Evolution Sunday

A Sermon by Rev. Ricky Hoyt

with opening and closing words, readings, and hymns.

Delivered February 3, 2008

Unitarian Universalists of the Santa Clarita Valley

NEWSLETTER BLURB

Our congregation again this year joins with hundreds of other congregations around the country celebrating the healthy collaboration of science and spirituality. The questions raised by evolution are significant even to those of us who welcome the challenge. In a system that creates by randomness, not design, and that chooses survivors by best fit to the environment, not abstract ideals, what can we say of spiritual purpose, meaning, and ultimate goals?

SERMON, “Evolution Sunday” By Rev. Ricky Hoyt

Today our congregation honors “Evolution Sunday,” the invention of a Professor named Michael Zimmerman who is the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Evolution Sunday emerged from a situation in 2004 when Professor Zimmerman was living in Wisconsin. The school board of Grantburg Wisconsin was passing anti-evolution policies. Professor Zimmerman organized a project where he invited Christian clergy to sign a letter supporting evolution as a compatible teaching with religion. He gathered 200 signatures and due to that pressure and other voices the Grantsburg School Board withdrew their anti-evolution policies.

Encouraged by that success, and aware that this issue is a nationwide issue, Professor Zimmerman decided to take his project nationwide. His letter-writing project has now gathered more than 11,000 signatures. Every one of the names represents a minister who supports good science as a companion to good spirituality, and who welcomes the increase of knowledge that science can offer to our understanding of the world.

Evolution Sunday was the next step in Professor Zimmerman’s project. In 2006 he asked all the supporters of his letter writing project to devote some time in their church on a Sunday near Charles Darwin’s birthday, to talk with their congregations about the compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory. In both 2006 and 2007 I honored Evolution Sunday by preaching about science and religion. And I do so again today.

I realize as I address this topic once again that the issue in a Unitarian Universalist church is not quite the same as the issue might be in a mainline Christian church. It feels a little disingenuous to preach as though there were some controversy in this church about science and religion, where in fact, there is none. The religions that have a problem with evolution are the ones that confuse the Bible with science and read the Bible as the inerrant word of God. We don’t read the Bible that way and can hardly imagine that anyone could.

Unitarian Universalists don’t read the Bible literally. In fact that we don’t read the Bible literally is one of the foundational principles of our faith, laid out by William Ellery Channing in his famous 1918 sermon called “Unitarian Christianity.” This sermon defined what it meant to be a Unitarian and was the mission statement of the new denomination that Channing and his colleagues were founding. Just so you know how strongly and clearly this strain of reason in religion goes in Unitarian Universalism hear these words from Channing’s sermon:

“Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.

Now all books, and all conversation, require in the reader or hearer the constant exercise of reason; or their true import is only to be obtained by continual comparison and inference. Human language, you well know, admits various interpretations; and every word and every sentence must be modified and explained according to the subject which is discussed, according to the purposes, feelings, circumstances, and principles of the writer, and according to the genius and idioms of the language which he uses.

We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible. In addition to the remarks now made on its infinite connexions, we may observe, that its style nowhere affects the precision of science, or the accuracy of definition. Its language is singularly glowing, bold, and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense, than that of our own age and country, and consequently demanding more continual exercise of judgment. -- We find, too, that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application.

With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.”

Cool stuff, huh?

Now hear what Rev. Channing has to say about the way other Christians use the Bible. See if this doesn’t also sound like a criticism you might make yourself, and one that is unfortunately as timely now as it was nearly 200 years ago when Rev. Channing first made it.

“We do not announce these principles as original, or peculiar to ourselves. All Christians occasionally adopt them, not excepting those who most vehemently decry them, when they happen to menace some favorite article of their creed. All Christians are compelled to use them in their controversies with infidels. All sects employ them in their warfare with one another. All willingly avail themselves of reason, when it can be pressed into the service of their own party, and only complain of it, when its weapons wound themselves. None reason more frequently than those from whom we differ. It is astonishing what a fabric they rear from a few slight hints about the fall of our first parents; and how ingeniously they extract, from detached passages, mysterious doctrines about the divine nature. We do not blame them for reasoning so abundantly, but for violating the fundamental rules of reasoning, for sacrificing the plain to the obscure, and the general strain of Scripture to a scanty number of insulated texts.”

Rev. Channing speaks in that passage specifically to the controversy of his time with he and other ministers called Unitarians who simply could not find in the Bible any evidence to support the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the Christian doctrine of Jesus being himself the one God incarnate, or the Christian doctrine of the fall of man and original sin that supposedly makes all of us incapable of living lives pleasing to God without Jesus’ help. But his words could also be held up very well today to criticize those who use the Bible to condemn same-sex marriage, or a woman’s right to choose abortion, or the teaching of evolution in our schools. It is, as Rev. Channing points out, not that they don’t interpret the Bible, but that they interpret it in such a way that their interpretation comes out to support the position they already want to take for other reasons.

In each case religious fundamentalists feel a threat from our modern culture. A threat that would destroy their idolatry of the family and the proper roles of the sexes. A threat that would free women from subjugation to their bodies. And in the case of evolution, and science generally, a threat that would undermine the very reason that we invent our religions in the first place, our great longing for and intuition that the universe is a place not just of order and regularity but also a place of purpose and meaning, worth and value, ultimacy that stretches beyond the glaring and frightening truth of our mortality, to say that there is more than just what we can see and measure and experience in this one life.

