Science and God

Sermon prepared for Science Sunday, St Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., February 12, 2023.

Two years ago one of my former pastors, John P. “Jack” Irwin, died of Covid-19 at the age of 95.

Jack was an amateur astronomer. In the mid-1960s, when the United Church Youth Fellowship met on Sunday nights, he would show black-and-white slides of stars, nebula, and universes light years away. We looked at pictures of alpha centauri, a triple star system that is the closest to our own sun.

By “closest,” Jack explained, it would take a beam of light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, four and a third years to reach it.

Jack showed other slides of solar systems a hundred and a thousand light years away. In a darkened living room, with Jack’s soothing voice describing the far reaches of space, it was difficult to stay awake. But when the lights came on and we blinked against the brightness, Jack asked a question none of us ever forgot:

“How many of you,” he asked, “have a concept of God that is as large as outer space?”

I suppose we were 15 or 16 years old and certainly we didn’t think of God as an entity of astrophysics. God and science were two different things, God being a powerful but approachable figure some call “the man upstairs;” and science, by contrast, is the empirical exercise of verifying phenomena by observation and experience rather than pure speculation.

Until Jack Irwin’s slide show blew our minds, we were content to keep our notion of God within reasonable bounds, perhaps as a white-bearded grandpa figure who created the world a few thousand years ago and raised Jesus from the dead.  There was no reason to assume the bible was not literally true.

In many respects, we adolescents were at the same intellectual and emotional stage as millions of people in the mid-19th century. Back then most people kept their idea of God under reasonable constraints, and when God said, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), it was not necessary to explain how God did it.

Then in 1859, scientist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a meticulously documented study that concluded plants and animals responded to changes in their environment by passing their strongest traits on to future generations. 

Today this idea of natural selection and evolution is generally accepted in biological studies.

But Origin of Species exploded like a bomb in church circles in 1859. If, for example, apes could theoretically evolve into thinking and talking beings – if, in fact, human ancestors were monkeys – then humans were not just a little lower than the angels, but just a little higher than the simians.

Church leaders and politicians responded to Origin of Species with rage. It’s worth noting that both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, born on February 12, 1809, were portrayed as apes by cartoonists of the day.

But it may have been the poets of the Victorian era that felt the pain of Darwin most deeply. Suddenly they were confronted with a God who was not an all powerful and generally benign creator, but an inattentive God who was allowing creation to develop on its own.

If you were a literature major in school, you may have read Thomas Hardy’s “Hap,” a depressing poem in which he lamented good and evil were governed by mere happenstance. If God was causing pain, Hardy wrote,

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

In the United States, the reaction to Origin of Species was simpler. Many states made it illegal to teach the theory of evolution.

In 1925, in one of the best known confrontations between biblical inerrancy and free thought, the state of Tennessee accused high school teacher John Thomas Scopes of violating the Butler Act, which forbade teachers from teaching evolution in any state-funded school.

The issue came to blows in the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in which perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan defended the inerrant bible, and famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow defended John Scopes.

The trial was staged to draw attention to the issue. Bryan and Darrow sparred over the issue of biblical literalism and in the end Scopes was convicted and ordered to pay a $100 fine.

But history remembers Darrow’s defense of the sacredness of ideas, as recorded in the 1960 film, Inherit the Wind. As Henry Drummond, representing Darrow, Spencer Tracy declares the divinity of

“The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘Amens!‘, ‘Holy, Holies!’ and ‘Hosannahs!’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is more of a miracle than any sticks turned to snakes, or the parting of waters!”

The theory of evolution signifies the miracle of the advance of human knowledge. Even so, we know it is still illegal to teach it in many parts of our country – just as it is illegal to teach Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, the lingering effects of slavery in America, and the genocide of indigenous peoples in our land.

Origin of Species continues to be a threat to right wing Christianity and in many churches Charles Darwin is regarded as the Great Satan. I learned as a Baptist magazine editor that dropping Darwin’s name caused subscription cancellations and angry letters.

I sometimes suspected some of the readers of The American Baptist magazine would have been happier subscribing to Answers in Genesis magazine, still readily available on your smart phone at answersingenesis.org.

In the “answers” section of this web page we learn the following:

1. The earth is approximately 6,000 years old. “If we believe the earth is billions of years old and shows no sign of a worldwide Flood,” we are reminded, “then that belief contradicts the biblical account of Noah. If we accept God’s testimony regarding the Flood, we cannot logically believe in millions of years.”

2. All animals that now populate the earth are the genetic descendants of the animals rescued on Noah’s ark.

3. Dinosaurs were among the land animals God created on the sixth day of creation, which was about six thousand years ago. According to answers.org, dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time. I imagine the massive tyrannosaurus rex reaching out helplessly with its tiny arms to snatch a panicky human being from a cave. For some, The Flintstones is a scientific documentary.

4. Finally, the bible is the inspired, infallible word of God, Adam and Eve were real people, and the bible provides the “correct chronology” of human history on our very young planet.

It’s no wonder science and particularly Darwin are such fearsome threats to many people. 

I was a bit surprised a few years ago when Martha, Katie and I visited Westminster Abby in London and discovered that Darwin is buried there among the monarchs, clergy, politicians, and poets who Britain reveres.

Charles Darwin is not the Great Satan in England. In fact his image is on the 10-pound note. In England, Darwin is remembered as a faithful Anglican layman whose theory of natural selection and evolution were not intended to challenge faith. On the contrary, they vastly expand our concept of God and our scientific understanding of the intricate details of God’s creative miracles.

For many, On The Origin of Species had the same effect on intellect and faith as Pastor Irwin’s question had on his youth group so long ago:

How many of us have a concept of God that is as large as the theory of evolution?

How many of us have a concept of God that is as large the new vastness of space revealed by NASA’s Webb telescope?

How many of us have a concept of God that is as large as the ideas that have developed in human brains 

To create vaccines for serious illnesses? 

To write the computer codes for space travel?

To write the computer codes for diagnostic tools such as CAT scans and MRI’s to maintain our health?

Science expands our concept of God to the very limits of human imagination. And because of Charles Darwin, God is bigger, not smaller. And while we draw breath on this earth, we will never truly comprehend the infinite vastness of God.

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer and teacher, wrote an Evolutionary Hymn so show his faith in the vastness of God:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there's always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we're going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it's god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature's simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,'
Goodness = what comes next.'
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

Amen.