Sermons

Chaos and Creation

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
February 5, 2006                        Genesis 1: 1-5, 26-27, 2:4-9

Let us pray. Eternal God, the world seems to be broken and hurting. Boats sink in Egypt – churches burn in Alabama – violence rages in our own city’s streets. And yet there are glimpses of your healing and hope, for which we are grateful. We are grateful for the life and witness of Coretta Scott King, and for all who labor for justice and peace. And we are grateful this day for the gift of your word. Open it now unto us, and transform us with your truth. For Christ’s sake we pray. Amen.
***
Today’s conversation runs the danger of becoming a kind of mishmash, and I usually do not admit that beforehand. We will not be able to address every point of a very complex issue this morning, and, in fact, we will only be able to touch lightly on a few points. Nonetheless, a catalogue of pertinent questions at the outset might be helpful, in order to draw some parameters and set the stage.

» How was the world created? By whom? Why?
» How did human life begin? What is its purpose?
» What is the purpose of science?
» What is the purpose of religion?
» What is the relationship of faith and science? Friendly? Unfriendly? Distant? Intimate?
» How should science be taught in our public school classrooms?
» Is there a role for religion in our public school classrooms?
» What do we believe about the Bible, and what does the Bible – and our theological tradition – have to say about these things?
» What is the nature of the God whom we call Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer?

The precipitating occurrence for this awe-inspiring and fear-inducing litany of imponderables has been ripped, as they say, from the headlines. “Intelligent design,” it is called, a theory that I must admit I do not fully comprehend, that seeks to bring together scientific principles and religious belief, and whose proponents represent a confederation of religionists, politicians and scientists. Proponents of intelligence design, “I.D.” for short, insist that what they are advancing is not creationism, the belief that takes the accounts that I’ve just read from the book of Genesis and interprets them literally to insist that the world as we know it was created in six days and, further, is between 10,000 and 6,000 years old. Creationism rejects the theory of evolution first advanced by Charles Darwin and now accepted, without question, by the vast majority of the scientific community.

I.D. proponents say that what they are proposing is not creationism. On the matter of Darwin, they would want to hold out that evolution is not a fact, but a theory, and would want that possibility taught in public schools. Even though they argue that I.D. is not creationism, they do argue that “certain features of the natural world are so complex and intricately put together that they must have been deliberately fashioned.” (New Yorker, December 5, 2005, page 66) They do not call that “deliberate fashioner” God, but that seems to be who they are talking about. They know that they cannot talk about a biblical understanding of creation in the public schools; that would run roughshod over the religious establishment clause of the First Amendment, the so-called “separation of church and state.” Intelligent design kind of sneaks in the side door – talking about God without mentioning God, using skepticism about something called “just” a theory to allow alternate possibilities to sneak in.

POLITICS: Thus far, it does not seem to be working. Legal precedent is firmly established that creationism cannot be taught in schools; it seems now that the courts will say the same thing about I.D. Earlier in January a judge ruled in a case in Dover, Pennsylvania that I.D. could not be taught, nor could evolution be presented as “just” a theory. The battle is being fought elsewhere, to be sure, in the states of Kansas and Ohio, for example. But it seems to be a losing one.

I must say that I am grateful and not a little relieved at Judge Jones’ decision. Jones firmly said “no” to I.D. in the schools. I agree. I agree further with no creationism, no prayer, nothing that resembles any religious teaching whatsoever.

Not that I do not believe in those things, or, in fact, in their propagation, I hasten to add. Just the opposite. But I believe firmly in what Jefferson called the “wall of separation,” though that wall seems a little rough around the edges these days, a victim of red state-blue state dynamics.

I believe in prayer, in God as creator. I even believe, within certain parameters, that groups of students should be able to assemble on school property, after hours and with certain criteria rigorously met, to do things of a religious nature, though not only Christian things.

But I want my children, our children, to learn of prayer here, at church, and at home. I am not particularly interested in them learning how to pray from someone other than who I know and completely trust – not watered down, not generic, and not counter to what my particular tradition believes. We pray, every day, and thank God for God’s good creation. In school I want them learning about dinosaurs and fossils, how the plates moved eons ago to form the continents as we know them, how to dissect worms and learn how this glorious and mysterious world works. Beyond the world of science, I would not mind a little civics lesson once in awhile that makes them aware of other religions, but certainly not their content.

SCIENCE: So what do we teach our children, and each other? What do we think about science? I must confess that right about now I wish I had paid better attention in high school. Some of you did, I know. I must also admit that this entire political debate feels a bit out of place, that we are using our children in a grown-up ideological tug-of-war. I am not sure I gave too much thought to the philosophy of science when I was in the ninth grade, the grade under consideration in Dover, Pennsylvania. In geology, I would barely remember the names of the eras. In biology, I was happy to have a lab partner more eager than I to dissect a frog. In chemistry, a day that did not involve breaking a beaker was a good one. Why we did any of this was beyond me, let alone the larger political and philosophical reasoning behind curriculum choices, or why we used one textbook rather than another. The bigger questions, then, and now, should come later.

