A Walk in the Woods

Imagine the following: You're out walking on a sunny day - say along the Appalachian trail, miles from anyone - on a path that, judging by the leaf cover and growth of underbrush, has not been traversed in many months, perhaps even years. Just ahead, off to the side, your eye is drawn to something reflecting the sun's rays. You step off the path to investigate and, to your surprise, come across what appears to be a brand-new iPod.¹ Instinctively, you look around, even up, wondering, "Where in the world did this come from?" Like the character A-Sho in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy²

When my boys were small, they would often account for something with the phrase, "for some reason." Now and then, I'd tease them, "What if something happens for no reason?" They'd look at me as if I were weird. We human beings, it seems, are hard-wired to seek some reason to make sense of what we see and hear. But what if iPods or coke bottles did fall absurdly (without reason) from the sky?

The illustration of the IPOD on the trail, or my boys intuitive "for some reason," suggest that to be human is to seek reasons, explanations, and causes for the world we experience. We are hard-wired to ask, "Why?" about our world - and, one way or another, we come up with an answer, with "some reason." Sometimes our reasons make sense; other times they're purely fanciful, comforting but not edifying. For many, as we noted a few weeks ago, when all else fails, God becomes the explanation of first and last resort.

God the iPod or Clock-Maker

In theology, one of the most compelling arguments to the "Why" question is in the so-called Argument from Design. It accounts for the orderliness of things by positing that God put everything in its place. My allegory about iPods and coke bottles mimics a more famous one told by the 18th century English cleric William Paley. He says, what would you think if you came across a watch lying along the trail? He asserts:³

"The watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place of other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use."

Paley uses this watch as an analogy to prove there must be a designer God who is responsible for all existence and whose purpose everything serves. IPODS and watches don't just happen - and by implication, neither does anything else. As I said, among the arguments for God, this is most inviting. It answers our "Why" questions with a compelling "for some reason."⁴

Evolution Sunday

Our conversation continues this morning with the fourth in this series discussing the place of Unitarian Universalists in the Radical Reformation.5 Our focus today, in honor of his birthday on this date in 1809, is Darwin's remarkable and magnificent idea that all living species have evolved from a common ancestor, over billions of years, leading to the wide diversity of creatures found on this planet, including human beings.

This weekend, more than 400 congregations in the United States have set aside this day as Evolution Sunday.⁶ As you no doubt are aware, there is a resurgence among Christian apologists, who, echoing Paley, assert the argument for "Intelligent Design." They say life did not just happen, it happened to fulfill God's purpose as recounted in the story of Genesis. Attacking Darwin's theory, they dismiss it a "merely a theory" and demand our schools remove it or give equal time to Genesis.7 Before Darwin, the Hebrew tale of God's creation was as good an explanation as any other. It's historic nature lends it added stature. Combined with the passion of those who equate their faith with all truth and the foundation of society, the argument takes on political power as well.

This is the thinking that led the State of Kansas to ban the teaching of evolution from its schools and most recently the case against the Dover, Pennsylvania school board which had wanted to purge Darwinian thinking from its biology textbooks. That said, there are many who find evolution confirms the majesty of holy creation. To them Darwin's ideas are not dangerous, but beautiful. Moreover, they find "intelligent design" misguided both as theology and science. An Evolution Sunday calls upon religious people to become better informed as to what evolution is and is not.

At some level, I imagine I am preaching to an already convinced choir on this one. Is there any among you who doubt the truth of Darwin's idea?

Our Place in the Sun

Nonetheless, let me summarize how our theology came to a conclusion that more than half of Americans yet deny.⁸ Recall that the early Unitarians and Universalists⁹ were traditional believers in Genesis and Biblical revelation. What distinguished our forebears was whether God was rightly conceived as a unity or a trinity, whether Jesus was both god and human or just human, and whether salvation was for a few or for all.

Were it not for the mid-19th century further reformation by Transcendentalist thinkers, we might yet be merely a subset of the Christian church.¹⁰ However, after Emerson, our faith became something remarkably new, decidedly not Christian, with a pantheistic or deistic notion of God. More significantly, the next generation of religious liberals saw that God was to be best understood by exploring the workings of nature. Said simply, rather than find God in scripture, God was found in its manifest creation. "To know god, study the world!" was the motto by the mid-1800's.

