February 15, 2009 - "Evolution?"

Genesis 1:1-8, 26-31; Hebrews 11:1-3

Happy Evolution Week!
Did you throw any parties?
Fill some balloons and invite guests over?
Well, not exactly, but this is Evolution Weekend, a movement put together by scientists and clergy in an effort to build good bridges between faith and science, the faith we hold – this is God’s world – the scientific evidence of evolution and an earth of great age.

By the way, Donna claims I’m living proof of evolution … in a backward sort of way.
She often says to me, “Tom, you’re making a monkey out of yourself.”

On a more practical level, I had two wisdom teeth excised when I was in college.
“Two” you say? “What happened to the other two?”

The dentist said I was an evolutionary product – some time in the distant future, as our jaws grow smaller, we won’t have wisdom teeth – and why are they called wisdom teeth anyway? And why do we extract them, if they’re wisdom teeth?
Ha! That may explain a few things.

So what’s up with evolution?
On the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, why are we still wrangling about it?
School boards argue whether or not to include “creation science,” “intelligent design” alongside the “theory of evolution.”

In 1925, the State of Tennessee passed the Butler Act which made it unlawful for public school teachers, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
The law did not forbid an evolutionary approach to plants and animals, but only to human origin.

And by the way, one has to ask the question, why has this been an issue predominantly driven by fundamentalism, and primarily southern fundamentalism?
Hold that question for moment – because location is vital: where something happens is just as important, maybe even more important, than what happens.

After the passage of the Butler Act, the American Civil Liberties Union financed a test case, where a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John Scopes intentionally violated the Act.
Scopes was charged on May 5, 1925 with teaching evolution from a textbook chapter developed upon the ideas set out in Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species.
The trial pitted two preeminent legal minds: three-time presidential candidate, Congressman and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and trial attorney Clarence Darrow for the defense.
The famous trial was made infamous by the fictionalized accounts given in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Hollywood motion picture and the 1965, 1988 and 1999 television films of the same name.
Scopes was found guilty and fined $100.
It was not until 1967 that Tennessee repealed the Butler Act, and in 1968, the US Supreme Court ruled that such bans contravene the Establishment Clause because their primary purpose is religious.

When I was a student at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, my Bible professor, Dr. John Bratt, introduced to us an intriguing term that I’ve used ever since: theistic evolution.

Theistic – meaning of God.
Evolution – the process, observed by scientists from the fossil record and other such studies, by which our world has come to be over a period of billions of years.
Theistic evolution – behind the myriad of life-forms, behind the billions of years, in geography and genomes, in gnats and bats, in you and me, the hand of God.

Genesis 2 says poetically that God took a handful of dirt and fashioned a form, and then blew into it the breath of life, and it became a living being.
That’s poetry with a point: We are from the earth … 
This body of mine: my flesh and bone, my blood and brain – from the earth.
Human DNA varies less than 10% from chimpanzees …

We’re all in this together.
Every creature, great and small.

For centuries, the church taught that you and I were utterly unique on the face of this earth, distinct and separate from all other forms of life.
We just arrived here by divine fiat – once we were not; and then we were - just like that, and that’s how God did it.
Ultimately this notion of distinctiveness grew insidious, with the classification of the races - that the white race was distinct unto itself, superior in all regards, and people of color a species less than human.
You can see where this is all going.
The claim of white racial supremacy was at the heart and soul of the British slave trade – buttressed by the teachings of seminary professors and pastors.

Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, professor of theology at Chicago Theological Seminary writes:
This is where all the trouble arises. The idea that human life is continuous with other creatures and indeed with the whole planet is a profoundly destabilizing idea for religious and political practices of dominance and control.
This whole struggle, she writes, is more about politics than it is about abstract issues like religious faith and secularism. In the 200 years since Charles Darwin's birth, this has changed very little.
Darwin knew well … how controversial his ideas … would be. In fact, his ideas might be thought to be more than controversial, they could be regarded as treason. People in Darwin's time could go to prison for heresy because it was seditious, undermining the divine origin of the monarchy.
[http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/susan_brooks_thistlethwaite/2009/02/a_christian_progressive_happy.html]

In the world of kings and queens, bishops and priests, Victorian wealth and upper-class dominance, it was comforting to know that such was all firmly fixed by God himself – that God created the heavens and the earth – and God created the kings and queens, and bishops and priests, and wealth and dominance and racial privilege.

Evolution suggested an entirely different kind of world – a world wherein all species, all life, all human beings, were related.
That life was changing – a frightening concept to kings and queens fighting the revolutionary ideas of change coming from the American and French Revolutions.

