What does the resurrection of Jesus tell us about the relationship between science and faith? The answer is in the baked fish that Jesus ate in the presence of his amazed disciples. But first, a story.
A few years ago, I was out fossil hunting with my wife and a group of other paleontologists in Northern Kentucky. You may not know this, but the Cincinnati area contains an incredible trove of fossils from an age of natural history called the “Ordovician Period.” My wife, Dr. Kate Bulinski, is a paleontologist who specializes in this period and the invertebrates that populated it. Fossil hunting often involves going to “road cuts,” which are places where hills or other rises have been blasted and dug out to allow a road to pass through. This exposes a wide cross section of rocks and, in some places, fossils.
After a long day of visiting several of these cuts, I remember standing next to one of these tall faces of gray stone, rock hammer in hand, feeling a little sore and weary, as occasional cars on the adjacent state highway passed by the fifteen of us. At that point, a famous paleontologist named Carl Brett, knelt down next to the rockface. He scooped up handfuls of the numerous fossils that spilled off the rock into the dirt: Brachiopods, cephalopods, crinoids, and trilobites. He said, “people drive by these cuts every day without any clue, oblivious to the absolute treasures [tossing gesture] that they are passing.”
Carl tossed them into the air and they cascaded down to the earth. He was expressing a profound sense of amazement, joy, and wonder holding those small fossils of long extinct animals, these invertebrates that lived and died 450 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs, ages before mammals were even beginning to stir on the world. The glory of these extinct creatures reflects the greater glory of their creator, whose eye is on the sparrow as much as the trilobite. That is the message of the baked fish that we heard today.
We see the resurrected Christ holding another small animal in his own hands, a fish. And to confirm that he is not a spirit or ghost, he shows them his pierced hands and feet (as he did last week with Thomas) and as a dramatic demonstration of his physicality, he eats the fish.
In popular culture, we often hear that science tells us everything we need to know about the physical world. It is a method for explaining all of our sensory experiences, the structure of the cosmos, and solving every problem under the sun. Faith isn’t needed here. In fact, at its worst we’re told that faith presents a fairy tale about a bearded man in the sky. A myth that smarter people dispensed with long ago. Somewhat more tolerant types might see faith as a sop to explain things that science hasn’t quite figured out yet.
Religious people can make this mistake, too, believing that religion is restricted to the spiritual realm. That our focus should be on faith and morals alone, and not of things of the world. Taken to its extreme, this can develop into the view that the world itself is evil and that our goal is to escape from the world. Religion, in this view, has absolutely nothing to say to Science, and vice versa. They concern themselves with two incompatible and separate worlds.
That one baked fish destroys this false idea. Through his resurrection, Jesus bridges the apparent divide between faith and science, matter and spirit. Our resurrected Lord does not return to us as an entity of pure spirit, freed of a body. “Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones.” He has returned with a glorified body that has defeated death. And he promises us that we too will be resurrected. He will glorify our bodies, too, and our souls will be reunited with them. Christ is human and God. In the same way, to be a human being means having a body and a soul. We are not angels, beings of pure spirt. Neither are we purely matter, like animals. No, we are both—we are enfleshed soul, and ensouled flesh. And in that way we embody the intersection between faith and science.
In that intersection, we are challenged by what we don’t and can’t completely understand. The limits of our knowledge are exposed. Yet Christ tells us, “Why do questions arise in your heart?” I am here. My presence is proof enough for you. And cause for joy and amazement. I have opened your mind to understand these truths and you will be my witnesses to all the earth.
And so the baked fish tell us that our home is in this world, just as much as in heaven. That we should experience just as much joy as Carl did in those tiny fossils. We should glory in the tools that science and human ingenuity provides: flying a helicopter on the surface of Mars, quickly developing a vaccine that has brought us relief from a horrifying pandemic. It is hard in spring time in Louisville, not to be filled with intense joy at all the glorious flowers and trees and birds surrounding us with glorious colors. And so, as we approach Earth Day this week, let us wonder in the things that the Lord has made. And let us praise the Lord who has created them.
As St. Francis wrote in his Canticle of the Creatures:
Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.
Most High, all powerful, good Lord,
Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessing. AMEN.
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