Evolution: The Issue Behind the Issue
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 23, 2006
A little over a month ago we had a very informative and entertaining presentation here is our sanctuary when character actor Gary Anderson offered a dramatic portrayal of the life and times of Clarence Darrow. While his portrayal did include the role Darrow played in the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, where his legal opponent was William Jennings Bryan, that one particular piece of Darrow's life did not dominate the performance. This was rightly done I thought since there was far more to Clarence Darrow's life and legal career than his defending the teaching of evolution in public schools.
The night before Anderson's portrayal of Darrow, however, he offered - here in the sanctuary - a preview of an act-in-progress he's working on for anyone who wanted to come and view it and then critique it for him. The historical figure he's working up yet another portrayal of is, in fact, William Jennings Bryan - Darrow's opponent in the Scopes Trial. As a well seasoned lawyer, a great orator, and a devout Christian fundamentalist, Bryan was the leader for the prosecution of John Scopes for his teaching of evolution. As was the case with his enactment of Darrow, Mr. Anderson did not devote an inordinate amount of attention to the image of William Jennings Bryan that the Scopes Trial accorded him, taking in instead the larger range of his political and legal career.
This, too, was rightly done I felt, and it confirmed for me something I've vaguely known but have never really explored all that closely - namely that Bryan has been given something of a bad rap by many of us religious liberal types. Thanks to his role in the Scopes Trial he tends to get pigeonholed as something of a know-nothing, anti-intellectual guy. But most human lives do not fit into neatly packaged, or pre-packaged, categories - Mr. Bryan's most certainly included.
I will only briefly touch on the life and times of William Jennings Bryan before getting into today's sermon topic itself. He was, putting it mildly, a very enigmatic figure. Bryan was the Democratic Party's nominee for President three times, always running - and always losing - on populist and progressive platforms. As "The Great Commoner" he was a champion of the rights of working class men and women, and an early advocate of labor reform. He was a strong advocate of a woman's right to vote. He was instrumental in having United States Senators elected by popular vote. He was, that is to say, on the same side of a number of social issues as were our Unitarian and Universalist forbearers.
The thing I find most striking about William Jennings Bryan's political career is that he resigned his office as Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson because he could not in good conscience support that President's decision to take the United States into World War I. Imagine that - a Secretary of State resigning to protest a President's decision to go to war. You have to give the man points for personal integrity whatever your opinion of his stance may be. He was not going to pretend to support a policy and an action which, in good faith and conscience, he could not personally stand behind.
Mr. Bryan was also a Christian fundamentalist; even though during the Scopes Trial he wavered a bit on whether the "day" referred to in the first chapter of Genesis was strictly one of 24 hours. He became a forceful opponent of evolution, and of it being taught in the public schools for three basic reasons. The first was that he viewed it as an atheistic assault on his religion and on the religious principles of parents who had to send their children to public schools. In that respect he cast himself the role of "defender of the faith." Since then I think we've achieved a pretty broad-based national consensus that the public schools do not exist to promote a particular religious point of view; but such was not really the case in the 1920s.
But Bryan had two other of reasons for both opposing and fearing the theory or principle of evolution, which are the ones what I want to focus on today because it could give us some insight into why this remains such a passionate issue. I figured that if there was ever a case of preaching to the choir it would be in defending the Theory of Evolution in front of a Unitarian Universalist congregation; so I'm not going to do that. A far better use of our time today would be to look at where some of the opposition to it is coming from, which runs far deeper that trying to cling to a literal interpretation of a set of Bible verses - even though that is what Bryan, in some measure anyway, was attempting to do.
But he was doing more than that. In his mind he was also defending many of the social values, principles, and causes he'd fought for during the course of his political career. His issue was this: If the true story of life on this planet is that of the stronger and more versatile elements of a species surviving and evolving at the expense of the weaker and more dependent elements, what does that mean for social policy? If the right and true nature of things on this planet was the triumph of the strong and the powerful over the weak, then why even bother with such things as morality and ethics, especially when it came to protecting the poor and the weak, because they just gumming up the natural order anyway. This, in fact, is fairly close to the stance taken by Ayn Rand's disciples today; and they look to the theory of evolution as supporting their stance.
