CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?
April 2, 2006The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
In late January I learned of an effort being waged by Christian clergy to present a united front against the teaching of so-called “Intelligent Design” in science education classes. They were calling on their Christian colleagues to sign on to “An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science”, and to deliver a sermon on February 14th in support of the relationship between religion and science.
I’d already committed myself to a topic for my sermon on that Sunday; but I did sign on to the letter, along with over 10,000 other clergy. Here’s the bulk of what the letter said:
While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority (of Christians) do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information, but to transform hearts.
We…believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought, and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion – two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
Of course, religion has not always been friendly to science. We know how great discoverers like Copernicus and Galileo were treated by the Church; their work was denounced as heretical, and their lives were made miserable.
But over the centuries, scientific discovery has gained a more solid relationship with religion, perhaps in part because the Faith community could say that God gave us our minds to be used for scientific advancement; and in part because the discoveries coming from the scientific community often served to deepen our sense of awe, leaving room for mystery as well.
As religion scholar Huston Smith once said, “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”
Still, there has remained a quiet undercurrent of discord between religion and science, and that discord has definitely gained strength under the current White House administration. “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau characterized it in a recent strip, where he shows a student puzzling over his science studies. “Drat!” the student exclaims; “These pesky scientific facts won’t line up behind my beliefs!”
“Then challenge them, Stevie!” says a man in a white lab coat.
“Holy flat-earther!” cries Stevie; “It’s White House situational science adviser, Dr. Nathan Null!”
Dr. Null: “That’s right, Stevie, and I’m here to remind you…situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts! That’s why I always teach the controversy – like the evolution controversy, or the global warming controversy…not to mention the tobacco controversy, the mercury controversy, the pesticides controversy, the coal slurry controversy, the dioxin controversy, the everglades controversy and the acid rain controversy.”
Stevie responds: “You’re right, situational science man – I’ll never trust science again! It’s just too controversial!”
But it has been Charles Darwin’s discovery of how life evolved that has seemed to caus the most resistance from people of faith – at least those who look to the Biblical account of creation for their understanding. For evolution contends that all life has evolved from other forms of life, adapting through random mutations.
The theory says nothing about the existence of a god, but it definitely challenges the Biblical account of God creating everything in six days, with humans – the final and greatest creation – given dominion over all other living things. Unfortunately, that account has led to disastrous results as far as how we humans have cared for the earth.
As you know, the legal battle over Darwinism began in 1925 when a young teacher, John Scopes, was convicted for teaching evolution in a Tennessee school. The trial – called the “monkey trial” – caused textbook publishers and state boards of education throughout the country to shy away from teaching evolution until the late 1950s. According to columnist Michael Shermer, it was the Soviets’ launching of Sputnik that led the U.S. to realize how far behind we were lagging in science – that we had allowed religious orthodoxy and fear to take over our children’s education.
Such orthodoxy threatens our schools again today – only now it’s being couched in scientific language, and so poses even a greater threat than before. What used to be called
“Creationism” – the belief that the universe was created strictly according to the story in the Book of Genesis – is today called “Intelligent Design Theory,” and pretends to be as scientifically grounded as the concept of evolution.
This so-called “theory” contends that something as complex and perfect as Creation implies an “intelligent designer” that created it all. Knowing that the teaching of a religious doctrine in public schools would be challenged in the courts – and probably lose – the proponents of Intelligent Design have shifted the authority from “what the Bible says” to “what Science says about the Bible,” as verified by a body of supposedly scientific data.
According to a leading I.D. proponent, “Intelligent Design is strictly scientific theory devoid of religious commitments. While the Creator underlying ‘scientific creationism’ conforms to a strict, literalist interpretation of the Bible, the designer underlying Intelligent Design need not even be a deity.”
And therein lies the dishonesty behind this theory; for one of the originators of it, Phillip Johnson, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley, has been very clear about its objective:
“…to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic – to shift the debate from Creationism versus evolution to the existence of God versus the nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus.’”
It is amazing to me how someone who professes devotion to the teachings of Jesus, can support a movement as dishonest and sinister as Intelligent Design. But many people apparently do.
