“RELIGIOUS NATURALISM”

An Earth Day Sermon

By the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, April 26, 2009

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

From William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey” (1798)

Nature never did betray
 The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
 Through all the years of this our life, to lead
 From joy to joy: for she can so inform
 The mind that is within us, so impress
 With quietness and beauty, and so feed
 With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
 The dreary intercourse of daily life,
 Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
 Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
 Is full of blessings. 

Here’s a comment ministers hear once in a while – probably Unitarian Universalist ministers more than most others. In some setting outside the church, you engage in a conversation with someone who tells you,

“I don’t go to church these days, because I find my spirituality in communing with nature. Spending Sunday morning hiking in the forest is like being in a great Cathedral, as far as I’m concerned.”

My verbal response would be affirming, telling them I know what they mean. They can’t see my thoughts, however, where inwardly I’m rolling my eyes and wondering what kind of guilt they must have if they think they need to explain to me why they don’t attend church. I didn’t ask them in the first place, after all, and I don’t even care one way or the other, but surely they felt a need to justify themselves to me.

I heard this “nature-is-my-church” confession more often when I was living in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it is easier to get away with there. But I’ve also heard it here in Indiana. My favorite story from the Northwest was when I was serving on the city’s ACLU board. Another board member, a retired professor, told me he was a Unitarian and had been a long-time member of the church I served, but he stopped attending when he discovered “hang-gliding.” For those who may not know what hang-gliding is, it’s when someone jumps off the top of a mountain while holding on to a big kite. Now, he told me, every Sunday he goes hang-gliding. When he told me this, I guessed his age to be early seventies. I was impressed that he was risking his life rather than attend church. And at least his confession was told without an undertone of apology. I appreciated that, and we became friends.

In a sense, what I am talking about today, in celebration of Earth Day, is a variation on this “nature-as-church” theme. I am going to discuss a school of religious thought known as “Religious Naturalism.” As I was preparing the sermon this week, I realized how appropriate it was to have given a series of sermons on Eastern religions, and speaking last Sunday about Taoism. Taoism is fundamentally a view that life should be lived in harmony and in accordance with the flow of nature. In some ways, Religious Naturalism is a Western version of Taoism.

In explaining Religious Naturalism, I’ll begin with the “naturalist” part. Religious Naturalists believe that nature is ultimate. Any truth we are ever going to discover, and meaning in life we are ever to uncover, are revealed to us through nature. This view expressly rejects any suggestion of the “supernatural.” There is nothing that transcends nature. That’s a beginning point, but don’t rest your mind there too long. The idea of “naturalism” is modified with the idea of religion. They deny the supernatural, but they find nature itself contains all the necessary elements of religion.

There are many religious concepts that are compatible with a naturalist view of things. The word “sacred,” for example, is appropriate in understanding how we experience natural phenomena. Understanding our role within nature fills us with a sense of awe and wonderment. Of course there remains a great deal of mystery in the universe – the more we understand how nature works the more we realize how much of it remains veiled and beyond our understanding. But acknowledging and honoring the mysteries in nature does not mean that those mysteries are “supernatural,” or beyond the works of natural law. We can embrace a religious sense of awe and wonder at the mystery we encounter, without labeling it as somehow an exception to all that is nature.

Jerome Stone is one of the current advocates for Religious Naturalism and has written several books and dozens of articles on the subject. He strongly believes that the idea of “sacred” or even “divine” is not exclusive to supernatural religion. He defines “the sacred” in terms of any experience with overriding importance, which is outside our own control, and we treat with respect. Under this definition, witnessing the birth of a child is sacred, the coming of spring each year is sacred, and feeling love is sacred.

The religious concept of “grace” has a rightful place in Religious Naturalism. It recognizes that each one of us is a very minor part of the vast cosmic reality, and that the cosmos somehow can still bestow on us great joy and blessings. Stone writes that Religious Naturalists have “a greater sense that we are not masters of our fate, that we need to recognize the worth of, to nurture and be nurtured by, this worldly grace and judgment.” This sense of grace is captured in Wordsworth’s lines about nature, that “all which we behold is full of blessings.”

