First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThank God for Evolution!
Brian Shoemaker
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton
October 25, 2009
Year 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150 th anniversary of his publishing The Origin of Species. The topic of religion vs. science has long interested and troubled me – so in light of those anniversaries, when Gary Fox approached me about leading a lay service, choosing my topic took no effort.
I approach the evolution / religion subject with both excitement and deep concern. The excitement comes in part from the newly-published results on Ardipithecus ramidus, the hominid skeleton discovered in eastern Ethiopia and painstakingly researched over the past ten-plus years. Suddenly the human family tree has become deeper and older (Ardi dates from 4.4 million years ago), and our notions about why our ancestors started walking on two legs have to be completely re-examined. Wow! A whole new chapter in our creation story! I read about this research, not just with intellectual curiosity, but with a certain feeling of reverence – as I’ll explain in a moment.
My concern is over the fundamentalist push to censor science teaching in the schools (or most recently to require teaching an alternative so-called “theory” as if it had solid supporting evidence). This reminds me of how the Inquisition convicted Galileo in the 1600s, just for theorizing that the earth moved around the Sun!
What has always drawn me to Unitarian Universalism is that, put bluntly, we’re not required to check our brains at the sanctuary door. The Unitarian side of our heritage has always considered reason as part of and not pitted against our spiritual nature.
Imagine my delight when I read the spring 2006 UU World article about a couple who travel about the country preaching, as they call it, “evolutionary evangelism.” An ordained minister – Michael Dowd – and an evolutionary biologist – Connie Barlow – who present the “Great Story” wherever they travel. The alternative I was looking for! Since then, I’ve had the privilege of hearing Michael Dowd speak in person, and have devoured his book Thank God for Evolution. (Mind you, these two are only some of the most recent to write in this area; Michael Dowd credits many others before him who’ve made key contributions).
I’ve distilled some key points about the “Great Story” here, while trying to keep it from simply being a book report on Thank God for Evolution. Please bear with me – some topics are better served with in-depth explanations, but I can only touch on them in the time we have. If something doesn’t seem to come together, that may be because I haven’t filled in the point enough to make sense. Feel free to bring these up with me one-on-one; I enjoy discussing the Great Story.
First, consider evolution itself.
Here we’re not just talking about diversification of biological species over time, though that’s an important chapter of the story. Rather, we’re considering the entire 14 billion year history of the universe, with all the growth, transmutation, violent destruction, and rebirth that has occurred.
At the beginning, all matter originated from an explosion – the Big Bang, as it’s come to be called. Elementary, subatomic particles spewed forth, and quickly condensed into hydrogen and a little helium. That was all! Eventually some of that gas formed eddies, then condensed, and – compressed by its own gravity – the gas became hot and started to fuse hydrogen into helium. Stars were born.
But it didn’t stop there. Those first stars burned and burned, and finally used up their hydrogen fuel, then collapsed and eventually exploded. The huge gravitational forces in that process slammed helium and hydrogen together to form heavier elements – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, and some metals – and the explosion sent that matter showering out into the void as dust, to begin the condensing process all over again. New stars coalesced out of this soup, as well as something different: clumps, then rocks, then planets – some with atmospheres and oceans, and eventually living beings! That star-stuff had given rise to life!
I’ve oversimplified the process, but you get the idea: all by itself, the universe has become more diverse and complex – and through aging and death, has created the stuff of new forms of existence. Bring this process to present-day Earth, and you understand Carl Sagan’s comment that we are star-stuff, contemplating the stars.
The mechanism (whether in astronomy, geology, or paleontology) isn’t the Great Story, however. We humans are meaning-creating beings – we create the meaning behind all those processes.
This story is one with a clear direction. Simple forms become more complex and diverse. Some die, and from their remains – whether stars exploding dust into the cosmos or salmon spawning and dying to fertilize the soil – new forms come into being. Subatomic particles – atoms – molecules – cells – organisms – families – tribes – villages – nations, and so on up the scale of diversity and complexity we move. Each level is creative, such that the next “level” is more than the sum of its parts. Sodium is a highly reactive metal, chlorine is a poisonous yellow-green gas, but their combination is common table salt! The continuum is much like a Matrioshka, a nesting doll. As a scientist (and amateur engineer) I learned to look within a level to see what it’s made of and how it works. The Great Story looks the other way, to see the direction of all this creation, collaboration, and diversification. What, then, of the level which encompasses all other levels, and is not itself a component of something larger?
That brings me to religion.
We now know orders of magnitude more about earth and the universe than humans did when any of the world’s religions were established. Moses could not have known that the sun beating down on his people as they slaved to make bricks was a huge ball of hydrogen fusing into helium. The Apostle Paul could never have known that Earth’s land masses are huge solid plates floating on a sea of semi-molten rock, tearing apart and then banging into each other over time.
What the founders of Hinduism, Judaism, Shintoism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity did know were their own surroundings. Each of those, and as far as I know all other religions, gives meaning to existence, in part with some kind of creation story, using language derived from the surroundings familiar to those people. Language from some other environment would not give them any meaning – if the culture didn’t know about sheep, how could they relate to the “Lamb of God”?? And in the evidence and observation-based, peer-tested language of today’s paleontology, learning that the human creation story has even older chapters than we imagined – Ardipithecus – gives me no small thrill of awe, as I mentioned before.
