Focus on religion and science

HER Grace, Antje Jackelén, is the Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, Sweden and was a much anticipated visitor at St George’s Cathedral on Sunday.

She had concelebrated with Archbishop Thabo Makgoba and preached at the Sung Eucharist of the day.

I had looked forward to welcoming Sweden’s first woman archbishop to the service, but for a number of reasons was unable to. However, it was with a sense of excitement that I found myself seated on Monday in a conference room at the University of the Western Cape.

I had come to listen to Archbishop Antje’s lecture on the “Mystery and Rationality in Communion: The Necessity of Religion-and-Science Dialogue for Climate Justice”.

The archbishop’s perspective of the impact and consequences of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods of Western European Church history focused my mind.

She explained: “The ensuing reverence for reason led to a preference of rationality over mystery… concepts such as mystery and divine energies became almost obsolete.”

There is a contrary, curiositysoaked approach to life and learning that was espoused by Jal l ad- D n Muhammad R m , the 13th-century Muslim poet and Sufi mystic. He encouraged a faith-path that interrogated the orthodox formulation of faith: “Keep knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who is there.”

The archbishop, Rumi-like, led us to the facts of fiction reflected in the books of Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. His work, she believes, taps into the Zeitgeist, the spirit of these times, as heavily secularised societies signal a desire for the inconclusive, non-dogmatism of spirituality. This return to the path of spirituality is “often at some distance from established and organised religion”.

Yet while this insurgent quest for spiritually denounces contemporary secularity, institutionalised religion is not let off the hook either. The characters in Coelho’s writings are depicted as experiencing traditional religion “as both anti-intellectual, because it clings to traditions that mirror world views of the past, and anti-spiritual, because it suffocates spiritual hunger and experience by forcing it into pre-determined and licensed patterns of worship”.

The tension between religion and science was lightly underscored by the co-host of the lecture, Professor Sarojini Nadar, in her reference to her experience as a parent.

Her eight-year old son had been given a homework assignment which required him to explore the difference between fact and fiction. He had to tabulate book titles, such as Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, under either fact or fiction.

He correctly listed Long Walk to Freedom as fact. The process came unhitched when he placed The Talking Horse in the fact category.

When it was pointed out to him that horses don’t talk, he protested: “We learned in Sunday School that the snake was talking to Eve and nobody says that is fiction.”

It is often this disjuncture between the fact of reason and the substance of faith that causes many to abandon the creedal bound faith organisations.

My experience has been that many who self-identify as atheist or agnostic have become so after their questions have either been fobbed off or have been seen as a sign of their antagonism to God.

During the Q&A time, a young physics student expressed her angst as a Christian who had been told to bracket her faith and focus on science independently of her religious views.

Archbishop Antje believes the engagement between the rational and the spiritual can be deepened by the accessing of the faith community’s “tried and tested cultural integrity, spiritual depth and moral force”.

The poetics of faith which inform its liturgies, rites and rituals can both motivate and inspire “a realistic hope that releases the powers of imagination and action of which humans are capable.”