The Creation Story of Science
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 25, 2010
In setting out to prepare what I wanted to say this morning I was very much aware that there could probably be no greater case of "preaching to the choir" than for a Unitarian Universalist minister to be defending the theory or principle of human evolution in front of a UU congregation. I thought of often told story - which may or may not be true - of President Calvin Coolidge, and his being a man of few words. The story goes that he came home from church one Sunday, and his wife asked him what the minister's sermon topic was. Coolidge's replied, "Sin." "Well, Calvin," his wife persisted, "What did the preacher have to say about sin?" Coolidge answered, "He's against it." I could see a similar kind of exchange taking place with respect to this sermon. "So, what did Steve have to say about evolution?" "He likes it."
Indeed, if I were to offer a point by point defense of the theory of evolution I'd soon be looking at a bunch of glazed over eyes. Instead then, I think we might do well to consider where the continual opposition to, and fear of, this quite self-evident principle keeps coming from. My take, to get it out at the outset, is that the opposition to the teaching of evolution, or the counter-move to offer the concept of "Intelligent Design," does not come from a blanket, anti-science stance so much as it come from the fear of losing a story, and the fear of the loss of a uniquely human identity. Put that on the shelf for now, and I'll come back to it later.
The Evolution Debate itself has been an ongoing narrative almost since the theory was first put forth. And if there's an opening chapter to this narrative it would be in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925--the place and date of the Scopes Trial, where a 24 year old biology teacher, John Scopes, was indicted for teaching for teaching Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution in the Dayton public schools. The prosecution team brought in William Jennings Bryan to lead the charge. Bryan had been recommended, and brought to Dayton, by way of an organization called the World Christian Fundamentalist Association. For Mr. Scopes it was Clarence Darrow for the defense.
The trial, and the subsequent play and movie about it, Inherit the Wind, pointed to, among many other things, a divide that did, and still does, runs through American Protestantism, as well as our broader religious landscape. It's the divide between the moderate to liberal religious folks on the one side--for whom things like evolution, geologic ages, and the like pose no threat to their faith; and the conservatives-to-fundamentalists for whom such things do. In this configuration Mr. Darrow is the hero for his standing up for science and intellectual freedom in the face of religious know-nothing-ism, as embodied by Mr. Bryan. But Bryan was a very complex figure, actually; and that characterization of him is a bad rap. A starting point in gaining some understanding of this ongoing evolution debate would be to take a closer look at him.
William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic Party's nominee--three times no less--for President of the United States. He ran, and lost each time, on populist and progressive platforms that included his championing the rights of working class men and women, labor reform, and a woman's right to vote. He was on the same side of many social reform issues as were our Unitarian and Universalist fore-bearers. He was Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson; and he resigned that position when he could not, in good faith and conscience, support Wilson's decision to take the United States into World War I. Whatever your opinion on that matter may be, you have to give Bryan points for personal integrity and courage.
Bryan was also a Christian fundamentalist. He truly believed that the teaching of evolution was an atheistic assault upon American school children. But he had two other reasons for his opposition. He was concerned and disturbed about what would happen if Darwin's principle of the "survival of the fittest" came to be applied to social policy. If the true story of life on this planet is that of the stronger and more versatile elements of a species surviving at the expense of the weaker elements, and if this is the right and true nature of things on this planet, then why even bother with such things as morality and ethics, and caring for those whom Jesus called "the least of these." Did "the least of these" even deserve to live under the principles of evolution? This was a very real, and a very troubling, question for Mr. Bryan.
This fear, as real as it was for Bryan, has proven to be largely unfounded. While, in the social and political arenas, we still debate the extent to which government programs and policies should be geared to assist those in need; our social policy, by and large, is not driven by a rigid kind of social Darwinism, even as the theory of evolution has become widely accepted.
But there was a third fear William Jennings Bryan had of evolution which his spiritual descendents still hold onto today; and that is the fear of meaninglessness. If the story of life on earth is no more than that of simpler life forms evolving into more complex life forms, with human beings coming out of that process, then our intrinsic worth as human beings is no more than that of a mosquito that we reflexively swat out of existence whenever one annoys us. If we are not God's crowning act of creation, as the Book of Genesis teaches, our lives have no inherent meaning. Absent a Creator God, we are adrift in a sea of meaninglessness. This was the stance of Bryan, and remains that of his religious descendents.
