Science and the Search for God

Review - "Science and the Search for God"As a boy, I often pestered my grandmother for answers to the Great Mysteries - "What came before time," "Who made God," "What's outside the universe." She said I'd just have to wait until I got heaven to find out. Then, she promised, I could just walk up to God's throne and ask him. In other words, don't worry about it.At some point, I simply started putting the two incompatibles - science and God - into separate mental compartments. Not willing to accept religious stories as serious explanations for life, yet equally unwilling to renounce some kind of godly First Cause as responsible for life, it seemed better to keep the matters mentally, and emotionally, apart.The Reverend Gary Kowalski, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont, makes a good argument that such segregation isn't needed. In "Science and the Search for God," the author gives us a gentle and gracefully written book in which he contends that faith and science should coexist on friendly, non-exclusive terms. "There is no reason that science should make us blind to the sacred in its prolific expression," he writes, "God is in the details - the lavishness and extravagance that bless every niche, nook and cranny of creation..."It seems to me that I can live very nicely with that. I view as unarguable that wiggly creatures are our ultimate ancestors. But on the other hand I regard the mind as something far more than an evolutionary happenstance. Kowalski's book suggests the two views aren't contradictory, that the intellect that requires the former can live perfectly well with the faith that supports the latter.Furthermore, Kowalski strengthened this reader's belief that religious faith doesn't require credence in the concept of a vengeful God, one who spends his time calculating the balance between our rights and our wrongs. Instead, we can see God as Life and Love, an altogether healthier way at looking at things we can't add up mathematically, but that a great many of us certainly suspect. I highly recommend this life-affirming book.Jerrold M. PackardAuthor, American Nightmare - The History of Jim Crow (St. Martins Press, 2002)