Bryan, and his many followers and adherents truly believed that there was a God who had specifically and deliberately created human beings as a separate species like no other. They further believed that this same God had given this special human species a set of morals and ethics to live by. Without those moral laws and principles, then it really and truly was a "jungle out there" in which only the fittest would indeed survive. For Bryan his opposition to the Theory of Evolution was entirely consistent with his political career of standing up for the poor, the weak, and the downtrodden against the wealthy and the powerful. It was, then, his deep fear at some of the social implications of the principle of the survival of the fittest that gave William Jennings Bryan the second reason for his opposition to the teaching and acceptance of the idea of human evolution.
The third, and related, fear that Bryan had in his day - as do his spiritual descendents in this day - was, and is, that of meaninglessness. One of his anti-evolution arguments was that 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 eventually coming out of that process then our intrinsic worth as humans 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, then our lives have no inherent meaning. Absent a Creator God and not only are we without any kind of morality, we're also adrift on a sea of meaninglessness.
To briefly go back a few centuries, this was the same kind of fear Galileo found himself up against when he put forth his discoveries that the earth was not really at the center of the universe after all. The charge against him was that he was violating the teachings of the Church. The fear behind the charge was that Galileo had reduced the earth itself into insignificance. You see, the official interpretation, in Galileo's day, of the first verse of the Bible - "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" - was taken to mean that the earth was the last piece of the universe God created and was deliberately placed at the center of the universe. The Genesis passage does not specifically say that, but that was the official Church interpretation. This idea very neatly corresponded to the idea that the human creature was the last act of creation on earth and was placed at the center of the created order here.
The Church authorities of Galileo's day reasoned that if the Earth is just another planet revolving around just another star among all the millions of stars in the universe then there is no meaningful life to be had here. So strong was the Church's authority that Galileo, for the sake of his earthly well-being, eventually recanted his findings even though in the back of his mind he knew they were still correct. And it wasn't until 1984, just over 20 years ago, that the Church officially acknowledged that Galileo had been right after all. In time, that is to say, they came to accommodate Galileo's findings into their own theology and teachings - even if, officially speaking, that time was around 300 years.
This, then, is what I see as being the issue behind the issue when it come to the seemingly never ending debate of evolution and creationism - with the introduction of the idea Intelligent Design being the latest variation in that debate. The issue behind the issue is how to we find meaning in our lives and how we meaningfully live with one another, and what kinds of stories do we tell in helping us in that search. So having endless debates over who has the "better science" doesn't really get at it. That's like a couple constantly arguing over who is doing the better job of keep the house cleaned up, when what they're really arguing over usually runs far deeper than that. Any family therapist will tell you that their first task in working with a troubled relationship, or with a troubled family, is locating the real issue behind the presenting issue.
So let's think of this creation/evolution issue, then, as the presenting issue, with the deeper issue being that of story. That's what I said - the real issue is one of Story with a capital 'S'. How so? It is because we human beings do not live by scientific principles and theories alone. We cannot, to be sure, live without them in this day an age if we're going to survive, thrive, and grow on this planet; but ultimately we live by our stories. For it is the stories we as a human race tell that guide us in our search to a better understanding who we are and why we are here and what we mean to one another. The reason being a Smith, or a Jones, or an Edington means something to the persons who bear those, and so many other, names is because of the family stories behind them - far more so than who procreated with whom and when. What gives the citizens of any country or nation their identity is the story of that country or nation, which is more that just a recounting of a succession of historical occurrences.
So what, then, is the Story - or stories - that give us our larger, and even ultimate, identity as human beings on this planet and in this universe? This is the Story that religion has traditionally provided. Or for some it's a particular philosophy, or the pursuit of some form of spirituality that gives them their ultimate Story. For me it's a mix of all three; and I don't think I'm alone in this regard. So, the issue behind the issue for the creationists is the fear of a loss of Story, with all that loss might portend. And since we now unavoidably live in a scientific era then the creationists are going to fight for their story on the scientific front, with such constructs as "scientific creationism" or "Intelligent Design." I said earlier that I wasn't going to jump into that debate today and I'm not.
