This page was updated 03/10/2008

Shall we pray to the great universe of change?

Shall we pray to distant galaxies, stardust, photons of light?

Shall we pray to tiny bits of matter, cells and their constituent parts,

And of their DNA, those tiny bits of cells that contain instructions that

Eventually create masses of cells that become plants, animals, and humans?

Or shall we pray to ourselves—our better selves, of course?

Shall we pray to icons, statues, and words created by human artifice?

Shall we pray to ideas, the mysterious and intangible products of our brains?

Or shall we pray at all, for what are prayers but projections of our needs?

This morning, I invite you to consider the great intangibles:

Love and hope, peace and justice, compassion and creativity.

Are these not worthy of serious intent, of constant attention, or our labor?

Then let us take time, regularly and frequently, to call them to mind,

In their abstract fullness and in the particular examples in our lives.

Let us remember friends who are sick or hurting, and those who have died.

Let us remember those who suffer, though we do not know them personally.

Let us call to heart all who work for meaningful peace and justice.

Call this attention prayer, its honored ancient name, or call it something else,

But do not fail to stop, cleanse the mind, and call to the fore those values

That encourage us to make the world a better place for all people. AMEN.

"Darwin’s Great Gift"

Charles Darwin gave us the intellectual foundation for a rational hope that the future will be better than the past. We now have a greater confidence that progress can overcome the ancient inertia that has limited human development throughout history. Where once the unchanging world was deemed perfection by philosophers and theologians alike, today we can imagine a dynamic and progressive universe, both in the immense distances of space and in the intimate closeness of genes and chromosomes. Not only are the times a-changing, once a revolutionary idea, but reality changes too!

1 Background

Make no mistake, there are millions of people who cannot imagine a dynamic and progressive world. For them , God does not change, and the structure of their religion, morality, and political life imitates this stagnant idea. Perfection is static, not dynamic, and what was good enough for their ancestors is good enough for them. That their world is constantly changing, and that they do not mind new cars, advances in plumbing and heating, and other minor details of life bothers such folks not all. They are, after all, just details, and they understand that the important things do not change.

That is why Darwin is so revolutionary. He imagined a dynamic universe, and it did not frighten him. Rather, he was fascinated by the possibilities, and that fascination was made possible, in part, because of how and where he grew to maturity. He had been granted a rare gift: religious freedom. For generations his family were Dissenters then Unitarians. His intellect was not shackled to an ancient creed.

Already several generations into their Unitarianism, the family was filled with scientists and economic leaders, as were a great many British Unitarians. A favorite uncle was a Unitarian minister, his relatives were friends of Joseph Priestley, Unitarian minister and leading member of the Royal Academy of Science. Only sixty years before publication of Origin, Priestley was almost murdered by a mob of religious zealots who destroyed his church and his home, with its laboratory. He fled to America, where he preached in a small, rural town in Pennsylvania Despite the distance and hardship, many people made the trip to hear him preach, including President George Washington. (But it’s not clear where Washington slept.)

2 Personal Story

I grew up in the Fifties, when science was all the rage. Scientists of all stripes were heroes, not nerds and geeks. Pocket protectors were in! As a Methodist I had read Genesis, but I never considered the story as science, as an alternative to airplanes and space ships, cars and trucks, buildings and bridges. I suppose I had heard ministers treating the Biblical text as if it were an essay submitted to a scientific journal, but I never took them that way. Religious harangues against science—or Elvis Presley, for that matter!—only made me sadly uncomfortable and were never convincing.

I was halfway through my second year in graduate school before I heard a convincing explanation for why science and religion coexisted in my brain. The human mind craves stories, yarns that connect people to their world and other people. These stories may employ nature as a part of their story, but just because nature is referenced in the story does not make the story science. Science and stories satisfy different human needs.

The most powerful gift of science is to convince us that tomorrow will be better than today. Darwin gave us the intellectual foundation for the hope and faith that religions around the world, from its earliest and most basic expressions to the latest and most complicated elaborations—religions had urged human beings to hope, to continue on despite the real hardships that life constantly presents us. It is easy to give up, and the point of the stories told over the campfires of our earliest ancestors and today’s TV sitcoms have the same purpose, to keep us entertained and give us hope.

