"Evolution & Humanity: Nature's Co-Creators"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
February 7, 2009

If you’ve been in a bookstore lately, you can’t help but know 2009 is Lincoln’s and Darwin’s 200th birthday.  There have been more books written on Lincoln than anyone else, and this year there are several new ones, but for once, I think Darwin has outdone him.  There are literally dozens of new books on Darwin, his theory of evolution and his cultural and scientific legacy.  Leave it to the marketing geniuses to sell books during a recession by tapping into Americans’ fascinations with science, celebrity, and cultural controversy – not necessarily in that order.  There are birthday celebrations for him all over the world, Television specials, and more than 900 churches and synagogues will celebrate Evolution Weekend.  Along with more than 12,000 ministers and rabbis across the country and around the world I have signed onto the Clergy Letter Project to publicly state that religion and science, two fields of critical importance to humans, should be seen as complementary rather than confrontational.

Scientists and rational thinkers are energized.  We are making a big deal over a scientific theory, trying to popularize evolution.  Darwin will never be on the cover of People magazine, he wouldn’t have wanted that even if they’d had it back then, but we’re doing what we can to turn him into a celebrity for our time.  Now I’ve been involved with science all my life, I really love it, and I can wax poetic about some of my favorite scientists – like Joseph Priestly, discoverer of oxygen and a Unitarian minister.  But, in my soon to be 59 years – my birthday is Thursday – I have never seen people rally around a scientist quite like this.  Darwin and Evolution have become symbols –icons representing a cause.  They are fitting symbols for modern science. Darwin’s theory, sublime in its simplicity, has produced more insights into the workings of nature than any other, and it brings unity to all the biological sciences and sends branches into other areas as well.

Darwin richly deserves praise for his work, but most of us rational thinkers are not prone to hero worship or to lavishing adulation on dead scientists.  It is not in our nature to be doing this.  The reason for all the hoopla about Darwin’s 200th birthday is a growing backlash against so-called Creation Science and Intelligent Design.  The controversy has been raging for a couple of decades now, and the scientists, having won a few significant battles, have issued a call to arms.  Biologist Kenneth Miller, an able defender of the theory of evolution, sees Intelligent Design not as a scientific theory, but just the opposite.  He says the proponents of Intelligent Design, while unable to use their theory to explain almost any biological facts other than to say the Creator made them that way, are attacking the modern scientific process.  This is what has gotten us so excited.  Intelligent Design seems to be an attack on reason and the rational philosophy of science which have seemingly served us well.
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The connections bwtween science and religion intrigue me as they do many UUs.  This is the fourth year in a row I have participated in Evolution Sunday.  In my sermon last year, Unitarian Universalists For Intelligent Design?, which is still on our website if you are interested, I talked about my incredulity back in the early 1990s when I learned people were still denouncing the theory of evolution.  All my engineer colleagues and my UU church friends dismissed the anti-evolutionists as backwoods rubes who would soon be laughed off the stage.  When that didn’t happen, and the numbers of believers in Creationism and Intelligent Design continued to grow until it included a majority of Americans, we began to feel the American way of life was truly threatened.

When the brilliant conservative intellect, William F. Buckley, Jr. took up the cause of Creationism, he posed a serious challenge to the cornerstone of biology.  Sensing a threat to the very soul of science, Kenneth Miller and others took on Buckley in a highly publicized debate on Public Television in 1997.  Buckley was no scientist, but he gave voice to a deep suspicion that amoral scientific exploration has led directly to a “dangerous and destructive materialism that threatens the heart and soul of our civilization and culture.”    The PBS debate did not resolve the issues; on the contrary, battles sprung up in school boards, museums, and political campaigns across the country.  Creation Science morphed into Intelligent Design Theory, or ID for short, a much more sophisticated approach to creation which acknowledges evolution can happen.  Scientists like Miller took ID seriously and went into courtrooms to present the case for the science of evolution.

