Little Julie came home from first grade one day soon after the school year had begun. "Hi, Mommy, I’m home. … Mommy, where did I come from?"

        Her mother was taken a bit off guard with the question. She quickly thought back to her first grade experience and realized that biological science was not part of the curriculum back then, but she put that aside and forged ahead figuring that kids are just more advanced these days.

        She began by talking about how two people fall in love, decide to marry, and so on. There was some detail about reproductive anatomy and physiology, but only as much as a six-year-old might comprehend.

        Finally, after almost a half-hour of her best effort, she asked, "Does that answer your question, sweetheart?"

        Little Julie responded, "Well, I guess so. Jimmy, who sits in front of me in class, he says he came from Chicago."

        Questions about our origins are not limited to six-year-olds, of course, and certainly not to the location of a hometown.  Recently, a theory about just that has made the news. It’s called “Intelligent Design.”  Ever heard of it? 

Intelligent Design simply asserts that the natural world is so complex that it could not possibly have developed on its own through a process of evolution. Somebody must have been behind the design. Makes sense.

Intelligent Design got huge press when nine members of the Dover, Pennsylvania school board were voted OUT of office for trying to teach Intelligent Design in science class.  There were the requisite lawsuits and the case was finally resolved in court. 

Two months ago, in one of the biggest courtroom clashes between conservative Christianity and evolution since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, a federal judge barred the Pennsylvania public school district from reading a statement casting doubt on evolution and mentioning “Intelligent Design” in biology class.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones (a Bush appointee, active church goer, and no activist judge by any measure) ruled that “Intelligent design” is religion, not science, and while it ought to be studied and discussed, the science classroom is not the place, and it cannot be taught as an alternative to evolution.

Goes to show that we all see things differently.

I am reminded of a scene in The Lion King where three buddies, a merekat, a warthog and a little lion cub, are lying out under the big night sky, star gazing.

Pumba, the warthog begins to theologize and asks, “Ever wonder what those sparkly dots are up there?”

The little lion king believes, as his father had taught him, that the stars are former lion kings who have gone before him and now watch over him.

Timon, the meerkat brags, “I don’t wonder. I know…they are fireflies. Fireflies that, uh, got stuck up in that..uh…big…uh bluish black thing.”

 “Gee,” Pumba reflects, “I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away.”

To which Timon responds to his friend, who has a well-known problem with flatulence, “Pumba, with you everything is gas!”

Now, I would like to think that while we are all intelligent, thinking people, we are also people of faith. It can’t just be all about gas, can it?  Of course not.

So the question is, how can we read the Bible, even call it the Word of God, with its stories of seven days of creation, how can we sing hymns about God as the creator of ALL things and not compromise our scientific principles?

Today hundreds of churches from all over the country and a host of denominations are coming together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science.  

For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. 

That is one of the reasons why I recently joined several thousand other clergy in signing “An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science,” which reads, in part:

“We...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....

“We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”

That being said, is there a way we can reconcile faith and science?

Stephen Jay Gould, who has written extensively about religion and science, offers a fairly simple answer to this complex question that reflects the thinking of many scientists and theologians—and is, in my mind, a good place to start.

His answer would be that, no, there is not, and need not be, a conflict between religion and science. Religion and science represent two different and distinct ways of approaching reality. Put perhaps too simply, science covers the “how”; religion covers the “why” and the “ought” of our existence.

This is how he puts it in his very clever way of writing: “To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.”

To put it another way: science, by definition, is trying to use what can be seen and known by our human faculties to gain knowledge about our natural world. It uses the scientific method—experimentation—to verify theories about how nature works, based on the evidence we can see.

And, in the province of religion, faith works in just the opposite way. Faith, in order to be faith, seeks knowledge based on what cannot be seen. In fact, if faith is based on what is seen, based on evidence, it ceases to be faith. Listen to the definition of faith we just read from Hebrews 11:

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

The problem is, if we start mixing the provinces of faith and science, faith ceases to be faith, and science ceases to be science.

But if we are to believe evolution, what are we to do with the creation stories, like the one in our Old Testament reading this morning? 

All we need do is turn to the early church leaders.

The great Biblical scholar and saint of the third century church, Origen, raised doubt in the Christian community about the value of reading this particular story from Genesis literally.

Origen insisted that readers of the Bible must learn to distinguish between stories that are true and factual (like the crucifixion of Jesus and the cleansing of the temple) and those that are true and not factual (like the story of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son.)

He wrote, “Was there ever a Jew who was wounded by thieves and rescued by a Samaritan; was there a particular son who left home and wasted his inheritance? Who’s to know? More importantly, does it matter?

“The power of these stories is independent of whether they actually happened in time and space. They are true, in as much as they tell us something about human nature and the will of God.”

Origen refused to accept that light and darkness existed (the first day in the Genesis creation account) before there were a sun and moon and stars (which were created on the fourth day).

He refused to believe that God took an evening stroll in the Garden and that the maker of heaven and earth couldn’t find Adam and Eve when they hid from him.

Origin believed that these ‘absurdities’ as he called them, were hints that God wanted these stories to be read in an all together different way, not as history but as “truth in the semblance of history”, as he called it. Truth embedded in metaphor, parable, poetry, fiction—true, even if not factual.

Today, scientific knowing and other ways of knowing – intuition, imagination, and faith – have been too easily cast into opposing camps.

What a shame; what a loss. We gain nothing and lose too much by pitting theology and science against each other. I don’t believe science is the enemy of theology. I don’t believe that theology should take the place of science.

Science and faith are intended by God to be complementary ways of knowing, not opposing ways.

That’s why Timon, Pumba, and Simba can all be “right” in what they “know” from the heavens. Three ways of knowing.

Clueless Pumba possesses the scientific knowledge that describes the physical reality, as best as science has been able to describe it.

Timon, despite his obvious closed-minded pride, has an imaginative knowledge that, if he controls his pride, can animate creativity.

And Simba, the Lion King, has the truth of faith, a deeper knowing that speaks to a spiritual reality.

 The truth is, theology and science are related, but different, like oranges and apples. I believe that theology does in fact teach us the ‘whys’ of the world and science teaches us the ‘hows’. I believe that they offer different kinds of truths both of which are needed for creation to thrive.

I believe that scripture’s truth is given in many forms and formats: history, poetry, parable, myth, visions, metaphor and always through the lens of life as we know it.

I believe that science should be taught in classrooms and laboratories and theology taught in homes and faith communities and religion classes.

Biblical writers were not interested in documenting nature or history or the history of nature. The authors of our texts, both oral and written, were compelled to keep alive the faith of a people who had come to discern a creator whose love of creation could be known in and through and among the created. A love far more mysterious, far less knowable than even Intelligent Design.

So I would like to suggest that we never fear to know whatever God allows us to know and always distrust restrictions on learning.

May we trust enough to liberate the classroom from theology and faithful enough to liberate the Creator from science.

And may we always celebrate together (and in our hearts) the One who is in and beyond science, in and beyond scripture, in and beyond us and all creation.

The ineffable one, the giver of life and life beyond life—the God who is even greater than Intelligent Design.     Amen!