Evolutionary Biology and Faith
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, January 31, 2010

Readings

From The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
From The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough

Message: Evolutionary Biology and Faith

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

So much is unfolding,
and we have only begun,
only begun to imagine justice and mercy
so much is unfolding.

I know it doesn’t always feel like that.
I know that some days it feels like
instead of a flower unfolding,
revealing its beauty,
we have a thread unraveling:

conflicts, climate change, consternation, gridlock, corruption.
I know it feels, sometimes,
like we human beings have reached the end of the road,
that progress has ceased.

I know it feels that way, sometimes.
But I have faith:
so much is unfolding.
so much is still in bud.

I have faith:
and I also have science.

When you step back, and look at the whole,
it is reassuring.
We are still evolving,
and although there are challenges,
the impulses of nature are good,
corrective to our worst habits.

so much is unfolding,
and we are just part of the whole –
just a part of it,
and that’s good news to me.

We are still changing,
and that’s good news to me.

We have the ability
to adapt to a changing world,
and that’s good news to me.

We will thrive, and so will all life,
when we honor our longings for cooperation,
and that’s good news to me.

So let’s talk about evolution and faith.

I’ve studied evolution and biology off and on,
but I know that some of you know even more about this than I do.
There are lots of details,
which I’m not going to get into,
but I invite you to explore and discuss.

What I want to talk about today are a few general principles,
ones that I think matter a great deal for
people of a liberal religious faith –
for us.

Our spiritual ancestors recognized
that evolutionary biology was helpful and important,
that the new science
matched up nicely with their commitment
to progress and change,
their hopes for the future.

Life which was capable of change and growth
was exciting to our foremothers and forefathers
who believed in a god which called us
to change and growth.
It all made sense to them.

It didn’t hurt that Charles Darwin was raised as a Unitarian,
or that he was married to an active Unitarian.
Darwin himself was sometimes an agnostic,
sometimes an Anglican,
and sometimes a Unitarian.

Unitarian ideas about progress, reason, science,
the beauty of creation, the beneficence of god,
all infused Darwin’s religious and philosophical commitments –
although it was, appropriately,
the science that mattered to him most.

This church, in particular,
is what it is because of the encounter with evolution.
Dr. Thomas Kerr, a medical doctor turned Baptist preacher,
read The Origin of Species,
and started preaching a more liberal message.
The Baptists here in Rockford suggested he might no longer be one of them,
to which he had to agree.
He resigned his pulpit.
The Unitarians, who were at the time without a minister,
asked Dr. Kerr to come be their preacher,
and he, holding Unitarian ideas, agreed.

Some fifty Baptists came with him,
and they reincorporated as
The Church of the Christian Union,
with just over 100 members.
That was in 1870,
and when Dr. Kerr retired thirty years later,
the congregation had some 500 members –
one out of every 60 residents of Rockford.

Although we embraced evolution,
many denominations did not.
And sometimes it seems like we’re still there,
still back in 1870,
with people saying they don’t “believe” in evolution,
as if the facts depended on their assent,
as if refusing to believe in gravity
would make us float up into the air.

Although our civic discourse has stayed still,
evolutionary science has not.
And clarity and new ideas about evolution
have things to teach us.

Start here:
We are not our own.
Earth forms us, human leaves on nature’s growing vine.
We are not our own.

Some billions of years ago – four maybe –
chemistry gave way to biology,
and some form of life began.
Shortly thereafter, it died.
It was not suited to its environment.

And this happened, probably, over and over again.
But some form of life
was suited to the swampy hot mess
that was the earth.

Something survived.
Grew.
The ancestor of bacteria and Archaea (ar-key-a),
archaea being the life
which lives in the vents of underwater volcanoes and such things.
And this something was also the ancestor
of Eukaryotes –
slimes and molds and algae, mostly,
also insects and birds and plants and grasses and trees
and fish and oh, yeah, mammals.
And mushrooms.
And so on.

A colleague of mine,
when I mentioned on facebook
that I was looking for some ideas for readings for this service,
suggested this little ditty:
roses are red, violets are blue,
you were once slime, in a big pond of goo.

Silly, but true.

We are not our own.
More poetically –
the lines from this morning’s choral introit:
A fire-mist and a planet,
a crystal and a cell,
a starfish and a saurian (that’s a dinosaur)
a face turned from the sod –
some call it evolution
and others call it God.

Dr. Kerr, and the rest of our anscestors,
called it both – evolution and God,
and it made perfect sense to them.

Earth forms us, and we are not alone.
Most of our DNA is shared.

When something works –
breathing, heartbeats, skin, etc, etc, etc,
then nature keeps doing that.
Bricolage, Urusala Goodnenough calls it,
a kind of collage,
where we take what there is,
and we put it together,
tweak it a little –
but evolution isn’t creation,
it’s editing,
and we have so much in common with everything else.

We are not alone,
and we are not our own.

Our emergence into this world is so recent.
We’ve done a lot to alter the environment
in our short time here,
and we seem to be accelerating our efforts
to change the face of the earth,
but we are, truly, only a strand in a wide wide web.

