Faith

I just came back from singing at a gospel concert. It was a religious experience. I was moved--by the spirit, by God, by whatever you want to call it. I felt it, profoundly. Now I'm finishing an essay about allelopathy and the novel weapons hypothesis. It will incorporate critique about the effectiveness of bioassays in determining allelopathy, discussion of forms of allelopathy other than phytotoxicity, and community-specific allelopathy and how that relates to several specific theories about plant communities.

I get a certain number of questions about how faith and science can coexist in my life. There seems to be this idea that science is all cold rationality (and good science mostly is that) and that religion is inimical to realism and hard facts--and religion is, at its roots, about faith, which requires an absence of definitive proof.

But I think that limiting yourself to one or the other is a little sad. I can believe in God while I'm carefully investigating the role of arbuscular mychorrhizae fungus in the invasive potential of Centaurea diffusa, and it will affirm my faith in God.

To me, the fact that everything is is the greatest miracle. Nothing is more spectacular than everything--every living and non-living thing, outer space and all the stars including our own, the earth we live on. It's incredible. A God that can create that is something to believe in.

And it doesn't have to be that, a few thousand years ago, God appeared and, boom!, created the Earth, exactly as it is today, only maybe with less carbon dioxide. And it only took seven days.

A God that can create evolution is something greater to me. A God that is in every natural process, that is every natural process--in gravity, and in the scientific explanation for gravity, in natural selection and photosynthesis (photosynthesis is so incredible) and Hadley cells and everything else--that's what I believe in.

And God is in everyone. Everyone. One of the tenets of my religion (I'm a Unitarian Universalist, and we don't have much but I believe in it) is "the inherent worth and dignity of every human being." To me, that's because God is in all of us. Every day. When I'm driven to create, that's God speaking through me. When I'm working to unravel the mystery that is our every-day life, that's God, too. God is in art and music and teaching and everything else that inspires people, but it's in biology and chemistry and anthropology and particle physics. And every-day things--doing the dishes, being nice to people, waking up every day. Ever felt like you've touched something greater than yourself? Had a moment where you knew what to do, intrinsically, or a moment of divine inspiration? Just a time when you made a difference?

To me, that's God. That's religion. And that's how I can believe in science and all that airy-fairy supernatural stuff at the same time. I just don't differentiate.