Genesis 1:1-5

War of the Worlds

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.  It was exactly 150 years ago, that Charles Darwin wrote his now infamous book, On the Origin of the Species. And it was exactly 200 years ago that Charles Darwin born.  Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 – as was Abraham Lincoln.

Darwin’s theory of evolution has been challenged ever since.  People took sides.  It created a sort of “War of the Worlds!” with science on one side and religion on the other – each diametrically opposed to the other.  But isn’t that limiting? Of course it is.

 

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?

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 three years ago I joined eleven 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” of our existence.

This is how he puts it: “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.”

That’s great, you say, 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 (he sites the crucifixion of Jesus and the cleansing of the temple) and those that are true and not factual.

Of those 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 an all powerful and all knowing 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.

Isn’t that a shame? 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 and 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.

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 church and Sunday School classes.

The Bible is a gift from, and was inspired by God.  But so is our intelligence and our ability to learn the true nature of the physical laws that make our universe work.  Science and religion were meant to work together. 

Here is how I take it. As a Christian I believe in God, and that God created everything in the world, and there is a way that God did it. And there is a reason God did it the way God did it. But, what I think or what you think doesn’t alter one little bit the truth of how it all actually went down. So whatever science uncovers about the created world… it can only reveal a snippet of that truth. Any window that science OR theology opens can only be a view into the Truth as to what God accomplished. There is nothing to be fearful of.

If science discovers life on another planet… if science discovers there were four little bangs that preceded the big bang, if science discovers that people evolved directly from platypuses and not apes… that won’t shake my faith one little bit… I will just want to ask, what was God thinking… why did God choose to do it like that? How does Jesus’ death and resurrection relate to the redemption of the space creatures? Are they blessed with free will? Are they too plagued with sin?

You see, I trust that the open and fair discussion of any theological idea or scientific data can only lead to eventual insights into the truth as God designed it. Science can never embarrass my faith with a new discovery, nor will my faith lead me to reject an empirically verifiable scientific conclusion. Both enterprises should embrace an atmosphere of confident openness and exploration.

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.

Amen!