"The Cosmic Evolution Story: a Scientific Mythology"

The Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
February,24, 2008
Northern Hills Fellowship

Sermon

Welcome to our second service this month on the topic of Evolution. This would be the third if you count the one at Congregation Beth Adam where half of NHF showed up over there to see Rabbi Barr’s slide show on the Creation Museum. In honor of Charles Darwin’s 199th birthday February 12th, hundreds of churches across the country of many denominations held services to show that people of faith do believe in evolution. Two weeks ago I preached on how people on the Christian Right have embraced the anti-evolution Creationist movement because they feel their beliefs are under attack. I asserted that the fight over evolution is not really about science; it is about religion. I said that in order to help our children understand the Evolution vs. Creation Science disparity we should teach evolution and encourage children to do a comparative study of religions and religious philosophies. Let’s give our children more information so they can sort their own way thru this issue. This morning I don’t intend for us to re-join the battle over Creationism. I think religion and science can be mutual friends, and I want us to experience the spiritual side of science this morning.
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Understanding the natural world at a deep level, which is one way to define the practice of science, can evoke profound spiritual experiences. Intimacy with nature can be the basis for a very robust religious life. Descriptions and answers we take from science and our own relationships with nature can be just as powerful as the mythologies at the core of any of the world’s great religions. Humans need a story, a plausible explanation of what brought us into being and how we fit in. All religions use their creation stories; we might call ours an Evolution Story; to help people feel at home in the world, to help them feel connected to the interdependent web of existence. William James, author of “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” a classic study on the psychology of religion, said, “At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.” We need to know our world can sustain us.

This sermon is part of my series on different ways people know and experience spirituality. Religious Naturalism, the framework within which I will speak today, is one of the ways of knowing embraced by many Unitarian Universalists. Scientific naturalism has one core assumption, that all things in the universe come about thru natural causes, without resort to super-natural intervention. People who believe in this way tend to be rationalists – thinkers, who avoid emotional arguments and who don’t accept things on faith. Yet, some scientific naturalists, me among them, are also religious. For me, relating to the natural environment provides sustenance and direction for my life. Mine is not a sentimental view of nature yet through my naturalist’s perspective on the universe I find rich and vital stories which help me relate to life.
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The scientific story of creation has been retold under several names, The Great Story, The Universe Story, the Epic of Evolution, The Everything Seed, or as I have named it, The Cosmic Evolution Story. Cosmic because it deals with cosmology, the scientific study of the origin and structure of the universe. Evolution because the emergence of the atoms, stars, earth and life itself have followed processes most vividly described by the term evolution in its broadest sense. The Cosmic Evolution Story is both a naturalistic story in that it conforms to the scientific descriptions of nature as closely as we can make it, and it is a grand myth, which is regularly used for religious purposes. Why? Because it has all the attributes we need in a mythology for our time, one that can deliver the images, signs and messages to our young that will enable them to actively relate to their environment in ways that are wholesome for their futures.

According to the pre-eminent scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, the first function of a living mythology is "to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe...not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of being is the mystery of his own deep being as well." People need to know how to deal with the great questions of life – “How did we get here?”, “What will the future be?”, “What does death mean?” and so on. Mythologies and the spiritual practices which rely on them reduce our fear of life and death by explaining these great questions.

My life story, all of our lives’ stories are contained in the Cosmic Evolution Story, and like the stories of creation in the Bible, the Cosmic Evolution Story tells us how we got here and more. Let’s quickly cover part of the story. As you heard in our Story for All Ages this morning, in the beginning, everything there is was all in one place. Then, 14 billion years ago or so the Big Bang began a process of evolution on a vast, cosmic scale. Shortly after the Big Bang, Hydrogen and Helium were pretty much all that existed. After a few hundred million years, ripples in gravity started pulling all those individual particles in space together to form stars. The stars ignited in nuclear reactions and united into galaxies – a pretty friendly thing to do until the galaxies started running into each other. This caused lots of collisions and explosions-on a scale never yet seen even in the movies! In all this commotion, the other chemical elements, Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Silver, Iron, etc. formed for the first time and went sailing all over space. Some of those original molecules are in our lungs and are component parts of our bodies right now. Considering we’re made of 14 Billion year old atoms, I am 14 Billion plus 58 years old! And I’m proud of my age.