In the Fifties, even many religious leaders were finding more hope in the developments of science than in their traditional religious documents. There is something powerfully inspiring about the ancient stories, but the ancient stories paled in comparison to the agricultural revolution increasing farmers’ yields or the medical revolution bringing healing drugs to isolated villages. By the end of World War I, many people found religion unable to meet the challenge of the modern world. The Great Depression and World War II confirmed this weakness for millions more. Science, and particularly Darwin’s theory, gave us real hope that we could solve humanity’s problems.

3 The current argument

We sang a favorite hymn earlier. "O Life that Maketh All Things New" was written by one of those Unitarian poets we are beginning to forget, Samuel Longfellow, about 150 years ago. In other words, it was written in the period when Darwin published The Origin of Species. It is a poet’s version of the same idea, an idea which had permeated Unitarian thought for decades and which finally found outlets in literature and science. Darwin was not the only Unitarian scientist exploring the life that makes all things new.

Recall these lines from the poem: "One in the freedom of the truth, one in the joy of paths untrod, one in the soul’s perennial youth, one in the larger thought of God…" No minister put all this together to eloquently preach to a congregation; it was a response from those people. Since the Enlightenment, proto-Unitarians had been noticing that science was a powerful tool for solving problems that had plagued humanity seemingly forever. They intellectually connected this scientific activity with the search for spiritual truth, which is our Unitarian heritage dating back centuries. If science produced truth, then it was a deeply religious activity. Longfellow relates freedom with the joy of new directions, the youth that change brings even older, and more cynical, people, and with the larger thought of God.

This last line is, of course, the kicker. If there is no new truth; if we already know all truth through ancient revelation found in sacred literature, then we do not require a larger thought of God. However, if we imagine that new truth can be discovered, that we do not know it all, but have much to learn about nature and also about ourselves, then we need an ever expanding vision of the good, true, and beautiful—a larger thought of God.

Creationism, intelligent design, and all the other efforts to censor scientific thought, like all efforts to censor artistic and political expression, are the responses of people to a smaller thought of God—a god of ethnic, racial, political comfort and support. The smaller god of a life that never changes, no matter what intellectual or social contortions are required to maintain the status quo. The small god is the god of the status quo, the god of yesterday and its familiarity, structure, and authority. Unitarians have never run from the clear implications of their call for freedom: it is a risk, an act of deepest faith.

4 Science and faith

Since Unitarians put their faith in truth, they never shirked from a truth that upset old conventions and comfortable familiarities. All sources of truth, not simply their texts and practices, but all sources of truth were greeted warmly, not with fear and trembling, but with a sense of adventure, of "the road not taken" another Unitarian poet wrote. Since science proved to be an incredible source of truth, it, too, was welcomed into the religious fold.

I preached a sermon on computers in the early 1980’s ("Bytes off the New Religious Apple") and on the physics of string theory in this century. I must admit that last one was much harder on both me and the congregation, and it was my last effort at the new physics. It’s just too complicated! I do believe that it one reason so-called Creationism appeals to many people: it is vastly simpler. It’s Creator plays tricks on us with geology, astrophysics, and biology, but still, believes don’t have to take any responsibility for Creation’s beginning—or its end! Creationism is not only bad science, it’s bad morality!

I urge you to keep up with modern science, though it’s hard. I urge you to work diligently against teaching Creationism in schools. (It’s official: the Taylor University science faculty teaches Creationism.) My computer helps me, using the internet, but I admit science has gotten so complex, I read less. Don’t let that intimidate you, or stop you from reading material for the layperson. Bookstores have many such books.

Most importantly, know the difference between scientific facts and the details of a good story. Each has a place in our world. We need good stories and good story-tellers. We need art and dance and music and poetry. We also need science to help us save the planet from ourselves. Weak science is no answer. Let us support the truth in every form.

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