“The Science of Easter:
The Story of Doubting Thomas”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
April 15, 2007

John 20:19-31

            Thomas takes a drubbing in John’s gospel. The truly blessed are those who, unlike poor Thomas, take it on faith that Christ is risen. Thomas, though, is holding out for evidence. Unless he is able to experience Christ for himself, he’s not believing. Tssk…tssk... Thomas.  The only evidence a real believer needs is the witness of the community of faith.

But Thomas has a point. Too much is taken on faith – from Jonestown to Waco, Texas, people have been willing to take the word of a strong charismatic leader, and believe pretty much anything – with tragic results.

            This is why the scientific method developed in the first place – to tear down the castle of reality as defined, articulated and defended by vested interests – in particular the church. When Copernicus upset the cosmological apple cart by showing that the sun didn’t actually revolve around the earth, (it was the other way around in fact), he was silenced by the church along with this students. Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk, was burned at the stake, in part for supporting this theory. Galileo was forced to recant of what he was finding looking through his telescope. I mean if you de-center the earth for goodness’ sake, what’s next? Well, we know what was next. Subsequent generations of the scientific minded, who were not prepared to take the church’s word for it, began to question whether the church, never mind the sun, was the center of the universe.  That’s when the church authorities started to feel threatened, and that’s when it could get nasty.  In the age of rationalism, which saw the emergence of the scientific method, any and all claims to truth would be tried and tested, not blindly believed because some authority said it was so.

The church has a long history of holding in disdain the likes of Thomas who want direct and immediate experience of their faith, unmediated by the power structures of the institution.   New Testament scholar, Elaine Pagels, thinks that the gospel of John was written in part to refute the Gnostic gospel of Thomas. Could this have been the same Thomas referred to in this story from John’s gospel? Thomas’ gospel is a series of sayings of Jesus, not in narrative form like the gospels. In them, Jesus is an advocate of direct and immediate experience of the sacred. It promotes a more mystical theology in which those with eyes to see don’t have to take anybody else’s word for it – they can experience the sacred here and now. They are the blessed ones, those who hold out for their own direct experience of Christ.

The scientific method is really rather straightforward. If you want know if something is true, develop a hypothesis, create methods to test it, hand it over to a community of the competent to have a go at it and see if your results are repeatable. Then you have yourself a theory that holds up until someone comes along with a better one. You don’t take anybody’s word for it – you take nothing on “faith”. So Thomas can be considered the proto-scientist of the early church. Unless he touches the wounds for himself, he’s not going to believe, even if it’s best friends who are telling him it’s true.

            So, let’s get one thing straight. There’s nothing about science itself that threatens the church or Christian beliefs. The scientific method is not concerned in the least with proving or disproving the existence of God. As a method of gaining direct knowledge of the world it’s brilliant and we have benefited from it in so many ways. The problem is not with the scientific method. It’s with the historic assumptions of science itself – what scholars have called scientism. Some scientists are limited by their own assumptions about the nature of reality.  Those assumptions in the 19^th and 20^th century were based in a belief every bit as powerful as religious belief – namely, that all reality is material reality. Every thing could be reduced to physical reality, “no spirit it in at all”, as local songwriter Valdy put it.  Spiritual reality was a non-starter. I can’t state this strongly enough. This is a belief system, pure and simple. It’s not science. It’s a biased assumption.

Take evolution, for example. Ever since Darwin the assumption in the scientific realm is that natural selection is a spirit-less process. Darwin himself came to reject his Christian faith, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t gob-smacked with wonder at how nature worked – he was! Darwin didn’t have any theological models that could accommodate what he was finding.  What he saw was that there was an intrinsic adaptive intelligence bubbling up from within organisms and species, but the God of his church wasn’t really involved with the natural world – “he” certainly wasn’t part of it. Alfred Wallace Russell, who discovered natural selection before Darwin, didn’t share Darwin’s beliefs. He came to the conclusion that it was all overseen by a guiding intelligence.  Darwin won out. But what if the science of evolution is telling us how God creates and creates and creates? Cosmogeneis is a word that means, God didn’t just create once upon a time and let the whole thing unfold. God’s continually creating, now and now and now. Remove the assumption of materialism and it’s possible to experience the Holy directly as our own impulse to evolve, and to evolve consciously.