The simple and rather obvious truth is that the theory of Intelligent Design is theology, not science; and it’s not very sound theology at that. Lee Anne Chaney, a professor of biology at Whitworth Christian College, admits that as a Christian, she believes that “God is ultimately responsible.” But as a biologist, she needs “to look at the evidence. Intelligent Design,” she says, “is not helpful because it doesn’t provide things that are refutable….Drawing inferences about a deity is too subjective to be science.”
Indeed, a number of surprising critics of the theory have begun to speak out. Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury announced his opposition to the teaching of it in schools. The Vatican’s chief astronomer, the Rev. George Coyne, said that Intelligent Design isn’t science and should be limited to classes on religion or cultural history.
And last August, after President Bush avoided the issue by saying simply that he thought students should “be exposed to different ideas,” a different White House science advisor from the one highlighted in the “Doonesbury” cartoon – John Marburger III – announced that “evolution is the cornerstone of biology,” and that “Intelligent Design isn’t a scientific concept.”
But perhaps the most damning of the conservative critics was syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, who called the ongoing battles over evolution “so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment….How ridiculous,” he writes poetically, “to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein?”
Nevertheless, for many religious conservatives, the wonders of the creative evolutionary process outlined by Darwin and others threatens their narrow understanding of God and of life, and they do not want their children being exposed to it – at least not without the story they’ve learned in church being affirmed as equally possible right alongside it.
And we’re never going to eliminate that fear completely. Every religion has its orthodox believers, who need the safety of a rigid belief system grounded not in scientific evidence or even rational thinking, but in fear based on the narrow interpretation of sacred scriptures.
But we, too, can become rigid in our worship of science and our rejection of intuitive knowing and faith. Not every scientist is an atheist or even agnostic; there are still unexplained mysteries in the universe, and we might do well to stand in humble awe of them, as well as in awe of the wonders explained by science.
Perhaps we need to find new language and new images that can celebrate both the wonders of science, and the mysteries of the universe, and in so doing, deepen our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to that which is larger than our individual selves.
If you’ve read the latest issue of the UU World, you will have learned of the UU husband and wife team traveling around the country to share their vision. Michael Dowd, a former conservative Christian pastor, and Connie Barlow, a science writer, speak of the “Great Story, the 13.7-billion-year story of the evolution of the universe, based on science yet infused with sacred meaning and awe.”
Dowd and Barlow suggest we view Creation as a set of Russian nesting dolls – different levels of “nested creativity.” The smallest level is subatomic particles within atoms, which are within molecules, which are within cells, within organisms, etc. Each level has the power to create new forms of life. The largest doll is the source of life – what many would call God, but what could also be seen as the “divine whole – the ultimate creative reality that both includes and transcends all other levels of reality.”
According to this metaphor, we humans are “nested” within the Divine Whole, and are intimately related to all other forms of life. We are an expression of the creative process which is always evolving, and we can choose to be a creative force in that evolutionary process, or a destructive one. Until now, we seem to have chosen the latter.
But other scientific theories have become tools for new, more universalistic religious metaphors as well. Author Barbara Brown Taylor writes about her “conversion” experience upon learning about Quantum Physics. “The universe looks like a web of relationships,” she writes, “an infinite web, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread.
“Where am I in this picture?” she asks. “All over the place. Up there. Down here. Inside my skin and out.
“Where is God in this picture?” she asks. “All over the place. Up there. Down here. Inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light…, revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is.”
Taylor, Dowd and Barlow are all pointing us to a similar religious vision: The oneness of all life; that “interdependent web of existence” we affirm in our 7th Unitarian Universalist Principle, which calls us to be not only co-inhabitors of earth, but co-creators as well. Grounded in both science and faith, it celebrates the human mind and the human spirit. It calls us ultimately to know ourselves so deeply connected to the earth and every living thing, that we are compelled to do what we can to heal the brokenness – to create on earth a heaven of justice and peace.
“We live in the illusion that we are all separate,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “When the fog finally clears, we shall know there is only One,” and that we are embraced within it.
And so it is.
© 2006 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