Dr. Ursala Goodenough, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is another strong advocate of Religious Naturalism. From her study of biology, she looks in awe especially about how interrelated we are with all life that came before us, and all life around us and after us. What evolution tells us about us, she says, is the “deep interrelatedness, our deep homology, with the rest of the living world.”

The root meaning of the word “religious” is “to bind together,” or to make connection, as in real relationship. To the extent that this sense of connection to that which is ultimate is the real meaning of religion, nothing could express that more profoundly than the story of genetic passage – an unbroken chain of relations from the first primordial cell life to the primitive reptiles, and all the way to you and me. An unbroken thread of relationships. Goodenough says it this way:

“Now we realize that we are connected to all creatures. Not just in food chains or ecological equilibria. We share a common ancestor. We share genes for receptors and cell cycles and signal-transduction cascades. We share evolutionary constraints and possibilities. We are connected all the way down.”

“You want a miracle?” She seems to say. Look at yourself. The possibilities of your unique genetic make-up are spectacularly infinitesimal. No miracle can come close to the miracle of you. “I have come to understand,” she writes, “that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence.”

So what is the proper response to this reality? It is what most religions do – to celebrate. To celebrate our place in the universe, to give thanks for the joy and blessings we receive from natures. And while we are celebrating, it is also true, as is true of all religion, that our understanding leads us down the road of ethical commitment. Here is Goodenough again:

“If we can revere how things are, and can find a way to express gratitude for our existence, then we should be able to figure out, with a great deal of work and good will, how to share the Earth with one another and with other creatures, how to restore and preserve its elegance and grace, and how to commit ourselves to love and joy and laughter and hope.”

Let me return for just a moment to the religious notion of miracle. Again, in traditional religious thought, a “miracle” is defined in terms of the supernatural, something that happens in violation of natural law. But there is another way of understanding miracles, and that was identified by Emerson a century and a half ago in his essay on “Nature.” We have been talking about finding the sacred in nature. Listen to Emerson speak of stars.

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible, but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.”

Nothing could better illustrate the concept of “Religious Naturalism” than Emerson’s observation about stars. Elsewhere, Emerson made this comment: “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”

Religious Naturalism is often called a “Big Tent” view. Part of the reason is that under that big tent can be found theists and atheists, agnostics and mystics, and humanists. The premise of naturalism is that nature is all there is, rejecting any appeal to supernatural events or causes.

One common and traditional view of God is that of a “supernatural” being, a kind of divine father-figure who, as creator of everything, transcends nature, is outside of nature’s realm, and therefore “super-natural.” That is not, however, the only way people have traditionally viewed the idea of a divine presence. The naturalistic view of God goes back at least to Benedict Spinoza, the 18^th century Dutch philosopher who startled Enlightenment Europe by speaking of God in terms of natural laws. From then until now, significant scientific thinkers, including Einstein, for example, embraced this idea of God in nature. Einstein spoke specifically about his acceptance of what he called “Spinoza’s” God of nature, while rejecting the traditional idea of an anthropomorphic personalized God as a Father writ cosmically large. This long tradition includes the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who said succinctly, “I believe in God, but I spell it “N-A-T-U-R-E.”

But also within the “big tent” of Religious Naturalism are found plenty of people who object to using God-language to describe the religious inspiration found in nature. The word “God” for them is too burdened with heavy stereotypes of supernaturalism, and isn’t helpful.

What is refreshingly different, though, about the Religious Naturalism school, is that either side – theist and non-theist – accepts the position of the other as legitimate, even if different from their own. Both claim that religion is not connected with some supernatural source, and that our relationship with nature inspires profound religious, spiritual, and ethical responses. Both consider scientific inquiry to be a sacred act of discovery. Yet those who find no justification for attaching the word “God” to that sacred aspect of nature seem not to have some strong objection to those who find the word meaningful. Nor do the theists disapprove of those who find nothing helpful about thinking of that sacred element of nature as “God.”