Science for our children, and for all of us, seeks to answer a set of questions about how the world is put together, how it works, what its component parts are and how they are assembled. That is why the Dover argument about evolution, that it was “just" a theory, seemed to miss the point. In the scientific world, a theory is never “just” a theory. I am not a lawyer but have discussed the law. I am not a scientist, either. But I believe that a scientist would agree that though all science is provisional, a theory is more than a random notion, but rather gathers a large body of facts over time, after repeated, quantifiable observations, to prove, or disprove, a hypothesis.

I believe that there is a God—I firmly believe that. I am less persuaded by proofs of God’s existence. In fact, our tradition spends considerable time with the question of “revelation,” how we can know God – and how knowing God simply through the natural world is never enough. I am very persuaded, however, by scientific proofs – a hypothesis verified over time by observation. That is why the evolutionary theory is more than “just” a theory. In fact, the mainstream of science rarely debates it anymore. It is a given. So what do we do?

THEOLOGY: The litany of questions with which we began will not all be answered this morning, nor will any be answered fully. But here are some propositions for us to consider today and to follow. I propose more conversation, like the one we are having today with Professor Allmon, to work these things out.

1. I propose that we read and wrestle with the book of Genesis together, and to ask the fundamental questions about who God is and what the community of Genesis was seeking to say. I read what I read this morning for several reasons, the least of which is not the reminder of variations within the creation story in Genesis itself. The point of the creation story is not a scientific explanation, but rather an affirmation of a powerful, providential God whose creativity and imagination called this whole thing into being, bringing – and this is important – order from chaos.

Creationists look to specific things – how the eye works, how various bacterium seem not to have evolved, to argue that evolution could not explain everything. I.D. proponents argue that there are gaps in evolutionary theory, that some things cannot be explained by random mutation and natural selection, Darwin’s mainstays. That may be. But look what God is about in Genesis – making order, making relationships, making community. Science does not dispute that, and, in point of fact, science helps explain some of the mysteries that Genesis is not all that eager to pursue.

Creationists believe in a literal reading of Genesis, that God made the world in six days, in six 24-hour days. I have no need to dismiss that out of hand, nor do I believe that the Genesis account is purely mythic, only a fiction. But since Genesis itself spends very little time on the “how-to” of it all, I take that as a signal that what we should be paying attention to is the world itself, its mysteries, its majesty – and, in the vernacular of the day, how we might become better stewards of it.

2. Further, by reading Genesis, we are invited to think even more deeply about who God is. One of the reasons that I.D. does not work for many is that it offers a vision of God, ironically, perhaps, and even unwittingly, that counters the vision of God that we have embraced over time. We believe that God does more than just fill in the gaps when science leaves us without explanation. We do not believe that God is some cosmic watchmaker who designs and makes the perfect watch, winds it up, and then abandons it only to watch it keep time from a detached distance.

No, what we believe about God is more complex, messier. We believe in a God whose presence permeates all of life, every moment, every atom, every heart. Our Reformed forbears, and the trajectories of our Reformed theology with an absolute trust in a sovereign God, would need even to insist somehow that God is involved in the world of genetics, in molecular biology, in transitional fossils, in science as well as economics, poetry, politics, not to mention theology itself.

Further, and most importantly, God is in covenant with us, and, we believe, God continues to act in the world, interested in what happens – transcendent and imminent. The God who spins the whirling planets, we say, knows every hair on our head. And, in fact, God is so intimately interested in the world’s affairs, and particularly in human affairs, that Jesus came to live among us.

3. Finally, what this conversation, and the public debate, does, is remind us that we have not done a very good job of integrating science and faith. They are not adversaries, by the way, or at least they do not need to be. The great scientist Stephen Jay Gould once called religion and science “non-overlapping magisterial.” That may be – but I wonder if we can do better than that. It seems in recent years that the physicists have often led us closer to the divine while the theologians have taken us closer to the natural world. How they talk to one another, and how we overhear the conversation, is crucial if progress is to be made.

We are people of faith: we seek to find a balance between what we believe about God and how we understand God’s world to work. In that larger picture, we seek to integrate evolutionary theory into our understanding of things, along with many other scientific propositions, as well as propositions about human behavior, political forces, sociological and cultural realities.

John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, insists science and theology have more in common than is often supposed, existing on a kind of continuum. Both make attempts to make sense of real-world data and to deliver truths about reality. Scientists and theologians, Polkinghorne writes, both share “experiences of wonder” at the disclosed order of creation and the universe. (See review of Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality in Books and Culture, July/August 2005, page 22.)

This is a conversation certainly worth pursuing with all of us in the room – theologians, scientists, poets, politicians – and the rest of us onlookers who simply, day-by-day, seek a little meaning in our lives and a little creation in the chaos.

It is important to safeguard the precious commitments of our nation, including freedom from the establishment of religion in the wrong places and freedom to practice religion in the right ones.

But this conversation is certainly more interesting. It takes us closer to the heart of the universe, to the heart of creation, to the heart of our own humanity and to the heart of God.

As much as a statement of a Presbyterian General Assembly can inspire us, this one from 1982 does: “that their exists no clear incompatibility between evolution and the Biblical doctrine of creation.” Our task is to be called into that lack of incompatibility, or rather more positively, to journey ever deeper into the mysteries of creation, which both faith and science would endeavor to explain, a journey of discovery and joy and wonder. Thanks be to God. Amen.