A crucial distinction Michael Dowd makes is between “private revelation” and “public revelation.” The public is a language of understanding and reason, observed, tested, and independently confirmed by many (as in the physical sciences). The private, on the other hand, makes claims about reality which arise from personal, often compelling, experiences which cannot be confirmed and must simply be believed.
Recall Rev. Cricket spoke last week about feeling boxed in by creeds, stifled by liturgies, and smothered by top-down unchanging dogma – we have an alternative to clinging to private revelations told and retold over centuries, many of which contradict scientific understanding of reality.
“The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
One part of the solution is to recognize Day Language (factual, testable, public) vs. Night Language (symbolic, meaning-giving, subjective, metaphorical). We understand the story that God molded Man out of the clay and breathed life into that clay as a Night Language rendition of what we’ve learned from the broad sweep of evolution.
Another part is to recognize how The Divine is all around us, and we are a part of it!
In a Mechanistic view (championed in the Enlightenment, the time of Newton), reality is a logical, exquisitely beautiful mechanism, like a clock, that the Great Designer fashioned, put in motion, and then stepped back – and God is outside, somewhere else. Land and sea are not respected, but simply resources for us to use.
In the Evolutionary view, existence is creative at every level, and we are a part of that creativity. Michael Dowd uses several two part illustrations to drive home this distinction. In one of these, part (a) is a farmer, standing by himself. Part (b) shows the farmer digging, while somewhere else rain is falling and water is evaporating, the cow is depositing fertilizer, the farmer is exhaling carbon dioxide that the nearby tree is taking up, the tree is giving off oxygen which the farmer is breathing in, and the field is producing food which the farmer can consume. As an analogy to the nested levels of creativity, think of the Matrioshka: the Divine is no less than the reality which transcends all other levels – something that is in us and all around us.
… it may be legitimate to imagine God as far more than a proper name for Supreme Wholeness, but an immanent, omnipresent Creator can be no less than this. Such a way of reflecting on the divine moves God-talk beyond the realm of belief or disbelief. When I say “God,” I am not talking about something or someone that can be believed in or not believed in. I’m talking about the Ultimate Wholeness of Reality, seen and unseen – the whole shebang – which is infinitely more than anything we can know, think, or imagine.
This is a simple, nuts-and-bolts distinction. We don’t believe in things that are undeniably real. We know them. We don’t believe in water; we are 60 to 70 percent water. We don’t believe in the Universe; we live and move and have our being within this undeniable material and nonmaterial Reality that many today call “the Universe,” but which others have for centuries referred to as “Mother,” “Father,” or “Lord.” This understanding does not, in fact, reduce the Creator to Creation; rather, it elevates and REALizes our sense of divine immanence and omnipresence.
I am presenting a God that we cannot deny. This is a God that we cannot help but experience, whether or not we think of God in such a way, and whether or not the word God is part of our preferred vocabulary. This God is all around us, among us, within us – overflowing with creativity and abundance at every scale of universal nestedness. And we ourselves are natural expressions, children, of the creativity that suffuses Ultimate Reality. We are no more isolated from God than a tree is isolated from the ground upon which it grows. An evolutionary understanding of Reality can thus bless us with a profoundly personal relationship with God.
Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution
This view of the Ultimate makes sense of and enriches every religious tradition – without degrading or excluding any of the others!
That view brings me to spirituality.
Again recalling Rev. Cricket’s sermon last week, spiritual is not necessarily religious, and vice versa. Consider a few of the ideas which the Great Story makes clear in our spiritual life:
If we are part of a nested, emergent creativity – if the Divine is in and all around us – then loving one’s neighbor is a completely natural outcome.
If we understand how cooperation has led to competitive advantage throughout biological time, then it makes sense to respect and work together with those around us.
Understanding the evolutionary legacy in our own brains – what Michael Dowd calls the “Quadrune Brain,” incorporating the Lizard Legacy, the Furry Lil’ Mammal, the Monkey Mind, and the Higher Porpoise – is a way to recognize our own innate, sometimes self-destructive, urges and keep them in perspective. (This is an intriguing topic all its own, but too much to get into here.)
To recognize how chaos, calamity, and death have been the drivers of great creativity throughout cosmic time, we can come to accept death when it touches us, knowing it is a natural and generative part of existence.
Having put evolutionary science, religion, and spirituality into context, then, the Great Story is clearly the Story which includes yet transcends all other stories.
Consider the four gifts of the Great Story.
- It reconciles science and religion, as well as different religions
- It transforms our view of chaos, bad news, and death.
- It broadens circles of care, cooperation, and commitment.
- It evokes empowering this-world visions of the future.
The Great Story may well provide the means to, as Rev. Cricket put it last week, “revisit the value of religion and consider reclaiming some of its power for ourselves.”
The lesson of the Great Story is that the Great Work of our time is to ensure a just, healthy, beautiful, and sustainably life-giving world for future generations of all species – from a place of inspiration rather than of fear.
Note: Additional information, and DVDs of Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow’s presentations, are available from their web sites:
http://www.thankgodforevolution.com/