Atheists, Fundamentalists, and Evolution

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

February 20, 2011

 

Centering Thought: "There is no creation story anywhere in the world that can exceed the wonder of an epic tale that teaches us that we, in truth, are made of stardust."  -- Connie Barlow

Readings:  Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell, New York:  Harper Perennial, 1988, #25

There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

It flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all things.

The Tao is great.

The universe is great.

Earth is great.

Man is great.

These are the four great powers.

Man follows the earth.

Earth follows the universe. The universe follows the Tao. The Tao follows only itself.

Selections from Genesis 1:1-2:4a, trans. Robert Alter, New York:  W.W. Norton, Inc, 1996

[Gen. 1:1] When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness…. And it was evening and it was morning, first day. And God said, "Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let it divide water from water…." and so it was…. -- second day. And God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear," and so it was….  And the earth put forth grass, plants yielding seed of each kind, and trees bearing fruit that has its seed within it of each kind, and God saw that it was good. -- third day. And God said, "Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night…." And so it was…. And God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, fourth day. And God said, "Let the waters swarm with the swarm of living crea­tures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens." And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind, and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth." And it was evening and it was morning, fifth day. And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind. And so it was. And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of every kind and crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good.

And God said, "Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness….

And God created the human in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.

And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multi­ply and fill the earth and conquer it, and hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth…."  And God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good. And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.

Then the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their array.  And God completed on the seventh day the work He had done, and He ceased on the seventh day and hallowed it, for on it He had ceased from all His work that He had done.  This is the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

Sermon

A young man seeking ancient wisdom traveled to the far ends of the earth to consult a holy man about the meaning of life. “The world,” the sage said, “lies on four columns which are supported by four enormous elephants.” “On what, Wise One, do the elephants stand?” asked the student. “The elephants,” the sage replied, “stand on the back of the great cosmic turtle.” The conversation continued: ^“But, Master, on what does the cosmic turtle stand?” “The cosmic turtle stands on the back of an even greater turtle.”  “Yes, Teacher, but on what does the greater turtle stand?” “On the back of a yet greater turtle.” “But Sir, on what does that turtle stand?” “On the back of an even greater turtle.” “And on what ...” “Listen, Buster, it's turtles all the way down.”[i]

The most familiar translations of the book of Genesis in the Jewish Bible begin with the words, “In the beginning, God created.”  The “beginning,” the point before which nothing was and nothing happened.  The translation by Robert Alter which we read this morning starts instead with the words, “When God began to create.”  “When,” a time within a sequence of events in which we can imagine a “before” and an “after.”  Alter’s translation follows the commentaries of a number of medieval rabbis, who noted that “when” opened up the prospect that something might have happened before the creation, before the “beginning.” We learn that when God began, the earth was “welter and waste” or, in the more familiar translation “void and without form.”  Where did that unformed matter come from, anyway? The rabbis pointed out that the first letter of Genesis opened toward the rest of the text; and they concluded that whatever might have come before, it was God’s business, not ours.  But curious minds will inquire.

We want to know where we come from.  From early childhood, we begin to wonder where we come from, where we were before we were born, what came before us. We want to know what our ancestors were like, where they came from, and so on all the way back to the beginning of our ancestors.  And before that beginning, what was there then?  We learn different stories about what happened right after the beginning; in our Judeo-Christian tradition, the most familiar story of our very first ancestors is the tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the story that comes right after the creation story we read from this morning.  The most striking thing about both of these stories at the beginning of Genesis is that God intervened directly to bring human beings into existence, either by speaking or by literally making the very first human being from the dust of the earth and breathing life into that being.

These stories enable us to make sense of the endless series of questions taking us back before we were born, before our parents were born, and their parents and so on back to our origins at the hands of the great creator.  The primary function of these stories is not to tell us literally what happened, but to tell us that we are the intended products of God’s will, and that we and the whole earth were created to be good.  Indeed, after God creates human beings and all the creating has been done, God pronounces it “very good.”  These are stories that give our lives meaning, even if they never happened exactly that way.  We may call these stories “myths,” not in the reductive sense that they are untrue or never happened, but in the much richer sense that they provide us with a lens through which we can anchor a sense of purpose in our lives, through which we can explain where we come from, what we are here for, and where we are going. In these stories, we are literally called into being by the source of everything, by God.

There are other accounts from other parts of the world that tell analogous stories about how everything came to be.  Thus, our reading from the Tao Te Ching from the Chinese tradition traces the beginning back to the Tao:  “The Tao follows only itself.”  These stories are not as compelling to us because they are not our stories, and we are less hesitant to label these stories as myths in the reductive sense that they seem untrue to us.

There is another story that has been developed over generations of scientific inquiry, a story that places human beings into a much more complex line of descent that starts, like the stories in Genesis, at the beginning.  This beginning, though, stretches back billions of years to the first event in the universe we know, when all matter was contained in a tiny space and then exploded to create all of the galaxies, the stars, and eventually our own earth.

