Evolution Sunday

            We are all familiar with the fish bumper stickers that signify someone is Christian.  The symbol goes back to the early church where it was a secret symbol Christians used to designate a meeting place.  Sometime in the 80’s or so people started putting fish with legs on their bumpers. Some of these said “Darwin” in the middle.  I thing this was originally intended to mean that the drive was a believer in science and evolution and rejected the conservative Christian views of creationism.  Most recently, I have noticed cars that have both. I can only assume that this signifies a driver who probably agrees with me: science and Christianity are not mutually exclusive.  

            Our reason for having Evolution Sunday in a church where most people probably already agree that one can believe in both evolution and Christianity is because of the debate that prompted the bumper stickers.  On one hand we have fundamentalist Christians, who, evidenced by the Scopes monkey trial, have been opposing evolution at every turn for years.  Creationists, and Intelligent Design folks, have defended the Biblical account of creation as the true, scientifically correct history of God’s creation the world.  On the other hand, we have scientists, who have rejected the creation story in the Bible as unscientific and untrue and then have tended to reject religion (Judaism and Christianity primarily) as being untrue as well.  Ironically, these two extremes have the same scientific view of the Bible.  The rest of us have been scattered in between with various understandings of science and religion and how they are related.  Many, as my daughter Esther said about herself when I asked her about her ideas this week, have sort of ignored Genesis and figure that someday it will all come clear.

            The heart of this, for better or worse, is the Genesis account and how we interpret that.  I won’t go into a detailed account, as I have done that in other sermons, but I will briefly note the difference between historical and literary criticisms and Biblical inerrancy.  When I seek to understand a Biblical passage, I do not assume that is it literally true the way it is written.   I take into account who wrote it, language, when they wrote it and why.  Scripture is our best account of the spiritual history of our culture, but like other books and historical records, it is imperfect. The first question on my Old Testament exam at Duke Divinity School in 1978 was name four places that the Bible contradicts itself and explain.  One of my choices was the Genesis creation story.  It contradicts itself since there are two stories, one in chapter 1 and one in chapter 2.  Lloyd Bailey, my professor liked to say: “If you want to know about the history of the world and scientific explanation of creation, don’t go to the Bible, go to a scientist, but is you want to know about the history of the faith of the human race, don’t go to a scientist, go to the Bible.”

            I agree with Marcus Borg.  When we are young, we are presented with myths and stories which we accept with what he calls “pre-critical naiveté.  For us they are true.  The Bible stories and fairy tales come under this heading.  When we reach the age of inquiry, our teenage years and following, we come to a critical period, where we ask hard questions and seek truth through criticism and scientific methods.  During this period, many people reject the fairy tales and the religions of their youth as untrue.  But Borg notes that some people move past this to  “post-critical naiveté,” which means that they are able to find the truth in these myths and stories that is deeper than the literal level.  So, though I may not believe that Jesus was born in a stable and visited by shepherds and wise men who followed a star from the east, I do believe that Jesus was born among the poor, and came particularly to bring them good news and that his incarnation was a miraculous and unique event in world history.

            Which leads me to the Creation stories in Genesis.  They were recorded by the Priests around 500 BCE, from two or more sources: one being the Yahwist oral tradition from the Southern Kingdom of Judah and one being the Elohist oral tradition from the Northern Kingdom of Israel.  The authors had just arrived back from the Exile in Babylon, and were trying to reestablish the Hebrew religion with people who had strayed away, married foreign wives, straggled home and were largely what we would call secularized. The Priests wrote down the Law of Moses, the first five books of our Bible, the Torah, as an attempt to unify the people and bring them back to the temple and culture that would hold them together and rebuild them as a nation and a culture.  So we have the first chapter that affirms that God, a monotheistic God, made the heavens and the earth and did in six days and rested: just like the Hebrew people are called to do: you shall observe a Sabbath and keep it holy.  This was the primary purpose of the first chapter.  It is doubtful to most scholars that is was ever intended to be what we would call a scientific explanation of creation.  It was true, in the post-critical sense, but not scientific.   The second story brings Adam, the human, and his wife, Eve, into an ethical debate.  This story is also true, but it is not concerned with scientific creation either, but with good and evil and why humans seem to have free will and make such a mess of things.  Both as Borg would say, are “not historically true, but profoundly true” nonetheless.

            This view of the Bible leaves lots of room for science and Darwin.  The most simplistic explanation is that one might affirm evolutionary theory, but find God as the creator and guide of this process.  Not to go into this too deeply, but I will tell you that evolutionary theory and scientific method in general have had a big influence upon theology.  The main emerging theory is  “Process Theology.”  Basically, this means that God did not create substances and systems and then give it a big push that set it all in motions.  Rather, God is the motion.  God is force, the “creative energy”, the wellspring of novelty”, that is at the heart of creation and creating.  For example, instead of marriage being created with one substantive idea, one purpose, which for the Catholic Church is traditionally procreation, marriage is in process.  There are many different kinds of marriages, and relationships, and God is present in all and in all that will ever evolve.

            But finally, I must note that for me the answer to God’s place in creation will always be a mystery.  I believe that both science and theology are honestly seeking truth that is unknowable.   But I believe that we are evolving as a species toward a greater sense of cooperation and compassion.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the universe bends toward Justice.”  He was a process thinker.  I think the ministry of Jesus Christ illustrates the evolution of spirituality toward greater compassion and love, thereby revealing God’s process of moving with us as we evolve in this direction.  It is not guaranteed, for we have free will and are co-creators with God.  We could fail, and move toward less compassion and ultimately toward destruction of our species.  But with or without us, God’s process at the heart of the universe will continue to evolve toward wholeness and love.