What I am going to at least try to do instead is relate the story I can tell myself, and that tells me in turn what my highest identity is. It is a story that accepts that premise of a multi-billion year old universe (that number seems to change from time to time) that was initiated by an event that is colloquially called "The Big Bang." It is the story of at least one planet in this now vast universe whose life forms have evolved to the point where at least one of its species, who has decided to call itself homo sapiens, needs to tell stories about why they are there. There could be other such planets where the same kind of thing has happened, but this is the only one we know of for sure at the moment.
The first line of this story is a variation on a line we were having a little fun with a few weeks ago in the lead-up to our service auction: Of all the planets in all the galaxies in all the universe we had to show up here. Here - here on a celestial body that has brought forth, in the course of millions of years, and in ways we're still trying to figure out, a certain kind of living creature who can step outside of itself and look at itself and ask questions of itself. This same creature has even come up with a way of getting itself, momentarily at least, completely off its home planet to the point that it can take a picture of itself and see itself in the vastness of all the creation around it.
Yes, I said creation because there is a creative process going on. Whether there's willful Creator behind it or not is a matter I remain agnostic about. Anyway - to pick up the story again - once this creature that came to call itself human, got to the point where it could stand outside itself and look at itself and ask questions of itself it began to create great works of art and music and literature. (Well, some works were greater and better than others, while yet others were downright lousy.) The creature also used its powers of thought and imagination to build up tribes and then societies and then civilizations. It used these same powers of thought and imagination to at least begin ways of understanding the workings of the larger world and universe in which it was located. And this creature told its stories about how and why it came to be here, and those stories changed and developed with the wider ranges of knowledge that the thought and imagination of this creature continued to uncover.
Early on in its collective life, this creature also discovered that it was capable of doing some pretty horrible and destructive things to itself and to the other creatures it shared this planet with, and even to the planet itself. It discovered as well that it could do some great and wonderful and life-enhancing things for itself. The human creature wondered about all this. And it created certain kinds of agreements and understandings among its members that would protect itself from its destructive and life-denying side; and that would also strengthen and promote its life-enhancing side. These agreements came to be called codes of ethics and morality and law. These codes changed as the creature's understanding of itself and its world changed, but the basic reason for the agreements still remained the same. Sometimes those agreements were kept and sometimes they were broken, and often the cost this creature paid for breaking them was very dear - and continues to be very dear to this day.
There is one more thing, one more piece, to the creaturely story: As this creature that came to call itself human learned more about its story it came to see - we came to see - a relationship. It was a relationship which held that all the various kinds of life on this planet were connected to one another - that each depended upon the other for its life and livelihood. It - we - are still trying to learn 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 come to call the human family; and how we best treat, and how we can most meaningfully participate in the whole chain of life that this planet contains. That is the spiritual challenge and question this creature that we are now has to deal with: How do we connect with, how do we experience, and how do we most meaningfully and responsibly live within this circle of life that has brought us forth.
Well, that's the story that gives at least the human life that I'm trying to live its meaning. It is not a story that neatly provides answers in some cleanly packaged way. But it is a story that hopefully points me in the right direction of those answers, knowing that my knowledge is incomplete and will still be incomplete when the life I've been given is no longer mine to have. This, as I see it, is our story since we, obviously, are the creature I've been describing. Much of the 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 behind this story is part of the mystery of it. For myself, I'll just live within the story itself and see whatever mysteries may be revealed.
I'll wrap up with this: The story I've told, which I'm sure most or all of you could tell your own variation on it, places us 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 way of knowing what our interdependence means and who and what it calls us to be.
Finally, while this story can be told completely within the confines and workings of the natural world and universe, I find a certain miraculous quality about it. It is the miracle of existence itself - and the miracle of our ability to know and experience it. It is the miracle of which the Buddhist monk and teacher 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 with 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 either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle we don't even 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 23, 2006