This is what I see as being the issue behind the issue in this seemingly endless debate between evolution and creationism, with this idea of Intelligent Design, along with Scientific Creationism, being among the latest variations on that debate theme. The issue behind the issue is how do we find meaning in our lives, and how do we best live with one another, and what kinds of stories do we tell to help us answer these questions. Having endless debates over who had the "better science," or who can muster the better arguments for their respective positions, doesn't really get at it. That's like a couple constantly arguing over who is doing the better job of keeping the house cleaned up when what they're really arguing over runs deeper than that. Any family therapist will tell you that the first task in working with such a situation is to locate the real issue that's behind the presenting issue, and then go from there.
So how about we think of this creation/evolution issue as the presenting one, with the bigger issue being that of Story. Yes, I said Story; Story in this case with a capital 'S'. I offer this with the idea that we human beings do not live by scientific principles and theories alone. We cannot, to be sure, live without them in this day and age if we are going to survive, thrive and grow on this planet; but ultimately we live by our stories. I've spoken to this in a couple of my more recent sermons and I'm revisiting the point here.
It is the stories we tell that really guide us in our search for a better understanding of who we are, and why we are here, and what we mean to one another. We tell family stories because being a Smith or a Jones or an Edington means something to the persons who bear those names because of the family narratives that are behind them. Those meanings go far beyond just a process of successive procreations.
What gives the citizens of any country, nation, or culture their identity is the story--or stories--of that country, nation, or culture--which is more than just a recounting of a succession of historical events. Whether we have any kind of specific religious beliefs or not, we human beings, each and all of us, have an inborn need to locate ourselves in some greater narrative that tells us something about who we are and the world and universe in which we live.
Beyond the stories, or narratives, of family or nation or culture--most human beings also seek after some greater, some Ultimate Narrative, if you will, that gives us our identity as human beings on this planet, and as creatures in a vast and mysterious universe. This is the Story that religion has traditionally provided. So, the issue behind the issue for the creationists is the fear of the loss of an Ultimate Story, with all that such a loss will seemingly portend. And since we now unavoidably live in a scientific era then the creationists as going to fight for their story on the scientific front with such constructs as Scientific Creationism or Intelligent Design. I'm not going to jump into that debate other than to say that the idea that there is some principle, or some kind, of a "Creative Intelligence" behind the origins and workings of the universe could well be an interesting topic for a class in philosophy or anthropology but not as a substitute for the Theory of Evolution.
Rather than take up that issue, however, I'll stay with this idea of an Ultimate Story; and in so doing just briefly introduce to you a book by Michael Dowd called Thank God For Evolution. Mr. Dowd--make that Reverend Dowd--is an interesting guy. He was very much on the Unitarian Universalist, and liberal Christian circuit when his book first came out two years ago, and even appeared at one of our District Conferences. Rev. Dowd was originally a conservative evangelist, who was very much opposed to the Theory of Evolution and its being taught. But the more he studied the theory, the more he became convinced of its validity.
So he did a one-eighty and has now become an evangelist for evolution, while still retaining a lot of religious language to make his case. He is firmly in the liberal Christian camp. His idea of God is that found in naturalistic theology, which sees God not as a Supreme Being, but as the natural, unfolding process of life itself - the "Spirit of Life" we sing about every Sunday. Dowd also recognizes the point I made earlier about how we humans find meaning and direction in our lives by seeing our lives as part of a larger story or narrative. So what he does in his book is treat evolution as a Sacred Story in and of itself.
His book runs for nearly 400 pages, and I'm only going to cite one passage that largely captures the gist of his position: "Humanity is the fruit of 14 billion years of unbroken evolution. When the Bible speaks of God forming us from the dust of the earth, it is absolutely true. We did not come into this world, we grew out of it, just like an apple grows from a apple tree...We are the universe becoming conscious of itself. We are stardust that has begun to contemplate the stars."
Just stay with those last two lines: "We are the universe becoming conscious of itself. We are stardust that has begun to contemplate the stars." Those two sentences actually explain why practically every religion that exists, or ever has existed, on earth has a creation story or mythology. If we accept the Big Bang which holds that the entire universe burst forth, and continues to expand, from a single entity, then we - our bodies and our brains - are part of the same stuff of the universe itself. We human beings just happen to be a particular "piece" of that stuff (and there may be other such pieces out there somewhere; who knows?) that has become aware of both ourselves and of the universe in which we live.
This is what Dowd means when he says "We (we human beings) are the universe become conscious of itself. We are stardust that has begun to contemplate the stars." We humans are a piece of the universe that has evolved to the point where we want to need to know who we are and where we've come from. In a pre-scientific age we told stories to get at those ultimate questions; now we engage in scientific exploration. And Dowd's point, which I accept, is that for all of our scientific explorations we still haven't lost our need for story; and our need to find some deeper meaning to it all. This is why religion, in one form or another, will always be around.