It was good they did take ID seriously, because ID proponents were building a strategy to attack evolution as we understand it.  One of ID’s leading theorists, Dr. Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, argued that some structures, such as the eye, are too complex at the biochemical level to be adequately explained as a result of evolutionary mechanisms and thus are the result of intelligent design, a theory called “irreducible complexity.”  An easily understood example of irreducible complexity is the mousetrap.  A mousetrap must have all five of its components to function.  The argument is that the five pieces wouldn’t just somehow assemble without a higher intelligence to see the efficacy of such a construction.  Behe used the bacterial flagellum as his biological example of an irreducibly complex structure.  The flagellum are long threadlike tails which propel the bacterium through liquid.  An intricate biochemical motor built into its base powers the flagellum.  An artist’s rendering of one is the top image on the insert I included in your order of service.  Scientists freely admit they don’t know how it evolved.  “Consisting of 30 or more individual proteins, the complexity of the flagellum and its motor has made it a favorite for those who insist that evolution cannot account for such structures within a living cell.”

Irreducible complexity is the most widely quoted rationale for ID, but ID theorists have put forth several complex arguments which demonstrate their scientifically informed grasp of biology.  They knew the gaps in evolutionary theory and challenged scientists to prove their arguments wrong.  However, the lack of a current explanation for how a particular organism evolved does not mean science will never come up with one.  After ID folks made the Bacterial flagellum their poster child for irreducible complexity, biologists went looking for another organism which contained just part of the flagellum’s machinery – and they found one.  At the 2005 federal Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, Kenneth Miller was able to refute the irreducible complexity claim by showing a biological organism, called a type three secretory system, which looks very similar to the bacterial flagellum but which contains only a sub set of the flagellum’s proteins and performs a different function.  You can see this organism in the bottom image on the insert.  He showed how the complex motor driving a bacterial flagellum could have evolved.  I can’t get into the details in a sermon, but Miller’s book tells the fascinating story of how the science of evolution has addressed the claims of Intelligent Design.  Miller’s testimony in the Dover trial essentially destroyed every single argument put forth by the ID folks.  Evolution won the battle in a route.  In fact, the judge ruled that Intelligent Design theory is not science but essentially religious in nature. 
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Hooray for our side!  Science was vindicated and we shouldn’t have any more trouble out of the ID crowd.  Right!?  ID is not science and we can ban it from classrooms where we want our children only taught real science.  Well, sorry folks, it isn’t going to work that way.  Traditional Christians aren’t about to give up.  ID theorists will try another tack.  The Creation Museum right here in our back yard doesn’t even care that it’s so-called science is full of holes, it opened 2 years after the Dover trial to huge crowds oblivious to the fact their side had lost.

In my sermon last year, I said the problem is not really about science - it's about Religion.  In it I gave some of the history of how at first Evolution seemed a challenge to traditional Christian beliefs about creation and how social Darwinism, linked with Eugenics and the Holocaust made many people fearful of Evolution.  Again, I refer you to that sermon if you want more on the history.  Saying the problem is about religion and not science suggests a simple solution – separate science from religion and let each stand on its own merits.  Saying the problem is about religion and not science is not quite accurate, however.  It leaves out the fact that Evolution really does scare people who think it excludes God from any role in creation.  Science caused a problem for religion, so, we can’t just separate the two and go on our merry way.

The traditional Christian view of creation is God had and has a grand plan for the world and for people’s role in it.  God is the Intelligent Designer.  The way humans turned out was God’s intention from the git go, because He intends for us to be his agents, to carry out his will, and we were made in his image, godlike, in order to do so.  Evolution says Humans, and everything else for that matter, might have turned out differently if only some tiny snippet of  DNA had folded left instead of right a few hundred thousand years ago.  Had the porpoise’s DNA been a little different back then, they might be the dominant species on earth today.  It is absolutely amazing humans did evolve.  Think of all the conditions that had to be the way they were for us to happen, but according to evolution, our presence here in this form wasn’t a foregone conclusion.  Evolution removes humans from the center of the universe.  If we evolved - with no particular plan, what role does this leave for God’s plan?  That idea really does give a lot of people heartburn.