Fast forward about 10 Billion years, and we see our Sun being born out of the atoms left over from the explosion of a supernova. And Earth comes along then, the only planet in our solar system with the right balance of energy coming from its radioactive core and from the sun to maintain a moderate temperature to allow the complex molecules of life to form. Then according to professor of biology Ursula Goodenough, “a system got thrown together, apparently quite by chance, [which} allowed biomolecules to be synthesized by a sunlight-driven chemistry…And the instructions for constructing this system acquired the ability to be copied and inherited. That is, life emerged from non-life.” This story of astonishing emergence is no less awesome than the miracle stories of the Bible. As you know, the story goes on, and in the rest of the scientific creation story there are abundant tales of emergence inherent in everything that is alive. Listen to the joy Walt Whitman expresses in the miracles all around him:

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the
journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a
grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the
highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn
the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts
to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d
head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels.”
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Mythologies give us a sense of connectedness – to each other and to the universe - that we are not in this life alone. They help us make meaning in life. For example, genetic science tells us we have all evolved from a common ancestor and we share many of the same genes with not only gorillas but with mushrooms. All living organisms on the planet today share a huge number of genetic ideas. We yearn for connectedness to others, and now we realize we are genetically connected to all creatures. In fact we are connected all the way down. This means we are anything but alone in the world. This is more than scientific information; this is something to celebrate!
Joseph Campbell goes on to say, "The second function of a living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge and the sciences of the time… (In our own day, the world pictures of all the major religions are at least two thousand years out of date, and in that fact alone there is ground enough for a serious [psychological] break-off with reality.” In ancient times, before the widespread use of scientific methods gave us so many insights into the workings of nature, mythologies were based on the cosmologies of the time - their best understandings of the beginning and organization of the universe. That was fine, then, but when the age of reason began to make outdated concepts of the universe less acceptable to people, many turned away from traditional mythologies and found no compelling mythology to take their place. This phenomenon coincided in history roughly with the rise of the concept of freedom of belief. Now, many people individually search for ideas to piece together into their own world view, and they can end up feeling isolated and disconnected from community. I have been in this predicament. Coming together around a common mythology is an antidote for such isolation.
The unity we experience knowing we and everything else in the universe are made up of the same matter can help end our sense of separation. Remember what we heard in The Everything Seed, “We were there with all the stars and planets, all the rocks and oceans, plants and animals and people. Everything that is now, ever was, or ever will be was inside that first tiny seed.” “Our community of life shares the same air, soil, water, and Sun energy as we breathe, eat, drink, excrete and die together on Earth.” Having a sense of unity can aid people in coming together to fulfill important roles for our planet that only humans acting in concert can accomplish.
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We have talked about the cosmological aspect of a mythology – that is, the part which explains the big scheme of things and how humans are connected to it. Next we need to know what is the role of humans in this world. Again quoting Joseph Campbell, “The third function of a living mythology is to validate, support and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live. And the fourth is to guide him or her, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life.” We need our guiding mythology to tell us something about human life, death, and what we do in between.
Do human beings have a unique role to play? Are we here simply to try to ensure the survival of the fittest or is there some deeper purpose for humanity? We all learn that the basic mechanism of evolution is that plants and animals physically change sometimes, and if a change works well in their environment, they may have a better chance at survival. But, humans no longer need to physically evolve in order to survive. Because of our brain power we have learned to adapt to almost every environment on earth. Humans don’t need to evolve physically any more in order to survive on earth. So, while part of our job is to ensure our survival, because of our brains we will do that in a different way than evolution has worked up until now.

The level of function of human brains is unique in all of evolution, at least on this planet. In addition to learning how to observe our environment and survive the elements, we have developed the capacity to think abstractly. We can hold many ideas in our minds at the same time, and we feel compelled to make philosophical meaning out of them. In 1957 Julian Huxley wrote: “As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past and its possible future.” With our capacity to think abstractly, we explore, explain and conjecture about everything in the universe. Carl Sagan said the same thing beautifully in his television program, Cosmos: “We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.”

Cultural anthropologists tell us that when humans first evolved the ability to think abstractly, it was about survival. It helped us to create cultures which would allow us to live in communities. Living in large groups required humans to make more complex arrangements than they had living in family groups. And living in a more complex culture required a bigger brain. It seems evolution created the large human brain so we could better live in community with each other. Here then, I see evolution providing an important component of a mythology for our time. Our natural history, human cultural history, tells us our purpose as humans is to build community.

That each of us individually has a self-reflective spirit is an important part of who we are. How we use it is even more important. I quote quintessential thinker Albert Einstein, “A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
That is the direction the Cosmic Evolution Story is pointing us human beings. Building larger and larger community, including more and more of our world in our loving embrace is our evolutionary purpose. Let us go and make this happen.e

Campbell, Joseph. Myths To Live By. in Martignacco, Carole, “The Everything Seed Resource Guide,” Beaver’s Pond Press (Edina: 2003) 12.
Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford University Press (Oxford: 1998) 27.
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself (1855).
Goodenough, 73.
Campbell.
Gordon, Patricia. “Themes of The Universe Story/The Great Story/Epic of Evolution,” in The Everything Seed Resource Guide. 51.
Barlow, Connie. An Immense Journey:Religious Natualism and The Great Story, http://www.thegreatstory.org/ReligiousNaturalism.html (Dec 2003) 7.
Ibid. 9.
“The Everything Seed Resource Guide,” 13.