Progressive Christians Uniting

Creation, Science, and God

A sermon preached at All Saints Church, May 21, 2006

From Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor tells some wonderful stories. Here’s one:

A lone cowboy is riding across the range, that beautiful open country out where (as the old song says) the deer and the antelope play. The cowboy approaches a herd of buffalo, dismounts, walks up to one of the animals, looks it over, and says: “Yuk! Just look at you. Look at that matted hair, those bloodshot eyes, that foul breath. Yuk!” Then the cowboy mounts his horse and rides off into the sunset.

The buffalo thinks for a moment, then turns to another buffalo and says, “You know, we seldom hear that kind of thing around here. But I think I’ve just heard a discouraging word.”

Although many of us thought the issues of creation and science and God had been worked through several decades ago – we are today hearing some discouraging words from our Christian fundamentalist sisters and brothers, denying Darwin’s theory of evolution and affirming the literal truth of the Genesis story of creation in six days, 6,000 years ago. Today I don’t intend to allow you to be discouraged for long. So now to Creation, Science and God.

A couple of years ago, Mary Regas and I had the rich privilege of going through the Rose Center for Earth and space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The new Hayden Planetarium is an architectural masterpiece, but the most impressive part of our experience was to observe the wonder on the faces of the throngs of children as they romped through the planetarium.

During the 1920s, Edwin Hubble had access to the 100 inch telescope on Mount Wilson California, the biggest in the world at that time. In 1929, he discovered that the universe is expanding in all directions. This discovery remains one of the best pieces of evidence in support of the “Big Bang” theory of creation.

At the Rose Center for Earth and Space, we were gathered inside the planetarium to experience the “Big Bang.” As I said, Hubble’s universal expansion gives us the strongest piece of evidence we have about our origins. If the cosmos is growing, it was smaller yesterday than today – and a year ago, smaller still. The further back we go, the smaller the cosmos must have been.

By following this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, we know there must have been a time when the entire universe existed as a tiny point and some explosion triggered its rapid growth. As far as scientists can tell, that cataclysmic event occurred nearly 14 billion years ago. Its name is now part of our popular culture; “The Big Bang.”

Let’s face it. The “Big Bang” is bizarre. It suggests that an explosion roughly 14 billion years ago created all space and matter and energy within a fireball that initially could have passed through the eye of a needle. This mind-boggling scenario raises many questions. However, of all the stories yet devised about the birth of the universe, the “Big Bang” is the one best supported by solid scientific evidence. Nearly everyone in the community of astrophysicists now accepts the “Big Bang” theory of creation.

We left the experience of that unimaginable energetic speck, from which the entire universe started, and walked down the cosmic pathway in the planetarium with beautiful mysterious pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope showing distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago. We walked with the time clock showing us the evolution of the universe.

Watching all those awe-filled children and young people so engrossed in this display of science, it was a discouraging word that I was forced to reflect on recent actions of Boards of Education throughout the U.S. trying to downgrade the teaching of evolution in state public schools. Christian fundamentalists pride themselves on taking a bold stand against a scientific theory they regarded as a threat to “creationist beliefs” in the origin of the universe and all life within it.

I have no interest in demonizing the “creationists” who believe the creation story in the Book of Genesis is the literal truth about the beginning of life. They sincerely believe the world was created like it is told in the Bible. In the beginning, God shaped the earth, hung the sun and moon in the heavens, put birds and animals in the creation, then made man, and out of his side created a woman as a companion. God finished it all in six days and on the seventh day God rested. It was the Sabbath. And God proclaimed the creation was very good. This was 6,000 years ago.

This inerrancy of the Bible is again a driving force in American politics. Kevin Phillips in his brilliant new best selling book, American Theocracy, says Christian fundamentalism has taken over the Republican Party. Their clash with science has seeded a number of serious controversies: a bible based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution and big bang theory, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of possible fuel depletion and opposition to stem cell research. Phillips contends we may be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial in 1925. A trial of John Scopes teaching the theory of evolution in his classroom in Tennessee pitted the brilliant, highly celebrated lawyer Clarence Darrow defending Scopes, against the silver tongued orator, William Jennings Bryan, who said the Genesis account of creation is scientifically true.

The Scopes trial was fictionalized a number of years ago in the play Inherit the Wind and also in a movie. The forward of the play has some very prophetic and provocative words: Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theater. It is not 1925. The stage direction set the time as “not long ago.” It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.

That tomorrow is here, for the evolution controversy has broken out all over with great passion. With the political power of the religious right in the Republican Party, they are seeking to pass laws requiring creationism to be taught in public schools. They call it scientific creationism, others call it Intelligent Design; they want it taught as science alongside the theory of evolution. They say scientific facts can be marshaled to support the Genesis account of creation; so it should have equal time with the heretical teaching of The Big Bang and evolution.

Kevin Phillips says the religious right voices have the President’s ear. He relates this episode. In late 2003, when the Grand Canyon bookstore began selling a creationist interpretation of the grand canyon’s origin. At that time, seven national geological organizations wrote to caution the National Park Service against “giving the impression that it approves of the anti-science movement known as young earth creationism or endorses the advancement of religious tenets as science.” Against the recommendation of the Park Service’s senior geologist, the book remains on sale. Startling!