It is that threat, I believe, that makes evolution such a terrifying subject for fundamentalist religious folks. I don’t believe that the debate is really about the literal truth of the first two chapters of Genesis. Or at least I’ve never understood why those two chapters of Genesis must be taken literally while the same people are quite happy not to take literally so much else of the Bible. I believe the more fundamental problem of evolution, for the fundamentalists, is that evolution posits a creation story that works not on purpose but on randomness, that works not on value measured against divine ideals, but on fitness for the environment. It’s not even so much that evolution removes God from the story, it’s that evolution removes the even more basic spiritual category of meaning. And though I’ve been speaking about evolution as a threat to fundamentalist religion, that loss of meaning should be felt as a threat to any spiritual person, indeed to all persons.

Evolution, and science generally, tells a story that says, to put it bluntly, there’s no reason for you to be here. Nothing in the universe cares whether you appeared at the end of the evolutionary line or not. That you are here is strictly an accident. What you do while you’re here is of no ultimate concern. There is no form of creation better than another, in terms of moral worth. The only real test is survivability and oftentimes the forms of existence that do the best at survivability are not the nicest, or the prettiest, or the most interesting.

Hold that creation story up against a story where God specifically makes human beings, purposefully and carefully, in the Divine image. And then sets us down on a world made just for us and in expectation of our arrival. And then that same power of the universe looks at us and calls us “good” not just suitable or efficient, but “good.” And you can see that evolution may be good science but it doesn’t provide a very attractive spiritual alternative.

I think it’s important when we hear religious folks disparaging evolution, or science in general, that we understand where their pain is coming from. Because I think that there are those of us who feel that same pain. The need to live in a world of meaning and purpose is legitimate and strong for all of us. Retreating to creationist science is not the solution to that problem, but the problem is not insignificant.

Human beings need two things in the world. Or among all the things we need there are two that we have invented science and religion in order to address for us. Human beings seek understanding. And human beings seek meaning. We want to know the world. We want to figure out why this works and what that does, and how this goes with that, and what is the nature of that things over there, and how this is different from that and how this comes to be and what will happen if we do this. Science is a great tool for satisfying our need for understanding. And it’s incredible to me that anyone could sincerely disparage the vast amount of understanding that the use of science has given to our culture.

But we also want to uncover meaning in the world. And I want to point out that for most people religion is not a tool to invent meaning, rather religion is a tool to explain the meaning that we intuitively feel. It’s because we feel that the universe is meaningful and our lives are purposeful, and that it matters to some thing bigger than just ourselves that we work for peace and love and justice, that we then invent religion in order to account for our feeling.

As we move through the world we’re constantly looking to satisfy both of those needs. We want to understand what and how, but we also want to know why and what for?

Science only gives us half of the picture. And people who give too much honor to science sometimes end up concluding the universe is meaningless and purposeless and random and uncaring, because that’s the way science portrays it. It’s easy to forget that science describes the universe the way it does because that’s the only vocabulary science has. Science has nothing to say about meaning and purpose, but its silence should not be read as denial. It’s not just “no comment,” it’s that science can’t even hear the question. The randomness of evolution doesn’t mean that the universe is random, only that if there is a purpose behind evolution it’s beyond the scope of science ever to reveal. Science itself doesn’t say that meaning and values and goals and caring are an illusion, only that science doesn’t have a way of investigating those.

Religion is a help with those topics, and thank God, because we need those things in our lives. But religion, too is only half the picture. The tools by which mystics intuit the nature of ultimate reality are not very efficient as tools for understanding mundane reality. And the general, abstract, metaphorical, symbolic language that religions use in order to describe divine purpose and aims, should never be confused with a literal description of the way things are and came to be. When God created human beings and called us good, that says a lot of important religious truths about the importance of using our lives in a human divine partnership moving our world toward holy goals. It shouldn’t be read as a God in the shape of a human being make a little model of itself out of clay and being pleased with the result.

For Unitarian Universalists our danger lies more in the first scenario than the second. Our respect for science, and its silence on spiritual categories not available to sensory observation and experimentation, lead us perilously close to a denial of the spirituality that science itself doesn’t actually deny. It would be as much a mistake for us to abandon religion and our real need for exploration of meaning and purpose and values, as it is for the fundamentalist religions to abandon science.

We have two needs, understanding and meaning, and two spheres designed to address those needs. But I also want to caution that science and religion shouldn’t be held up as equally important only to be held apart as having no relation to each other. Religion needs science, because religion is not only about meanings and purposes and values and goals, it’s also about an accurate description of the universe, and science is a great help in providing that. Religion shouldn’t be only revelation and visions and trances, as it is sometimes unfairly characterized. Religion should also be, as Rev. Channing said, reasonable. Religious insight that begins as a felt intuition should be scrutinized by all the tools of reason and logic available. And a spiritual intuition that flatly contradicts what can be more plainly observed should be discarded.

And although science cannot be faulted for not addressing religious subjects it has no means to explore, science still in its own sphere has much to contribute to our search for meaning. Our sense of meaning depends on an accurate understanding of the world. Evolution may contradict our earlier picture of human beings as a special creation, but the new picture of human beings as intimately connected with the rest of creation, emerging from the world, not set down on it, and our fate and even our very existence dependent on the nature of the environment around us, provides us data for religious musings on a very different kind of meaning and purpose to our lives. Not a negation of meaning, but a truer meaning, based on a truer understanding.

Charles Darwin is not an enemy of religion. In fact, like all great scientists, Darwin was a hero to religion. Religion is, finally, an attempt to understand all the world, both the contents we can see and measure, and those contents beyond the senses available only to the mind and heart. Religion has a friend in any person who helps us see deeper and farther and brings the mysteries of the universe closer to our lives.

Rev. Ricky Hoyt

(818) 652-7850

RevRicky.com

Rev. Ricky Hoyt	Evolution Sunday - 8

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

KING'S COPIES

2008-04-17

mzimmerm