Other scientists are suspending materialistic assumptions and employing scientific method looking for evidence that Spirit infuses and influences the material world. Masaru Emoto, not a scientist himself, conducted research using scientific methods, on water crystals. His findings need to be subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific community. But they are compelling. He looked at frozen water crystals from polluted bodies of water throughout the world, and then tested the impact on the crystal formation of various, ideas, thoughts, music, attitudes, etc. For example, he asked a Buddhist master to meditate in the presence of polluted water to see if it would impact the structure of the water molecule. The transformation of the crystal was stunning.  It went from being essentially a dull lump to an exquisitely patterned crystal.  In each and every case, the water crystals reflected the quality of energy to which it was exposed, for good or ill. Our consciousness is itself a manifestation of the evolutionary Spirit, and when we intentionally employ our self-awareness to the healing of the planet, we do as Spirit.

            You know, the church has unintentionally supported scientism in its predominant theological models. Remember scientism – the assumption that all reality is physical reality, devoid of Spirit?  For hundreds of years, mainstream Christians have been taught that God lives outside the universe, and makes brief forays into this material realm to straighten us out – but then it’s back to the extra-cosmic throne. Most of us have been nurtured on dualism – there are two separate realities, heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, mind and matter, and mostly they don’t have much to do with one another. So, we handed the material/physical realm over to science, but we kept Spirit, but kept it as a level totally separate from the physical. We looked for God outside of time and space. Jesus, our theological models claimed, was the singular incidence of God taking on flesh. But what if Jesus represented the divine blueprint for this spirit-drenched world, not the holy exception.  Our language shifts. We don’t talk so much about the incarnation, but rather incarnation as a verb that describes Spirit always becoming flesh. What if we changed the model and played with the idea that material, physical reality is the outward manifestation of Spirit that is unfolding in an evolutionary universe?  Then heaven infuses earth, spirit animates flesh, and mind can be found within matter.  You can distinguish these realms, but not absolutely separate them.

            The sciences of physics, chemistry and systems theory, are becoming fascinated by what might be called the science of Easter – how living systems wind themselves up in the direction of even more abundant life. What each is “touching into” – as Thomas touched into Christ’s wounded side – is that life systems just seem to know how to organize themselves into more elegant forms. Nobel-prize winning Chemist, Ilya Prigogine looked at the evidence and came up with the term “self-organization”. What he meant by it was that as far as he could tell it this dynamic was a fundamental condition of the cosmos – galaxies, solar systems, our planet, and all of life, including humans, have a built-in capacity for, and bias toward, increased complexity, beauty and consciousness. The intelligence that knew how to do this is a standard-feature of the universe – we all come equipped with this intelligence.

            The late Francesco Varela, a cognitive scientist, came up with the term “autopoiesis” to describe the process by which life at all levels renews itself. All of life from the cellular level to organs, including our brains, has built-in networks or loops that again just seem to know how to make themselves do what they are supposed to do. They will change for example, in order to become more of itself. Again, he noticed a mind-boggling intelligence fiercely committed to becoming more of itself, deeper more beautiful manifestations of itself over time – self-renewal.

 David Bohm, a physicist, looks at this phenomena from the perspective of sub-atomic physics – where Newtonian physics breaks down, and reality is more like a dance, a relationship than discrete bits of reality. He calls it the “implicate order” – another name for this intelligence at the heart of reality, that is ferocious in it’s commitment to new life. Another name for it that crosses a line into the realm of Mystery – he said that there is a “hidden wholeness” at work in the universe, moving through every cell and every life form, including you and me. In other words, something lives in the deep, down of things, that desires maximum self-expression and self-transcendence. I call this the evolutionary Spirit.  

            So, you get the picture. The Easter story is not discontinuous with nature. There is what Matthew Fox calls a “natural grace”.  You can use words like self-organization, or autopoiesis, implicate order, or hidden wholeness. Or you can greet one another in this Easter season with “Christ is risen!” Because, Christ is always rising, always becoming manifest in this beautiful, incomprehensible, mysterious world of ours. And you can hold out with Thomas for direct knowledge of Spirit. Start anywhere, go deep, suspend materialistic assumptions. Start with your own life. Start with the 50 trillion cells of your body that are converting energy to make protein so that you can be here this morning. Or with the awareness that the body you are carrying around this morning won’t be the body you’ll be carrying around seven years from now – it will have completely rebuilt itself from the inside out. You will have undergone a resurrection of the body.  Friends, the Spirit is coursing through our very veins. But don’t take my word for it, or anybody’s word for it. Make Thomas your patron saint – our first Easter scientist.