THINKING SOME MORE ABOUT SCIENCE AND RELIGION…

Freud considered Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы), to be the greatest novel ever written.  Nietzsche said about it, “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”  Einstein said that Dostoevsky “gives me more than any scientist.”  It happens also to be one of my very favorite books.  I’ll never forget when I read it for the first time thinking that I wanted to identify more with the Karamazov brother Alyosha than with his older brother Ivan. Ivan was the intellectual brother, while his brother Alyosha was a young novice monk looking to religion for answers about meaning in life.  By the end of the novel, I understood what Ivan was saying.  I began to see that science and religion must be reconciled in my thinking, that there was no reasonable alternative to reconciliation and respect.  One without the other couldn’t make complete sense.  I guess I was around nineteen when I first read the novel, and I think back on it as if I actually had been in the little room in Russia lit by a lamp listening from a corner as Ivan and Aliosha talked.  I remember thinking how lucky I was to be able to hear what they said, what Dostoevsky said.

But it was an older monk in the story, Father Zosima, who explained something about love and creation that continues to make clear sense to me.  “Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand,” Father Zosima declares. “Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love.” 

The blue morning glory by the church, the butterfly in Balboa Park, and the bird on the melaluka tree outside our house would have delighted Dostoyevsky as they did me today.