In time, our forerunners mostly did away with God itself, choosing instead to revere nature per se and to place the human being firmly within a natural world.¹¹ Meanwhile, across the pond in England, Charles Lyell's and James Hutton's geological studies showed the earth to be billions, not thousands of years old.¹² Genesis, however appealing for its metaphoric understandability, clearly did not tell the true tale of the earth. About the same time, French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck¹³ - inventor of biology as we know it - put forth an early theory that species inherited traits from one another over time.¹⁴ And, in the midlands, at Shrewsbury, Charles Darwin came of age.

Darwin was one of six children born to physician Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgewood. As was customary, young Charles was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine. He showed no aptitude for it. By 1827, his father sent him to Cambridge to study divinity. While there, his love for collecting plants and insects caught the attention of botanist John Henslow. Henslow arranged for the young man, just 22, to join the expedition of HMS Beagle to Patagonia in 1831 as a science naturalist. The voyage along the west coast of South America and eventually onto Australia took five years.

Darwin's visit to the Galapagos Islands, especially, laid the foundation for his ultimate insight into redefining the place of human beings in the scheme of things. Upon his return, Darwin published many accounts of his travels but took his time to unpack his observations and to make sense of his intuition that, given enough time, species would adapt to changing circumstances, leading to the appearance of new life forms.¹⁵ Eventually, he felt confident that he had discerned a new way of thinking. In 1859, he published his large volume, The Origin of Species.¹⁶ It was immediately both a best seller and repudiated by the clergy of the day as anti-god.

What Darwin Discovered

What is Darwin's theory? Like the Bible, Darwin's Origin remains largely unread, mostly because it is hundreds of pages of zoological and botanical notes. Nonetheless, Darwin's insight that all life arose from a common ancestor over unfathomable periods of time has been confirmed time and again. It has never been refuted. Today, it is often called neo-Darwinism to include discoveries in genetics and cellular biology that came after Darwin.

Neo-Darwinian theory is easily stated and most likely quite familiar to you: First, there is the notion, offensive to traditionalists, that all life, including humans, share a common ancestor. Secondly, the wide array of living organisms may be accounted for by natural selection (in contrast with divine dispensation). That is, random and blind chance alone leads to variations between species and those whose traits further their survival will be more likely to survive. Over immensely long periods of time, minute favorable changes will bring about countless new and distinct forms of life, including humans.

To traditionalists, the "dangerous" part of this idea is, first, there is no place for God, and additionally that there is nothing necessary to human beings.¹⁷ That is, were you to roll back the clock of evolution and start all over, there is no guarantee that humans would ever appear. The evolutionary unfolding could go in many other directions than it has. To say our place in the sun is purely contingent, not essential, flies in the face of traditional faith convictions. To say we emerge out of eons-long natural process offends those who think of God as a watchmaker. Darwin's theory, no less than Copernicus and Galileo, shatters the story (and the faith!) that has come down to us from Genesis. In the words of paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary theory "dethrones" humanity:

"The most important scientific revolutions all include - as their only common feature - the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."18

It is this fact that scares the ignorant and illiterate, the true-believers of any day, including our own.

Darwin realized these implications of his theory. He was slow to accept it. However, he followed the evidence of his senses and the logic of his reason. Today, around the world, the theory of evolution is accepted, not just as an explanatory "for some reason" theory, but also a fact of life.¹⁹ Darwin, who by the way, was a Unitarian, redefined humanity.²⁰ Contrary to Genesis, no longer is the human the pinnacle of creation, the special plaything of God, who magically appeared on day six when God breathed life into clay. Rather, like all other living species, the human is an outcome of very natural, very understandable causes of very long duration. We are, simply and no less marvelously, part and parcel of the great miracle and mystery of life itself.²¹

British biologist, Sir Julian Huxley, sums it all up:

Evolution "is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth. It helps us understand our origins . . . We are part of a total process, made of the same matter and operating by the same energy as the rest of the cosmos, maintaining and reproducing by the same type of mechanism as the rest of life . . . "²²

Facts and Fables, Proof and Politics

Among scientists, evolution is a settled fact and while new details are yet added, it is a comprehensive explanation of how life works on earth. Yet, among the many folk, it is anything but settled. Traditional religionists, as noted, see this as a dangerous idea. They see evolution as a demotion of humans to the level of slime mold, a violation of our sacred and special character. Dismissing Neo-Darwinian thought as "just a theory," - reflecting their ignorance of how theory is used in science - the apologists for Hebrew and Christian Genesis Creationism contend that the long refuted notion of "intelligent design" is not only better but the explanation of humanity's place in the cosmos.

This strikes me as so nonsensical as to not even merit a response. Yet, ideas have political implications. The practice of politics prefers stroking fears and prejudices rather than advancing truth. In our time of cultural anxiety, for those who seek security in knowing God is with them, evolution a still dangerous idea. While it may be possible to legislate textbook content or invoke a deity to justify social adventurism, in the long run, like the 15th century Spanish Inquisition or Islamic jihadist fundamentalism today, the appeal for the old definition of humans as divinely crafted is but a rearguard, holding action. Science will move along its merry way. Where the theory is in error, corrections will be made. But the truth remains. Our place in the sun is clearly understood, one among many wild and wonderful species.

That said, Unitarian Universalists ought not be complacent. A retreat into superstition and ill-logic, reinforced by the power of the state can have but ill effect on our schools, our children, even our underwriting for ongoing scientific inquiry. Our Unitarian Universalist commitment to a faith that rests on reason and evidence, as well as symbol and metaphor, can be a gift to those trying to find their way. We must be able to say that there is a hopeful role for humans as sacred beings without yielding to the cynicism that our lives are devoid of meaning and purpose, mere star-bits of randomly assembled matter nor regressing to childish Creationism.²³ It is our special call to re-enchant life, not with illusion, but with appreciation and affection, to declare our place in the sun as the true marvels that we humans have become. I'll pick up this line of thought in a future sermon. As ever, I welcome your observations and comments. May you know you are a blessing, unique in space and time. Amen.

1. iPod is a brand of portable digital media player designed and marketed by Apple Computer.

2. The Gods Must Be Crazy is a 1980 movie in which an African bushman "A-Sho" encounters in the Kalahari desert technology for the first time - in the shape of a Coke bottle (tossed out as litter from a small airplane). He takes it back to his people, who find many uses for it. However, soon they start to fight over it, so "A-Sho" decides to return it to God - where he thinks it came from. A bit slapstick comedy, a bit satire on human gullibility, occasionally a biting commentary on the cruelty of modern technology, the viewer meets a school teacher assigned to a small village, a despotic revolutionary, and a clumsy biologist. It's all good fun with a serious theological point.

3. William Paley (1743 - 1805) was an English minister, a Christian apologist and philosopher. Born at Peterborough, Northamptonshire, he set out late in life to refine the arguments for God's existence. His Watchmaker Analogy is among the standard "argument from design" or "teleological argument" to prove God. Essentially, it says: a design must have a designer. In the fullness of all existence, the evidence of design is clear and the ultimate, first cause, designer is God.

A more recent version of this argument is called the "anthropic principle." It says the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry are just right or fine-tuned to allow the universe and life at we know it to exist. The Anthropic Principle argues that seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have exactly the values necessary for the universe to produce life. These physical constants suggest that it was designed to support life on earth, just as Paley's watch had to have a watch-maker.

Here's Paley's famous analogy, as found in his 1802 volume, Natural Theology:

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for any thing I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer.

But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first?

For this reason, and for no other, viz., that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose . . . This mechanism being observed . . . the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place of other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use."

So-called "Intelligent Design," most recently in the news, and it's pre-cursor "Creationism" are essentially the same idea as Paley's.

