The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

 “Remembering that the universe is so much larger than our ability to comprehend, let us [enter into] this time together with the resolve to stop trying to reduce the incomprehensible to our own petty expectations, so that wonder -- that sense of what is sacred -- can find space to open up our minds and illumine our lives.”

Come, let us celebrate the wonder that is this day.

 

 

According to Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Writing Project, 929 congregations in 14 countries are, sometime this month, celebrating Evolution Sunday and the 200th Birthday of Charles Darwin. This includes seven UU congregations in Canada.   You and I are part of this powerful response by liberal religion to the voices of those who would deny the science of evolution...those who feel that as a scientific theory, evolution denies the existence and hand of a creator god (which isn’t necessarily true, by the way.) 

 

We celebrated Darwin last year as well, when I tried to make the point that religion and science, reason and intuition, are not diametrically opposed, but rather two necessary pieces of the same quilt...a quilt that displays our diverse proficiencies and our diverse ways of interpreting experience. At that time, in a very unscientific show of hands, we saw that even within this congregation, there is a wide variety of perspectives on the relationship of science and religion, which I contend is mostly a result of differing authority given to them. Not surprising, that, because the individual’s right to assign authority is a basic tenet of liberal religion. 

 

This year, I was inspired by the documentary, “Kansas Vs. Darwin” which is about a Board of Education hearing, a DVD that I have and am happy to share with any who would like to see it. What struck me most about the story is the vehemence of the conversation, the intense distain for the other from each side of the debate. 

 

Admittedly, our apparent propensity for warring is something that has been on my heart. Watching recent events in Israel and Gaza has got me wondering about Truth and Right...you know, the ones with the capital letters...and about how it comes to be that each side is so entrenched. And more than that, I’ve been wondering about that feeling in myself...where I feel that I know what is Right and where I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t see it the way that I do.   And so today, I want to explore this a bit and ask that you take a look at your own heart and mind to examine where it is rigid and intolerant. Go on. I know those places are in there. We all have those places. 

 

You know, Darwin was brought up in a relatively narrow world (even though his family attended a Unitarian church). He was a member of a privileged class in a society that was just beginning to examine how to retrofit new scientific knowledge into a Biblical world view. Virtually everyone in his day was a Creationist...believing that the world was brought into being by a supernatural god, and that each creature had been created pretty much in its present state at a relatively recent time, as little as 6000 years ago. 

 

Darwin went to Cambridge to study theology, in preparation to be an Anglican minister, but then took off on his great adventure on the HMS Beagle, at trip that explored the coast of South America for some five years. It was on this trip, that as a novice naturalist, he came into contact with humans very unlike himself, and traversed the continent and the islands, filling dozens of notebooks with his observations. He sent home specimens of more than 1500 species, the examination of which would occupy the rest of his life. And it was in the tropical rainforest that he felt a wonder so sublime that his work would be influenced forever by that experience of the intense interconnectedness of all things.

 

He returned from this ‘trip of a lifetime’ in 1837. But he didn’t publish “On the Origin of the Species” until 1859, more than twenty years later. His biographer, James Moore, believes that this was due, in part, to his respect for religion. Darwin was agonizingly aware of the fixed worldview that his theory would unsettle.[1] Moore seems to infer that Darwin waited to publish because he was afraid of how his theory would be accepted by Christian society... quite a foretelling fear, don’t you think?   Here we are, two hundred years later, and his theory of evolution is still rocking the religious world. 

 

I want to go back to this documentary about Kansas, but first let’s bring that debate closer to home. While it’s true that the creationist/evolutionist debate is hotter and more visibly contested in the United States, it is far from absent in Canada. Just recently, and I’m sure you’ll remember this, John Tory ran a campaign on a platform that included extending public funding to all religious schools in the province, which was, some say, thinly veiled support for teaching creationism in science classes. 

 

And, the province of Alberta has not just one, but two, creation science museums, which try to provide evidence that the Biblical creation story can be taken literally. They take credit for polling statistics (the interpretation of which I give little credence) showing a marked increase in the number of people in Alberta who believe in a creation over evolution. They say, “Just wait until we have [a creation museum] in Ottawa, our nation’s capital!”[2] Yes, the creationist/evolutionist debate is alive and kicking in Canada.

 

In 2006 alone, there were 47 challenges to teaching evolution in 24 different states in the US. In Kansas, following a report recommending what should be included in the science curriculum, the Board of Education called a hearing to respond to a ‘minority report’, which objected to the recommendations made by the scientific review. Scientists actually boycotted that hearing, refusing to enter into a debate to justify a recommendation that had already been fully examined and presented. And so, the hearings proceeded with testimony only from those who supported teaching intelligent design. Although the hearing was conducted by an attorney who clearly sided with the scientists, eventually the Board of Education voted to accept the minority report and to teach creationism in the schools. Thankfully, their decision was overturned by a new Board of Education the following year. 