We depend on modern science, symbolized by Evolution, for important knowledge about our existence.  Because of this, science claims unique access to truth and we have given it almost priestly power.  To some, it seems science has tried to displace humans doing God’s will as the central purpose of life.  Conversely, science assumes almost no responsibility for the consequences of its discoveries and will not obligate itself to seek justice or compassionate applications of its inventions.  Scientists and liberal religionists can help resolve this dilemma - not by calling people names who fear evolution's implications for their religious beliefs, but by showing how science and religion can work together to help deduce a purpose for our lives and give hope for our future.  
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It is time to end the power struggle between science and religion, and liberal religion, as embodied in Unitarian Universalism, is uniquely positioned to broker the peace.  UUism brings together human reason and spiritual insight.  We have a theological system which embraces the workings of evolution.  We find the natural world awesome, full of things that peak our curiosity, and a strong motivator to make meaning of it all.  

One place we find meaning is in the natural world itself.  We are awestruck by the observation that the universe had to be structured in just this particular way, or human life wouldn’t be possible.  Some see the hand of an Intelligent Designer in creating these conditions.  Maybe there was one, but while there is no proof of that, the magnificent fact remains that the material conditions of our universe contained all that was necessary to produce human life on planet Earth.  Nature has also conspired to continually change the living landscape of our planet and correspondingly to endow life with a robust ability to adapt to change.  We see a grand design to life; it’s name is evolution, and with or without an intelligent designer there is divinity in it.

While nature inspires us and challenges us to understand all the hows and whys of our existence, meaning in our world is primarily created by humanity itself.  Humanity began as all life on this planet, as organisms struggling to survive and thrive, but we have outpaced all the rest until we have become the planet’s masters.  We were not content to stay in one ecological niche where we were particularly well suited.  We developed technologies which have allowed us to live in almost every place on Earth.  We were not content to just eke out a living in small family or tribal units; we evolved big brains so we could master the abstract concepts required to live in larger and larger groups.  We are not content with taking life as it comes, we are driven to know why, to make meaning out of life and to live for a purpose.
Our big brains have enabled us to develop things on such a large scale we now create changes in Earth’s entire ecosystem.  Until very recently, only Nature could do such a thing.  In some ways, we now have more power than Nature.  In the sense that we can use our brains to find ways to adapt to changes in our environment, we have transcended the need for our bodies to evolve.  We have come to understand that we must be careful with our power because we really don’t know all we need to about the consequences of our creations, and our mistakes might have cataclysmic consequences.  One of our purposes now has to be to help life on our planet survive and thrive.  It is becoming clearer and clearer we need to work with nature, to learn from it, if we are to be successful in this goal. 

Our society needs scientists to help us construct meanings out of the workings of nature. Learning from nature must go beyond the work of discovery and classification (although the deep observance of nature required for this work is a necessary first step) to include understanding what meaning nature can bring us.  Scientists can help us relate the specific the information uncovered thru research to the complex systems in which it functions.  They can help us connect the micro to the macro. And, we need scientists to help us foresee and participate in the applications of their discoveries.

Our society needs the rest of us to participate in the application of scientific discoveries, too, to take part in the ethical decisions needed to govern their use.  The current state of medical care in this country is one place we must do this.  Medical care is not an example environmentalists typically use to illustrate how we interact with our world, but it gives a concrete example of how we can act to improve the health of our people and the well-being of our planet.  In order to improve health care we need medical professionals to help us know how to administer new cures, and we need government to help us make the system of deploying them more equitable.  We have plenty of evidence that these things will not happen for all of us if we are not engaged in the process.  Health care consumers including people like us must get clarity on what we really want and need, and healthcare providers, lawyers, consumer groups, and others, need to work out fair ways to provide health care to everyone.  It is up to us to partner with science and nature to determine and create the kind of world we want.
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Human life on this planet is its most remarkable feature.  Some say we are the purpose of evolution, that human life is the universe become conscious of itself - so the universe can know itself.  Whether you accept that or not, we humans are still left to determine what purpose we will serve.  I hope we will find it in ourselves not to use our tremendous, new-found powers to destroy, but instead to partner with nature, the awesome power that brought us here, to create a more wholesome future for the earth.
So might this be.