4. See my sermon, "Redefining God: From a Puny Theism to Radical Atheism" (January 29, 2006) for additional arguments for God's existence and my critique of using God as, in Pierre Simon LaPlace's (1749 - 1827) words, an "hypothesis" to account for things we do not understand. When Napoleon asked why LaPlace had not mentioned God in his Celestial Mechanique, the mathematician reportedly replied, [Sire,] je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse." "[No, Sire,] I had no need of that hypothesis."

5. The Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church began in the early 16th century with the protests of Luther and Calvin. Unitarians first appear as a religious group or as proponents of a theological doctrine in the mid-16th century, in Spain, Poland, and Transylvania. The word "radical" here refers to the notion of trying to get to the root of things. In this instance, asking what is the core teaching of Christianity led to the conviction that the doctrine of Trinity is in error.

6. 441 congregations as of 10 February. See http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/rel_evol_sun.htm for details. I am also among over 10,000 clergy who have signed on to the following statement:

"An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science: Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible - the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark - convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, 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."

For a listing of signers, see:

http://www.uwosh.edu/colleges/cols/religion_science_collaboration.htm.

7. In science, "theory" is the term used to describe a constellation of evidence, facts, and ideas to explain the natural world. No theory is ever fully complete, the world being far more complex than our depictions. Thus, spoken or not, every theory is qualified by an implicit "This is true only to the best of our current knowledge." As more knowledge is gained, theories may be disproved and replaced with others. More often, however, theories are modified and adapted to a better appreciation of what they purport to describe. A theory is a best, albeit imperfect, attempt to report the truth about how the world works.

Sadly, however, in common parlance, "theory" is often used to mean an unproven assertion that may or may not be true. In this way, "theory" is equated with "speculation," not description or explanation. Today's apologists for "creationism" or "intelligent design" mis-apply the word "theory" to advance their religious and/or political agenda - exploiting the general public's ignorance of what science entails.

8. According to an October 2005 CBS poll, "Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved. These views are similar to what they were in November 2004 shortly after the presidential election."

9. It is tedious to say repeatedly "Unitarian and Universalist" rather than simply "Unitarian Universalists." However, since the Universalist Church in America (founded in 1795) and the American Unitarian Association (founded in 1825) did not merge as one body until 1961, it is not historically accurate to link the two. Yes, they shared many ideas and ideals, congregational practice, but were essentially differing variants of Christian thought well into the 20th century.

10. See the first sermon in this series, "The Radical Reformation I - Redefining Christianity: From Savior to Exemplar" (January 8, 2006) for how Unitarian Universalists expanded our faith beyond the limitations of Christian conviction.

11. The Free Religionists, Unitarians in the western United States, and later religious humanists in particular re-formed our faith in the latter 19th century to emphasize human beings as active meaning makers and uniquely placed in an evolutionary progression. Relying increasingly on the scientific method of impersonal, inductive reason, many Unitarian Universalists came to see God as but a projection of our fears and fantasies. Unitarian Universalism became ever more a religion without God as the 20th century unfolded and the human was redefined as something other than a child of the divine.

By the late 20th century, however, the divinity of nature was expanded to consider the earth itself a living entity. The so-called Gaia Hypothesis, put forth by James Lovelock in the 1960's, proposes that our planet functions as a single, living organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. By this reasoning, humans are further redefined as constituent parts of a larger reality, very much in the way our organs - which function uniquely of their own "nature" - are part of who we are. As you or I are more than the sum of our parts, so, too, the earth is more than the mere aggregation of its many parts. By this thinking, it has a "soul" or essence that is alive.

12. Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875) was a Scotsman, British lawyer, geologist, and popularizer of uniformitarianism, the assumption that natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating in the present.

Fellow Scotsman James Hutton (1726 - 1797), considered by many to be the father of modern geology, was the first proponent of uniformitarianism. Lyell's Principles of Geology (in three volumes, 1830 - 1833) was particularly influential for Darwin.

13. French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 - 1829) was an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. Today, Lamarck is remembered mostly for his discredited theory of heredity, the "inheritance of acquired traits."