 

And so the documentary follows those hearings, and interviews members of the Board of Education and those giving testimony, as well as several scientists, those who had refused to participate. The film is incredibly revealing of human nature...of our desire to appear open and understanding, even as we dig in our heels and cling to our version of the truth. I couldn’t help but feel that almost to a person, everyone in the film was afraid...afraid that they might be wrong, afraid that they might have to change, afraid that what they built their understanding upon would be pulled out from under them, afraid that there was nothing that could be believed or trusted. 

 

Admittedly, the lens of the film is biased. It intentionally portrays the creationists as manipulative, hick, uneducated, even stupid. The attorney conducting the hearings behaves shamefully...with vehemence and distain... which does nothing to enhance the position of the evolutionists. The sanest (appearing) people in the documentary are the scientists, and yet they’re the ones who, whether heroically or childishly, refused to participate. No one comes out looking very good.

 

In last year’s Darwin message, I concluded that the match between science and religion might best be compared to a human relationship in which the partners co-exist equally. But this DVD was like watching Divorce Court...an embittered battle between sides that can see no value in each other and have no interest in understanding the other’s position. Why do we behave like this? Have we hurt each other so badly? What are we so afraid of? 

 

(These are hard questions, for me anyway, and I would really like to hear your responses. Several of you have mentioned that you miss a time in this Fellowship when there was a dialogue following the message. And today I’m going to give you a chance to respond in that way...I tell you this now, so you’ll be prepared when the time comes.)

 

Did you catch me saying a while ago that I gave no credence to the press release from the Creation Museum? I take this as evidence of hardened places within myself.   I watched that video in collusion with its barely concealed anti-creationist message, and I read the article from the Big Valley Creation Museum with my mind already made up that its author was part of a great mass of deluded Biblical literalists. I could hear no other message.

 

I said in my blurb about this service that the gap between spiritual and scientific power was closing. I don’t know if I believe that. Certainly, science continues to explore that which is unknown and mysterious, which in these times includes even that ‘formerly-known-as’ supernatural. And religions...some religions or some versions of some religions...are embracing science as part and parcel of their understanding of this awesome and mysterious world. We, for example, include science as one of the sources of our faith tradition, believing that it has much to offer us of inspiration and meaning.

 

Yet, if we believe that the marriage of science and religion is without irreconcilable differences...if we propose that the gap can and will be closed...if we are willing to let the power be shared...if we believe that we can coexist in harmony...then it seems we must listen to the other side.

 

Ah. There it is. The other side. The gap we experience and perpetuate is not between science and religion, though we certainly have our disagreements there. Rather, the gap we experience, and perpetuate, is between a worldview that embraces science, and evolution in particular, and one which does not. That is the other side. How can these two be reconciled? 

 

Well, the easy answer would be to say that all would be well if THEY would come to see the Truth...because obviously our way is the Right way! And so here we are, back again, at authority and truth and right...and the role they play in determining who we are. I mean, I can imagine that creationists might be threatened by a worldview that disrupts or even discredits what they know to be true, just as I can touch, in myself, the fear that I might be wrong...that what I have built my life upon might be false. 

 

I value openness and tolerance. I value a willingness to learn something new. I want to be a person of the wide path. And yet, even as I say that, I recognize that there must also be places where I am willing to hold doggedly to a truth as I know it, where I stand up for a value I find to be indisputable, where I fight for a right I hold to be beyond self-evident. What if the creationists ‘win’ and our children are not exposed to evolutionary science in the schools? What if the majority of the Canadian population claims that using our minds and our reason provides false evidence...which is just a short step from saying that what we are has no inherent worth or dignity? How are we to fight the possibility of that happening?

 

In truth, my first response is to berate and belittle those who think differently than I. My first response is to react in self-defence. But, if we are to evolve, if we are to move beyond this survivalist response, we must find other ways to be in dialogue. We must find more compassion in understanding the position that others take, even when it feels threatening. 

 

Perhaps our differences cannot be reconciled. Perhaps neither side of the divide is willing to live with the consequences of the other side being in power. Still, must we pursue violent reaction over peaceful consideration? Or build walls instead of bridges?

 

And so we come to a time now when a few of you might share. Our service leader will run the microphone around so that you can express something that you’re thinking about today in regards to the questions I’m posing. 

Any thoughts? 

 

So happy birthday, Darwin. Thanks for rocking our world, and bringing us the knowledge that spurns this conversation. I know...if it hadn’t been you, it would very soon have been someone else. Still, thank you. I close this time in our service with the words with conclude “On the Origin of the Species”:

“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

So may the wonderfulness of evolution continue.

Blessed be. 

 

 

"We call upon the power which sustains the planets in their orbits, that wheels our Milky Way in its 200 million year spiral, to imbue our personalities and our relationships with harmony, endurance, and joy.

 Fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief, flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trembling hands."

Harmony, endurance, and joy. May we use our trembling hands to evolve toward these things, that they may sustain us in the days ahead.

 

Amen.   Go in peace.

 

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