Not only, then, are we part of one human family,
we are part of one family of life itself.

This is an invitation to humility.
If the mutations had been a little different,
well, we’d still be slime in a big pond of goo.

Evolution is not progressive.
It is not the case that all this has been leading up to us,
evolution is change, that’s all.
Organisms and species are capable of growth and change,
but nothing says that they will,
or that the changes will be for the best.
Mutations are sometimes for the worst.

We are not the end of the road,
we are not the purpose of evolution.
We should be more humble about our place in the scheme of things.

It would do us,
and the earth,
some good.

We are not the only animals to perform rituals,
bury their dead,
laugh,
communicate with symbols,
use tools,
remember,
or love.

So much is unfolding, so much is still in bud,
and we don’t know what the future holds.

If we are not the purpose of evolution,
what is?

We’re getting beyond the science very quickly here,
because, according to the science,
evolution doesn’t have a “purpose.”

It has a way of working.
Organisms have mutations.
If those mutations are helpful in creating more offspring,
then they spread.
Over time, these mutations can constitute a new species.

This is the key – helpful in creating more offspring.
And this doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It happens in a volcano vent,
but not in a vacuum.

Biology is always contextual,
evolution is always specific.

If you are a big ol dinosaur,
and you thrive on warm temperatures,
and lots of big plants,
and an asteroid hits the earth,
and blocks out the sun with dust,
and temperatures drop,
and the plants die,
well, the things that served you well
twenty minutes ago
no longer serve.

Every species exists in a niche,
and adapts to that niche.

Humans have thrived because we were appropriate to a niche –
and then we did something pretty amazing –
we created our own niches.
We tilled the land and grew our own food.
We build out own shelter.

And now – we save lives that 10 years ago,
let alone 500 or 2000 years ago,
never would have had a chance.
We get on a plane and travel around the world
in half a day.
We make families and children
of many many colors, shades, and hues.

And now we stand on the verge:
to understand our own genome,
to create therapies based on genetics,
to mutate our own genes for what we imagine is the good,
to evolve ourselves.

And we confront, in this moment,
some critical questions:
will only some benefit from these new advances?
will we learn to live in harmony with our environment,
or continue our habit of destroying it for our own needs?

The science of evolutionary biology won’t help us with these questions:
the science is neutral.
It is natural for a member of a species,
and for a species itself,
to maximize its chances to reproduce itself.
A striving for life is at the heart of life,
without it we would not exist.

We need to bring our faith commitments to these questions.
Of course, our faith commitments are suggested by the science:
the fact that we are not our own,
that all life is our relative,
this is important to our faith.

The fact that species thrive when the cooperate with their environment,
not simply when they dominate it,
that sustainability is essential to success,
this is important to our faith.

The fact evolution is always contextual,
and we have the power to create a context
where diversity and beauty flourish,
this is important to our faith.

We have a unique opportunity,
in this age,
to be conscious participants in evolution,
not just of ourselves,
but of many other species.

Will we be each for ourselves,
come hell or high water –
and, with the path we are on,
high water is coming –
will we be each for ourselves
or will we be for others?

The long sweep of history gives me comfort.
Knowing we are not alone gives me comfort.

We are part of life, and life is marvelous.
The sycamore by the river.
Darwin’s beautiful flowers, designed to attract the right bug,
the song of a bird to another.

We are part of life, and life is marvelous.
Reason, creativity, love –
these are the outcomes of evolution,
and for them we are grateful.

Things are still unfolding,
and though our challenges are great,
the resources to meet those challenges are present with us,
the gifts of evolutionary biology –
our concern for each other,
our ability to laugh,
our ability to plan, and execute the plan,
our fragility and our strength –
all these things which we will need to call upon
to meet the days before us.

And if we find ourselves without the vision,
the skills or the talent
to do what must be done,
then perhaps a mutation will appear,
and we can favor it,
and we can evolve our way forward.
It’s happened before.

Today is going to be a joyful day.
Don’t be afraid of some change.

Don’t be afraid of some change.

That line from the choral introit:
some call it evolution, others call it God.

Dr. Kerr called it both –
and here’s the point:
evolution isn’t some force from the outside,
that makes species change,
that favors some and disfavors others.
Evolution is the process of life itself.

Mutations are fairly common,
they are happening all the time.
Change is happening all the time.
Life isn’t static or stable,
just like the universe isn’t static or stable,
but made up of vibrating always changing strings.

Some call it evolution, others call it God.

God isn’t, in my view, some force from the outside,
which makes our fortunes change,
that favors some and disfavors others.
God is the process of life itself.

Our longing for community, for love,
and our work for these things –
that’s God at work through us,
just like evolution works through life.

Don’t be afraid of some change,
today’s going to be a joyful day.

Change is happening, all the time.
We are conscious of it, aware of it,
and that makes things complicated.

But the life which maketh all things new
is in us,
and around us,
and in all our brothers and sisters,
from the starfish to the slime,
and things are still unfolding.

Who knows how they will unfold next?
Isn’t that exciting?
Life isn’t done.
The die isn’t cast.
We are still in bud,
and I think that’s fantastic news.