14. Darwin would later acknowledge his debt to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, to Lyell and Lamarck for shaping his understanding. He also became aware of economist and demographer Thomas Malthus' (1766 - 1834) ideas regarding populations and credits him with opening the door of understanding:

"In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus' Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence [a phrase used by Malthus] which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be a new species. Here then I had at last got hold of a theory by which to work."

Evolution as a concept was not new nor unique to Darwin. Thinkers as far back as Aristotle had argued that it was so. Darwin's contribution was to make it a science.

15. "When on board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species- that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision." (Darwin's opening paragraph to The Origin of Species, 1859.)

16. The full tile is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

There is some evidence that Darwin published his ideas of evolution only after he met with naturalist and social critic Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) who said he, too, was preparing to submit his ideas to print.

17. American philosopher, Daniel Dennett and British zoologist Richard Dawkins are among the most assertive in their accounts on this point. See Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1995) and Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1986) and Climbing Mount Improbable (Norton, 1996). These readable essays explain well how the evolutionary process works and the conclusion that there is nothing necessary to humans ever having come to be.

Evolutionary thinking does not need to invoke God to explain itself. Darwin's basic idea accounts remarkably well, provides the "for some reason" we seek when it comes to understanding how life works. For some, this is a frightening notion. For others, I among them, this makes human life all the more special and precious.

18. Stephen Jay Gould (1941 - 2002), The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, (Harvard University Press, 2002).

19. I can bring this notion home readily. Sometimes the time-frame of evolutionary process is remarkably short. Consider: Antibiotics have proven to be a major development in human health care. However, presently, after only a few generations of use, there is increasing alarm among health researchers and medical practitioners as bacteria continually adapt (mutate) and develop the means to protect themselves (drug resistance) from our chemical assaults. Anyone who has struggled to cure an infection knows first-hand that evolution is not just a "could be true," but a hard fact of life.

20. We Unitarian Universalists have consistently claimed Darwin as one of our heroes, mostly on the evidence that his mother, Susannah Wedgewood was a member of the Shrewsbury Unitarian Chapel (in England, only the Church of England is called a "church"). Certainly, his devotion to the natural order, his essential agnosticism and his grandfather's noted deism puts him firmly in the unfolding theology of Unitarian faith once it left the Christian milieu.

21. As with astronomical distances, geologic time is very hard for us to grasp. It should be noted here that it is beyond our true fathoming to consider how long it has taken for life to emerge as it has, or to truly appreciate what johnny-come-lately creatures we are.

In a cosmos of roughly 13 billion years, the earth has been in its orbit for approximately 4.6 billion years. Life, in its most primitive form, is estimated to have arisen 3.8 million years ago. The genus homo branched off the tree of life with the great apes a mere 6 million years ago. Homo sapiens, the only surviving member of the genus homo, dates at most to 500,000 years ago, and modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens), possibly as recently as 100,000 years.

Comparing all this to a 24 hour clock, we human arrive on the scene only in the last few seconds of the day.

Lastly, though evolution can account (explain, provide "for some reason") for the emergence of life's diversity, it must beg the question of how life first began. As with the "big bang" of the universe, life's appearance is a beautiful mystery. Accepting mystery, that there are some things beyond our understanding is very hard. Our need to answer the "why" of it, however, tempts one to draw on that old standby God. It answers a need for meaning but does not truly relieve the unknowing.

22. Julian Huxley (1887 - 1975) in Evolutionary Humanism (Prometheus, 1992.)

23. Part of what fuels the resurgence of intelligent design thinking is the perception that reductionistic materialism is the alternative. Materialism, no less than creationism, is a metaphysic offering a "why" premised on a "how." It argues that matter (atoms and their workings by the laws of physics and chemistry) is all that, well, matters.

It further argues against the intuitive notion, held across religious lines, that human beings occupy a special place in the hierarchy of nature. Where spiritualism lifts the human out and above nature, materialism reduces the uniqueness of organic life to the lowest element of which all matter is composed. In debunking superstition, the materialists offer an equally pseudo-scientific explanation of life that fails to acknowledge what makes humans, for that matter all living beings, different from rocks. If this were so, then, truly, Darwin's idea is dangerous, for it removes even the possibility of anything mattering more than another.