I wish to say a few words about the relationship of the tradition of religious humanism with Religious Naturalism. This church has a long and solid history, a proud legacy steeped in the humanist view of life. From our beginnings in 1903, ministers of All Souls have been part of the humanist movement. Most ministers, beginning with Frank Wicks and Burdette Backus, have been signatories of the Humanist Manifestos of either 1933 or 1973. Humanism is itself a naturalist view, and some wonder what may be the difference between Religious Naturalism and Religious Humanism.

While both traditions are certainly compatible, one clear difference is that traditionally the humanist tradition has place human beings at the center of social and ethical concern. Any institution or cultural practice or pursuit, the humanist tradition has declared, should be for the betterment of humanity. Period.

Religious Naturalism more clearly places nature on the pedestal that humanists have put human beings. The advances of science, through both biology and physics, has served to demonstrate not only how closely linked we are with nature, but that we humans are simply one branch of a seemingly endless natural cosmos. Religious Naturalists are more inclined to see humanity as part of, rather than the pinnacle of, the creation and the universe.

Many in the humanist movement have recognized Religious Naturalism to represent the future of those values that humanists affirm. Since both embrace a naturalism that rejects supernaturalism, there is much that is in common between the two views. William Murry, a UU minister who has been a major voice for the humanist movement, and a former president at the Meadville seminary, has embraced both, and affirms what he has been calling a “Humanistic Religious Naturalism” – the blending of both traditions.

One other difference between the two may be what I mentioned before about the theist and the non-theist, those who find God-language appropriate and those who do not. There has probably been more ink used in humanist writing to debate this issue than any other. In many ways, it became the litmus test for religious humanism. Religious Naturalists have agreed to disagree, and this, for them, no longer dominates the discourse.

Einstein, who held strongly to humanist values but cared little for debate about God-language, was unimpressed by such debates. In an essay on his religious views, he spoke of those who attacked him from both sides of the “God” debate, beginning with the theists who longed for him to accept their supernatural view. He wrote:

“I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are (also) the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are creatures who – in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’ – cannot bear the music of the spheres.

“The music of the spheres.” That metaphor for the harmony of nature has a long and distinguished past. But it shares the spirit of Religious Naturalism. There is in nature a stunning harmony, and stirring inspiration, a sacred sense of reverence that we can discover and can shape our religious life. It has both a spiritual and an ethical imperative for us. Another adherent of Religious Naturalism, P. Roger Gillete, give this summary:

[Religious Naturalism] “takes the findings of modern science seriously, and thus is inherently naturalistic. But it also takes the human needs that led to the emergence of religious systems seriously, and thus is also religious. It is religious. . . in that it seeks and facilitates human reconnection with one's self, family, larger human community, local and global ecosystem, and unitary universe (…) Religious reconnection implies love. And love implies concern, concern for the well-being of the beloved. Religious naturalism thus is marked by concern for the well-being of the whole of nature. This concern provides a basis and drive for ethical behavior toward the whole holy unitary universe.”

I think Gillete identifies why love is so often associated with religion. Religion is about being connected, feeling connected, with others, or even with life itself. When our youth sang their Earth Day song earlier, they sang that “Love Can Build Anything,” which is the point. As Gillete said, “religious connection implies love. And love implies concern. Religious concern provides a basis and concern for the ethical behavior toward the whole holy unitary universe.”

In practical terms, it is indisputable that the future heath and survival of the human species depends on our ability to change our relationship with nature. Wholesale pollution of air and water is nothing short of suicide for the human species. Dependence on resources that are quickly being used up is self-destructive behavior on our part. There exists an overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is happening, and it will destroy us, and the environment around us, unless we find ways to change direction. For simple practical reasons, we must learn to be less domineering of nature and, like Taoist philosophy, find more ways to “befriend” it.

That is all in practical terms. In spiritual terms, we hunger for a religious perspective that is in harmony with, rather than antithetical to, scientific wisdom. We need the kind of inspiration, wonder, sense of mystery, and respect for the sacred that is intrinsic in the nature that surrounds us.

Over the ages, we have longed for that which can fill us with both meaning and inspiration. What we have been seeking has been – proverbially – right before our eyes. If and when we can embrace nature as not just something to live with, but something that fills us with awe and reverence, then we can blend the practical and the spiritual, the moral and the inspirational, then we can share with enthusiasm the spirit of the poet in reflecting on nature, and declare with Wordsworth:

Nature never did betray
 The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
 Through all the years of this our life, to lead
 From joy to joy: for she can so inform
 The mind that is within us, so impress
 With quietness and beauty, and so feed
 With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
 The dreary intercourse of daily life,
 Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
 Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
 Is full of blessings. 