To take the Genesis story of creation literally in 2006 is bizarre, puzzling, off putting. The contemporary mind finds it untenable. If you want to take the Bible seriously, you cannot take it literally.

Living faithfully with the scientific claims placed before us and with the authority of the Bible is no small issue. It is a huge, huge challenge.

One day two people were having a conversation on an airplane about the essence of their respective professions- one an astronomer, the other a theologian. The astronomer said, “Well, to me theology is simple – in my mind you could take the whole Christian faith and put it into one phrase: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’” Not to be outdone in statements of superficiality, the theologian responded. “Your field is simple too; all the science of astronomy could be expressed in one sentence: ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star – how I wonder what you are.’”

Creation, science and God have complex, deep dimensions. So I urge you not to discount the claims of science in your devotion to God and the authority of the Bible. Remember God’s first commandment: you shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your strength and with all your heart. This is the first great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the laws and the prophets.

Three implications emerge from this understanding of creation, let’s look at them quickly.

First, remember the Book of Genesis is a statement of faith and not a book of science. As the ingenious poets describe the creation of the cosmos and the human family, their intention is not to be a literal reporting of what happened. Rather it is a proclamation of faith: “In the beginning God…” It doesn’t matter if the universe had its beginning with a big bang billions of years ago or whether human beings evolved over the eons – back of it all, in it all, through it all is God. That is the foundation of life. Genesis is a bold statement of the deepest belief – untinged by the least hint of speculation. In the beginning God.

Second, there is no fear in truth. There is no conflict in the scientific pursuit of truth and our deepest beliefs in God. God wants our minds and our hearts. The journey is open ended. To fear the star of truth, to refuse to follow the truth wherever it leads, is to forfeit the future. God save us from a religion that has a closed mind – hidebound to tradition, fearful of new discoveries, intolerant of radical departures from custom. Wash your hands of it. Be drawn to a religion that Jesus revealed, a religion of an open mind, forward looking, regarding the mind as a sacred instrument and the pursuit of truth a sacred duty. In the religion of Jesus, there is no fear of the new because our deepest conviction is that God is truth.

Third, you and I are made in the Creator God’s image. There is great power in that affirmation.

When you and I participate in the process of creating something for life – however simple – and offer it up to God; when we work with diligence and joy and a great contempt for the shoddy; when we offer our lives to something greater than we are and try to give shape to the ongoing business of creating a world at peace and love and unity with itself – oh yes, when we do this, there flows into our lives the very power that created the world and sustains it.

If you are to understand how this belief is rooted in our religious faith, you must come with me back to the very beginning of human history.

As the Creator God raises the curtain on the stage that God has so carefully prepared, we see man and woman, throbbing with earth’s own vitalities. They are unique because in some mysterious way they are like their Creator.

And at the deepest level this means that they, too, must participate in the creative process; they, too, are workers in the ongoing business of creation.

And the pressure of that divine thumbprint, the design of that sacred image on their souls, would mark their identity and their destiny.

Incredible, maybe! Yet it has happened. MacNeill Dixon has written these fascinating words: “Had I been present at the birth of the planet, and some archangel had turned to tell me that the blazing mass I was watching, this whirlpool of unbelievable fire, with its heat of roughly 50 million degrees, this sideshow of celestial fireworks, was on its way to cool and be the cradle of empires and civilizations, that it was on its way to boasting the Parthenon and Michelangelo and DaVinci, and would find room for such things as music and mathematics; that it would feel the tug of war between optimists and pessimists; that it would admit the arrival of Homers and Beethovens and Napoleons and Lincolns — I want to say I would have listened respectfully, since that is my training, to an archangel predicting such an incredibly occurrence out of fire and dust, but I would have determined never to talk with a demented, deranged angel again!

It was impossible and yet it happened! It happened because these pygmy creatures – men and women – were fashioned with God’s own thumbprint pressed so deeply upon them that it could never be effaced. God has made us in such a way that we must participate in that creative process, we must work, we must offer something back to life if we are to be healthy in our souls and strong in our bodies. Then we flow with the tide of the universe.

Whether your task is to write books or to dig water wells, to whip into shape ideas or homes; whether your task is to prepare for a career or to make retirement meaningful; whether you are asked to create profits or to develop character in children; whether your life is to paint houses or to hang beautiful pictures in the minds of youth, to pick grapes or to create symphonies, to choreograph a Broadway musical or organize your office; whether it is to heal the hurts of a nation or to recover health for yourself – these efforts to create, to work, to open yourself to the life-giving process are the marks of God’s image upon you. Without this, human life loses its meaning and its wholeness.

No tranquilizer ever compounded by the pharmaceutical companies induces sleep as quickly as the whisper of conscience, “This has been a good day. I’ve created something.”

Oh God, help us be creators and tap into your divine power, that power that made the heavens and the earth, that power that holds the stars in their courses, that power that raised Jesus from the dead. Oh God, give us that and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Amen.

Posted under: Founders