In a recent biography on Darwin, we learn how deeply he and his family despised the slave trade … and worked tirelessly to end it.
And how sugar cane growers in the West Indies and American cotton planters supported slavery with the claim that slaves were not human beings.
Darwin’s conclusions – that all life forms are connected was a blow at the heart of the slave trade … and a blow to the arrogance of the white races.

To suggest commonality among all life forms casts a different light on the human venture and our relationship to elephants and dolphins, ants and beetles.
Far too often, humankind has done enormous violence to the natural world, as if we could do no wrong, and who cares anyway, because nature is only a brute force to be tamed and manipulated for our comfort, and the animals that inhabit the world are themselves only dumb brutes, without cognition or emotion – they exist only for food and for sport.

Darwin himself was a dedicated shooter – as were all the upper class in Victorian England … the hunt was a festive occasion, but ultimately, Darwin gave up the hunt – upon finding a dying bird left behind, life suddenly struck him full force.
Never a vegetarian, and never suggesting such, Darwin, nonetheless, began to see life as sacred – all life, whatever it is – and all from the hand of God.

Though Darwin has been vilified and denounced by many, he’s not a monster – but a sensitive man with a fine mind, and when he set out on his shipboard adventure on The Beagle, he wasn’t the first to see the marvels of the world, and the possibility of evolution – others were propounding the theory as well, but it was Darwin’s book, The Origin of the Species that clarified it and brought it to the forefront.

From the moment, I heard my Bible professor use the term theistic evolution, I have seen the two forever linked as partners – faith and science – as Francis Bacon put it: the Works of God and the Word of God!

But it’s by faith that we believe.
Not fact, but faith!

The writer to the Hebrews says:
… by faith, we believe … … a conviction of things not seen.
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

The material world neither proves nor disproves the existence of God.
A thundering waterfall, or the whir of a hummingbird’s wing, amazing though they be, cannot prove that God made any of it!

Psalm 19 says:
    The heavens are telling the glory of God;
      and the firmament  proclaims his handiwork.
      Day to day pours forth speech,
      and night to night declares knowledge.
      There is no speech, nor are there words;
      their voice is not heard.

The natural world is silent witness to the glory of God.
It’s faith that hears, it’s faith that sees.

That’s the nature of faith – faith wells up from within – it’s not a self-generated process, nor a process produced by proof, but a gift from God.
Faith arises from the work of the Holy Spirit.
Faith is a gift from God.

And why is it a gift?

So that people of faith cannot boast – faith is not our doing, but a gift from God, to be lived and shared in this world of ours.

Paul writes [Ephesians 2]:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

Nor should a person of faith ever scold someone who has a different take on things … who sees and lives by some other creed … or, for that matter, even a Richard Dawkins, a self-avowed atheist … who steadfastly declares that the universe is a self-generating system without purpose or moral value – that God is a fiction, and a rather useless one at that, if not pernicious, what with all the evil and suffering perpetrated in God’s name.

Until such time as God would move upon his heart, Richard Dawkins will continue to see the world as he sees it … and that’s a gift to the world of faith.
God sees to it that faith never fully triumphs in this world, because a triumphant faith would kill faith … faith needs doubt, faith needs to be challenged … faith needs to be prodded and poked … questioned and queried!
Thank God for Richard Dawkins and others who trumpet the horn of atheism.
They are not the enemy.
Our own pride and fear are the enemies.
The pride of our faith, and the fear that we may not have all the answers.
Like Pogo said many years ago, We have met the enemy, and he is us.

To be a person of faith – it’s a gift from God, and like any gift, to be shared humbly and gratefully.

Our task is small.
To be the light of the world and the salt of the earth.
These are modest metaphors – a small oil lamp on the shore of Galiee’s sea can be seen in the night for miles – it doesn’t take much light at all.
And for salt, only a little … too much, and the soup is spoiled – just right, a hidden presence, and the soup is good for body and soul.

Our task is small:
Not world domination.
No mighty army going out to conquer the heathen world.
But a gentle presence.
A reforming presence that calls into question human pretension and religious foolishness!

To live as best we can by our faith:
To believe and to live:
The world is fashioned by the hand of God.
Life is a divine gift.
Life has purpose and destiny.
Good and evil have an ultimate reference point in the heart of God.
Love is better than hatred.
Welcome is better than rejection.
Forgiveness is better than grudge-holding.

Thank God for Darwin and millions of thinkers and scientists who love this world and seek to understand it.
Thank God for thoughtful women and men who continue to challenge Christians and put us to the test.
Thank God for Christians who are bridge builders –
And thank God for my professor, Dr. John Bratt, who gave me the term, theistic evolution.

And thank God for God – He’s got the world in his hands!

Amen and Amen!