The Friendship Collaborative: Part 1
August 18, 2008
This interview originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. This is Part 1 of 2. Part 2 appears here.
Pastor Ken Wilson and scientist Carl Safina met in an unexpected way. They’d both agreed to attend a retreat in the longleaf pine woods of South Georgia that brought together evangelical leaders and some of the world’s top scientists. They were responding, in part, to the invitation made by scientist and author E.O. Wilson in his book The Creation, in which he called on conservative Christians and scientists to work together to honor and protect God’s handiwork.
At that meeting, the participants discovered that they had much to agree upon. Months later they released an “Urgent Call to Action,” which stated in part “We clearly share a profound moral obligation and sense of vocation to save the imperiled living world before our damages to it remake it as another kind of planet.”
Though it was the public statement that captured media attention, some of the participants discovered something else at the retreat. They weren’t merely “co-belligerents” uniting to fight a common threat. They liked each other. They had much to learn from each other, but they left as friends, and committed themselves to intentionally strengthen their ties. Wilson, Senior Pastor of Vineyard Church Ann Arbor, and Safina, President of Blue Ocean Institute, learned from and enjoyed their unique friendship so much that they decided to forge “The Friendship Collaborative” to foster more bridge-building between other scientists and people of faith. Their premise is simply what worked for them: the chance to meet face to face and talk about shared beliefs regarding creation and the environment that supports life.
Blue Ocean Institute staffer Marah Hardt conducted the interview for Creation Care magazine. She asked Wilson and Safina to reflect upon the mutual influence and insight sprung from their unexpected friendship.
CC: What have you gotten from each other about your faith and your science that you didn’t get before?
KEN: Carl taught me that love for the natural world could be a mystical experience. I read his book, Song for the Blue Ocean, after working with him in one of the small working groups at the retreat in Georgia where we met. In the book, Carl described experiences with nature that were very much like experiences I’ve had in prayer—mystical experiences that involve a sense of being connected with something greater than yourself in such a way that the ordinary boundaries of the self as a separate entity in the world blur, giving way to intuitive sense. Carl was having these experiences, primarily with the ocean that he loves, and writing about them in a way that built a bridge to my experience as a praying person.
So I credit Carl with being an important part of revealing to me something that is in fact, central to my own faith: understanding reality—the world around us—as a mystical place and as a window through which we can see the real God.
CARL: Science and religion differ mainly in that science demands proof and religion demands faith. That seems like a fundamental difference. But through Ken I’ve come to better understand that science and faith share a desire to know the world, and by so doing, to understand the human role here. That is a fundamental similarity. To me it runs deeper than the theological difference of perspective. In fact, if Ken can come from a theological perspective and I can come from a scientific perspective and we arrive at a similar view of our responsibilities to creation, it speaks powerfully of what we must do. It also speaks powerfully of what we can do together. To me it opens the possibility of saving the planetary world from human destruction. Science cannot save the world. Only a value system that decides that saving the world is important can actually save it. Science can only provide information and predictions. So science and religion need each other here. And Ken has shown me that this can seem a natural, easy, and enjoyable alliance.
CC: What surprised you about each other?
KEN: His intuitive grasp of religion. Carl presented himself to me on first inspection as a no-nonsense New Yorker who perhaps didn’t have a personal interest in religion. He described himself to me as atheist and secular, though he said he prefers the term secular because it’s more about what he’s for than what he doesn’t believe.
I suppose it was my own ignorance of the intentionally secular sensibility that thought of this as a non-religious sensibility. But like I said, I found Carl to be someone I could talk to about religion, knowing that he had an intuitive grasp of the subject. So I think he’s a religious secular guy!
For example, he told me early on that his two heroes were Charles Darwin, for showing us the relatedness of all living things, and Jesus of Nazareth, for his teaching on loving our enemies, which showed us that all human beings are related. It blew me away that he had latched on to the central and distinctive thought of Jesus, and not some side issue that happened to appeal to him. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
CARL: Ken is very welcoming. I was very open with him about the fact that I am secular. When people first meet me, it’s not unusual for them to think I’m religious in the usual sense of equating religious with belief in God. I didn’t want any misunderstanding. But people also often believe that science is the opposite of religion. That’s not at all true. Science and religion are very similar in some ways and very different in others, but they’re not opposing forces. They ask different questions and perform very different roles in society. And many scientists have a strong faith in God. I respectfully explained to Ken that my view on the question of whether God exists had little to do with science and everything to do with the suffering of innocents. Ken really took me by surprise by saying he respected that view. I realized that Ken and I both have bigger fish to fry, so to speak. I realized that after that there were no barriers between me and Ken and that we could really enjoy a very warm friendship and try to maybe accomplish something good together.
This is Part 1 of 2. Part 2 appears here.
For more information on forging surprising friendships, visit www.thefriendshipproject.org. To read about the original meeting and the “Urgent Call to Action” click here.
Carl Safina is President of Blue Ocean Institute.
Ken Wilson is Senior Pastor of Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, MI and Regional Overseer of the Great Lakes Region of Vineyard Churches.
Special thanks to Blue Ocean Institute post-doctoral fellow Marah Hardt for conducting the interview.
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