FROM GRAND TRUTHS TO GRAND CAVERNS

Two summers ago, I toured Grand Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley.

It is an oasis of subterranean beauty. Awestruck, I walked from one room to the next, surrounded by shimmering red and yellow walls, giant stalagmites, and crystal-clear pools from underground streams. Near the end of the tour, I asked our guide—a girl of high-school age who was probably working a summer job—the approximate age of the caverns.

“Less than 6,000 years,” she answered.

“6,000 years?” I said, incredulous. “But these caverns must be millions of years old.”

“Well, I’m a Pentecostal,” she explained. “And since we believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, the caverns can’t be any older than that.”

“What if you were Presbyterian,” I asked with a wink. “How old would the caverns be then?”

She gave me a puzzled look and said she didn’t understand the question. We left it at that.

I learned later that geologists estimate the caverns were formed more than 400 million years ago during the Paleozoic era. (In case you were wondering.)

Ah, the age-old conflict between science and religion. Of all the religious wars, this one is the battiest.

After all, science explains how the universe behaves. Religion suggests how we might.

Science has given us computers and vaccines, probed the recesses of the atom and the hinterlands of outer space. It is responsible for everything from anesthesia to supersonic travel to our understanding of quantum mechanics. New theories are tested experimentally every day. Some of them advance our knowledge. Those found wanting are rejected.

“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong,” says the Dalai Lama, “then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”

Talk about enlightenment . . .

I’m not suggesting that science is without its shortcomings. You’ll notice, for example, that while science can tell us how to build an atomic bomb, it doesn’t address the somewhat significant question of whether to drop it on someone.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. It has nothing to say about what is permissible.

Clearly, that’s one reason why Einstein remarked that, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Similarly, the late Stephen Jay Gould, an Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and professor of geology at Harvard, argued that science and religion operate in entirely separate realms or, as he called them, “Non-Overlapping Magisteria.”

“Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts,” said Gould. “Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve . . . Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”

Some, however, would argue that science is uncovering so much about Nature that it is diminishing the majesty and mystery of life. And while it’s true that science has revealed a lot about our natural history, it is safe to assume that it will never explain how everything could have sprung from nothing. That leaves plenty of room for science to coexist with a genuine sense of spirituality.

After all, science doesn’t contradict the universal values at the heart of religion. I have never heard a physicist or biologist argue against compassion . . . or forgiveness . . . or gratitude . . . or charity.

Moreover, many scientists and philosophers have written lucidly—even poetically—about the glories of creation.

The astronomer Carl Sagan said, “I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship.”

Eric Chaisson, author of Cosmic Dawn, writes that, “Without life, galaxies would twirl and stars would shine, but no one would appreciate the grandeur of it all.”

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein proclaimed that, “The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”

Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

And the Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend declared that a worthwhile life is not one devoted to scientific achievement, but to love. In the first draft of his autobiography, completed just before he died in 1994, he said love is what matters most. Without it, he said, “even the noblest achievements and the most fundamental principles remain pale, empty and dangerous.”

Clearly, there is plenty of common ground here. If genuine scientific and religious principles oppose one another, perhaps it is only as your thumb opposes your fingers. Together you can use them to grasp the truth about life.

As the German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe wrote a few hundred years ago, “The highest happiness of man . . . is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.”