Our contemporary cosmologies teach us that the universe started with such a big bang.  A lovely and compelling explanation, a wonderful image of the very beginning of all that is, some 10 to 20 billion years ago.  What a sight that would have been!  But a subversive question arises in our minds.  What came before the big bang?  Where did all of the stuff that participated in the big bang come from?  Might it have come from the collapse of a prior universe into a black hole, a universe which itself came into being from its own big bang?  Might there have been big bangs all the way down?

Over the centuries, this scientific story has become more complex, overthrowing the ancient idea that our earth is the center of the solar system, that our galaxy is at the center of the universe, and that only divine creation could account for how this wondrousness came to be.  Darwin’s theory of evolution extends this account of development over millions of years to all of life on earth, accounting for how the most primitive life forms developed over eons of time into our own human species.  The most striking difference between this story and the stories of Genesis is that it doesn’t give us the assurance that we human beings are special, a product of the direct intervention of God in the universe and, as God said with satisfaction at the end of God’s creating, that we and the earth are “very good.”

Why has the theory of evolution been such a flashpoint in the conflict between science and religion over the 150 years since Darwin propounded it?  Why is it so hard to teach this unifying theory at the heart of the science of biology in our high schools?  A recent survey of high school biology teachers found the following results:

The majority of high-school biology teachers don't take a solid stance on evolution with their students, mostly to avoid conflicts, and fewer than 30 percent of teachers take an adamant pro-evolutionary stance on the topic, a new study finds. Also, 13 percent of these teachers advocate creationism in their classrooms.[ii]

We don’t find this reluctant to teach other scientific theories to students in our public schools.  No teacher would advocate the idea that the earth is flat, even though that was the belief of those who wrote the book of Genesis.  Newton’s theory of gravitation passes without particular notice or opposition in the teaching of physics, nor is Einstein’s theory of Relativity especially controversial, and none of these scientific theories are attacked as being “only a theory.”  What is it about the theory of evolution that sticks in the craw of so many parents and teachers and believers?

One of the oldest arguments against the theory is that insults our ancestors.  Who wants to believe that our most ancient ancestors were mere animals, that our most sophisticated mental faculties are the product of chance?  What child among us doesn’t bridle at the playground insult, “Your mother’s a blankety blank!”  (You can fill in the blanks.)  There is the further problem that the theory overthrows the notion that human beings are special, the particular product of divine intent.  Just as the earth has lost its place as the center of the universe, human beings, according to this theory have lost their place as the crown of creation and master of all.  Finally, there is the problem of meaning.  If our lives are the product of a series of accidents, what do they have?  Why are we here, and what is our destiny?

These are understandable and difficult questions.  I believe that one of the reasons the theory of evolution has been such a hard sell is that scientists themselves have overreached its implications and triumphantly proclaimed the death of faith as a result of their increasing understanding of the mechanisms through which life has developed.  Thus Edward O. Wilson, a leading biologist at Harvard University, asserts, “that the tendency to believe in God could be explained by natural selection.”  He continues,

If religion… can be systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution, its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever.[iii]

The problem with this conclusion is suggested by Kenneth Miller in his book Finding Darwin’s God:

What Wilson never seems to grasp is that science, being also a product of evolutionary forces shaping the human brain, could be discredited by exactly the same logic.  If he can explain away a believer’s faith as a product of evolutionary forces, that believer can turn around and do exactly the same thing, attributing Wilson’s lack of faith to the pressures and demands of evolution on his brain…. That evolution helped to create our capacities for both faith and science is undeniable.  To maintain that either is thereby invalidated fails the test of logic.[iv]

Beginnings recede farther and farther beyond our knowledge even as we fill in more and more of the blanks about what came after the beginning.  Darwin himself concludes On the Origin of Species with this sentence:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been, and are being evolved.[v]

Maybe it really is turtles all the way down, or, perhaps better, big bangs all the way to the beginning, a beginning which is and will remain ultimately unknowable.  And so we find ourselves always in the middle, between the ultimate unknown that comes before us and the ultimate unknown that comes after us.  We are meaning-making creatures; we wish we could penetrate to the beginning of everything and explain everything, but we can’t.  We are the ones, each of us, who must make the meaning of our own lives.  We don’t need to deny the intricacies of our descent or the reality of faith to find meaning and above all to make meaning.  There is grandeur to our living right here in the middle.

Mary Oliver, from her recent book of poems Red Bird, “Another Everyday Poem:”

Every day

  I consider

  The lilies –

      How they are dressed—

 

And the ravens—

  How they are fed—

    And how each of these

      is a miracle

of Lord-love

  and of sorrow—

    for the lilies

      in their bright dresses

 

cannot last

  but wrinkle fast

    and fall,

      and the little ravens

 

in their windy nest

  rise up

    in such pleasure

      at the sight

 

of fresh meat

  that makes their lives sweet—

    and what a puzzle it is

      the such brevity—

 

the lavish clothes,

  the ruddy food—

    makes the world

      so full, so good.[vi]

May we live in that goodness, may we give our lives to that goodness, and may we spread it everywhere our steps may take us.

So may it be, and Amen.

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