon this unanticipated gift to improve the lot of those suffering from incurable disease or injury...

Instead, you say, along with your fundamentalist friends, No, no, no! My god is a little god who only teases us with the gift of medical science, and then denies us the right to turn it to good use. Instead, you say, No, no, no! My god is a little god who is incapable of imagining eons of evolutionary development, and can embrace only the concept of a few thousand years. Or, No, no, no, My god is a little, vengeful god whose plan, after creating this marvelous human species, is only to destroy the vast majority in favor of a privileged few.

I honestly don't get this kind of thinking, Bush. I'm with Carl Sagan. If god there is, he/she is a whole lot bigger than those who claim so piously to represent and worship him/her in the form of their own pusillanimous projections.