Using Dowd as a jumping off point then I'll offer the story I tell myself, and that tells me, in turn, something about my highest identity. It begins, as already noted, with what is colloquially called "The Big Bang" and focuses in on how at least one planet in this vast universe evolved life forms to the point where they even named themselves, and found a need to tell stories about how they got here. There may be, as I just suggested, other planets where the same kind of thing happened, but ours is the only one we know for sure of at the moment.
So, to play off a line from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, of all the planets in all the galaxies in all the universe we had to show up here. Here on a celestial body that has brought forth a creature - though a process of millions of years of evolution - who can step outside of itself and ask questions of itself. This creature has even come up with a way of getting itself off its home base, and far enough out in space, to take a picture of its own planet. We can even see what we look like from a extraterrestrial angle.
This creature came to see itself, then, as the result of a creative process - and indeed that is correct. It's now having an argument with itself about whether or not there's a willful Creator behind that process, but we're going to slip by that one and continue the story I just began. Once this creature that got to the point where it could stand outside itself and look at itself and ask questions of itself, it began to create works of art and music and literature - with some such works being better than others. This creature used its powers of thought and imagination to build up tribes and then societies and civilizations. It used these same powers of thought to at least begin to understand the workings of the world and universe in which it was located.
Early on in its collective life, this creature who came to call itself human, also discovered that it was capable of doing some pretty horrible and destructive things to itself, to other creatures, and to the planet itself. And it discovered it could also do some great and wonderful and life-enhancing things for itself as well. The human creature wondered about all this. And it created certain kinds of understandings and agreements among its members that would protect itself from its self-destructive side and enhance its life affirming side. These agreements came to be codes of law and morality and ethics and justice. Sometimes those agreements were kept and sometimes they were broken. Breaking these agreements often cost the human creature dearly; and sometimes, too often in fact, that cost ran up to the point that it included horrible wars and genocides. But so far, anyway, the human creature has managed to survive its own follies and its broken promises to itself, and still survive and grow and advanced in even greater knowledge and creativity.
There is one more thing, one more piece to this creaturely creation story. As the creature that came to call itself human learned more about its own story it came to recognize - we came to recognize - a relationship. It's a relationship that holds that all the various parts of life on this planet are connected to one another, and that each depends upon the other for its life and livelihood. We are still seeking to understand the full meaning of this relationship. We are still trying to learn how we best treat one another as related members of what we have now come to call the human family; and how we best treat, and most meaningfully participate, in the whole chain of life - the whole circle of life - that our planet contains. This is the spiritual challenge and question that we human beings now have to deal with: How do we connect with, how do we experience, how do we most meaningfully and responsibly life, within this circle of life that has brought us to where we now are?
Well, that's the story that gives at least the human life I'm trying to live its meaning. It is not a story that neatly provides answers in some cleanly packaged way. It does not explain, again in some neatly packaged way, some of the terrible personal tragedies that befall us; nor does it explain some of the personal demons that many of our fellow human beings - and even ourselves at times - have to do battle with. It just means that we have to find ways of standing with one another in love and compassion when such tragedies and demons overtake us at times.
But it is a story that hopefully points us in a good and positive direction in seeking at least partial answers to ultimate questions; knowing that our knowledge is incomplete and will still be incomplete when the lives we've been given are no longer ours to live. Much of this story remains in the realm of mystery and wonder, and we continue to be invited to probe that realm. Whether or not there is some Great Willful Purpose - with a capital 'P' behind this story is part of the mystery of it. We cannot know for sure. For myself, I'll just live with the story and continue to see whatever mysteries may yet be revealed.
I'll close with this: The story I've told, and which I'm sure most of you could tell your own variation on it, places us human beings within a larger and ever-ongoing chain or circle of life rather than seeing us as the final, crowning, and end result of a time line. It is within this chain or circle that we affirm our worth and dignity, and extend that worth and dignity to our fellow human beings. It is within this chain that we search for ways to show compassion for all creatures with whom we share a relationship. It is within this chain that we keep searching for ever deeper ways of knowing what our interdependence means and who and what it continues to call us to be.
Finally, while this story is told entirely within the confines and workings on the natural world and universe - which I believe is the only reality we have - I still find a certain miraculous quality about it. It is the miracle of existence, and the miracle of our ability to know and experience existence. It is the miracle of which the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh writes in this passage with which I'll close:
"I like to walk along on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such moments existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk on either water or thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle we don't recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle."
Stephen D. Edington
April 25, 2010