READING from Rev. Bill Murry,

“Humanistic Religious Naturalism”

sermon at River Road UU Church, April 30 2006.

Religious naturalism not only insists that the natural universe is ultimate. It also finds religious meaning in nature. For many people, myself included, nature evokes some of the same feelings a supernatural deity evokes in the adherents of traditional religion. The unimaginable vastness of the universe and the incredible complexity of life evoke awe and reverence greater than anything I experienced as a theist. As a religious naturalist, I feel wonder and amazement at nature's majesty, beauty, complexity, and power; I feel joy and comfort among its trees or by its waters and refreshed and rejuvenated from working in its soil or walking in its woods; I feel reverence when I ponder the incomprehensible vastness of the universe and the equally mind-boggling smallness of the sub-microscopic world. That the universe is, in the title of a book by physicist Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, beyond my ability to imagine.

I find that the more I learn about the world from modern science, the more I am in awe. That the star Arcturus, which I can see in the night sky, is 216 trillion miles away absolutely boggles my mind; that other stars I can see with the naked eye are as far away as 10,000 light years leaves me speechless; that the DNA in a single cell in my body, that is so small I cannot see it, if stretched out, would reach from fingertip to fingertip of my outstretched arms, and that there are trillions of cells in my body, and that there is enough DNA in those cells to reach to the sun and back a dozen times, these facts fill me with wonder and astonishment. And the fact that the Milky Way Galaxy has a trillion stars, and that the universe contains at least 50 billion galaxies, and thus hundreds of trillions of stars similar to our sun, fills me with an amazement far beyond my poor power to describe. I am overcome with astonishment at the thought that my body consists of 10 trillion cells and that my brain contains about 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. And I am overwhelmed at the abilities of non-human creatures such as the red knot.

Physicist Chet Raymo suggests that we can think of "all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or will ever have ... as an island in the sea of mystery." The sea is infinite, and even as the island expands, it does not diminish the sea's infinite and inexhaustible mystery. In fact, I have found that my sense of wonder and mystery grows and deepens as my knowledge of the universe increases. Even the immense power of nature as exemplified in earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and tornadoes is a source of awe. That nature's power can destroy human beings and human creations is reason for great sorrow, but it is not the result of malice, and certainly not "the will of God," as is sometimes said. We can use our ingenuity and creativity to do all we can to protect ourselves from nature's destructive power, but we will never be entirely successful. Nature is like the Hindu godhead that consists of the creator (Brahma), the preserver (Vishnu) and the destroyer (Shiva).

For religious naturalists living in a natural environment is a spiritual experience, or, as the naturalist philosopher Santayana notes, an object of piety.

“Why should we not look upon the universe with piety? Is it not our substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie from eternity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys.... Since it is the source of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not cling to it and praise it?

Freed from supernaturalism, the religious naturalist can be devoted to a nature that nurtures and sustains. It is not incidental that people speak of "mother earth" or "our mother, the earth." Our ties to nature are deep and intimate.

READING: John Ruskin speaks of that religious dimension to nature in this poem:

There is religion in everything around us,

A calm and holy religion

In the unbreathing things of Nature.

It is a meek and blessed influence,

Stealing in as it were unaware upon the heart,

It comes quickly, and without excitement,

It has no terror, no gloom,

It does not rouse up the passions,

It is untrammelled by creeds...

It is written in the arched sky,

It looks out from every star,

It is on the sailing cloud and in the invisible wind,

It is among the hills and valleys of the earth

Where the shrubless mountain-top

pierces the thin atmosphere

of eternal winter,

Or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind,

With its dark waves of green foliage,

It is spread out like a legible language upont the broad face

of an unsleeping ocean,

It is the poetry of Nature,

It is that which uplifts the spirit within us...

And which opens to our imagination a wonder of spiritual

beauty and holiness.