Does God Believe in Evolution?

A Sermon Offered by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
November 13, 2005 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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Out of life comes death,
And out of death, life,
Out of the young, the old,
And out of the old, the young,
Out of waking, sleep,
And out of sleep, waking,
The stream of creation and dissolution
Never stops.
—Heraclitus, 6th century Greek philosopher

Staring up at the stars on a summer night, my friend Heather suddenly whispered, “It all keeps changing.”

I knew she wasn’t just talking about the night sky, still streaked with the burning tails of the meteor shower.  I knew she wasn’t just talking about the moon, a sliver of pale radiance in the spread of the universe.  She was talking about . . . everything.  It all keeps changing.

Environmentalist John Muir once wrote: “Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, chasing everything out of one beautiful form into another.”

This movement, this natural flow of evolving life is cause for wonder, for awe.

And yet, so many religious people deny it. 

Years ago, my spiritual teacher asked me, “What is God?”  I fumbled through some convoluted answer.  “You are so wrong,” he said sharply.  “You are lost in imagination.  God is real, as real as science.  God is very simple,” he said.  “It is merely a human word made up of three letters.  G stands for the generating principle in life.  O stands for the ordering principle in life.  D stands for the destroying principle in life.  That is all God—or the Holy—or whatever you want to call it— is.  It is that which generates life, orders it, and destroys it, so the process can start all over again.  It happens in every moment of our breathing, in every moment of our living, in every moment of the universe’s long existence.  Everything else, every other explanation of God is unnatural.  God is scientific.”

According to recent polls, 42% of Americans believe “all living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” created in six days instantly intact and in shape, as detailed in the Book of Genesis. (NYT, August 31, 2005)  This belief is called creationism.  Another 18% of Americans believe that human life evolved over time, but that the evolutionary process was guided intentionally and directly by a supreme being with a clear plan. (Ibid.)  This belief is called intelligent design.  60% of the people in this country do not believe in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which says that all living things evolved by chance over time.  60% of Americans don’t believe that life is generated, ordered, and reshaped through purely natural means.

According to noted Research Professor Edwin O. Wilson, writing in the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine: “Nothing in science  . . . has been more firmly established . . . than the universal occurrence of biological evolution.”  (Harvard Magazine, Nov-Dec 2005) Yet few things are more discounted.

Just this Wednesday, the new Pope officially weighed in on the issue, quoting St. Basil the Great, saying: “some people fooled by the atheism they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance.”  (NYT, Nov. 12, 2005)

Well, yes, Pope Benedict, that is exactly what science is saying.  For you see, science is a bit more current in it’s thinking than the man you are quoting, St. Basil, who died in the year 375, at a time when the church still taught the sun revolved around the earth.  Science has progressed just a bit since then.  So, too, should religion.  See, religion isn’t the same as science.  Religion cannot and must not be taught in the same classroom as science.  Science deals with the facts of life; religion should deal with the meaning those facts awaken within us.  Religion should not contradict science; it should give it deeper significance.  Accepting intelligent design means discarding science, and true religion should not and must not commit such a grievous sin.  As Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, wrote in yesterday’s New York Times: “If science proves some belief of [religion] wrong, then [religion] will have to change.”  (NYT, Nov. 12, adapted)

Unitarian Universalist theologian Karl Peters writes: “My mind has been shaped by the world view of modern science.  I live with a scientific understanding of things in my daily life, and I use the fruits of the natural and social sciences to clean my house, gain my knowledge of what is happening in other parts of the world, treat my illnesses, understand the workings of my brain . . . For me it is only one more step to ask how scientific knowledge might help me in my religious living.” (Dancing With the Sacred: Evolution, Ecology, and God, p. ix)

Karl Peters grew up in a rather traditional conservative Christian home and church.  He became a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian in college.  But something happened while he was preparing to become a Christian minister.  He writes: “I could not experience God at work in the world.  When I asked about this, I was told that we could experience the effects of God but not God [himself].  [But] all that happens [in the world] could just as well be due to the workings of nature and human society.  Why bring in God as an effective cause of world events, of events in my own life?” (p 3)

And so, Karl Peters had to change the way he thought about God.  He didn’t throw away the word; he just redefined it.  Karl Peters came to think of God “as the creative process or the creative event rather than a being who creates [and manages] the world.”  (p. viii)  For Karl Peters, God is not personal; God does not have a consciousness or a will separate from creation itself.  Rather, God is creation itself, God is the process of life, the process unfolding within life.  God is the creative flow of 13.7 billion years of expanding universe.  Does God believe in Evolution? No.  She doesn’t have to.  Because according this process theology, God is evolution.

In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a two-part theory of creation: the theory of random variation and natural selection.  Darwin proposed: “creating consists of two unrelated processes: one is a set of interactions that creates new variations” in life; “the other is the set of interactions that selects and preserves some variations over others.” (p. 40) 

The easiest way to explain this process of creating, of evolving, is to remember those old television commercials for Recee’s Peanut Butter Cups.  One person is walking along holding a jar of peanut butter; another person has a chocolate bar.  They collide, and the peanut butter and chocolate meet and mix—all by chance.  That is random variation.  Something happens that causes a change in the way things have been developing up till then.  Randomly, something new appears.  Peanut butter gets stuck on chocolate.  An explosion disturbs the pervading nothingness in a cataclysmic Big Bang.  A fish is born with stronger than usual fins, allowing it to move along the rocks in the shallow water.  This is all random variation.

The second part of creating is the natural selection part.  Every once and awhile, one of these changes to the norm is successful in some way, and the variation gets preserved.  Because the difference somehow enhances or improves the original, it survives and is passed into the future.  In our Recee’s Peanut Butter Cup example, the people taste the mix of peanut butter and chocolate and decide it tastes pretty darn good.  A candy company decides to market this variation not as a mistake but as a new way of savoring life.  What starts as a mistake, a random variation in the make up of the universe, is sustained because it works.  And because it works, it survives and becomes the norm.  This is how human life as we know it slowly, slowly, slowly came into being.

This scientific theory need not destroy faith.  It should deepen it, for it offers three key principles, three key foundations, which can lead us to the truth of evolutionary religion.

First, evolution tells us that diversity is not, as some would claim, an aberration that must be eliminated to maintain the order of things.  Rather, evolution shows clearly that diversity becomes the very building block of life.  Life in this universe—and on this planet—progresses only through changes in the norm, through something stepping out of the common order and creating a new variation.  Life cannot sustain itself through replicating the past, or by making things that look the same.  Diversity and newness is what leads to a deeper and more developed life.  Any people, or any faith, that does anything other than celebrate diversity is contrary to the natural law of the universe. Any people, or any faith, that does anything other than celebrate difference is contrary to the natural law of the universe. Any people, or any faith, that does anything other than celebrate innovation is contrary to the natural law of the universe.

The second thing evolution does for religion is to affirm our inherent connection.  It confirms the interdependent web of all existence. We didn’t just appear as separate, instantaneous and autonomous creations. We have a profound shared history with all living things.  In the religious past, we might have said that we are connected to other people because we were created by God, and all people are God’s children.  In the religious past, we might have said we were connected to planet earth because God created humankind out of the very dust we now walk upon.  But because of evolution, we have a scientific basis for saying “all creation is one.”

Our common bloodline reaches back 13.7 billion years to the moment of the Big Bang.  Each human being on earth—whether man or woman, young or old, abled or disabled, gay or straight, American or Iraqi, each human being is linked together in that 13.7 billion year old blast. We were there together.  We are the children of the hydrogen and helium atoms that were first formed, that condensed into galactic clouds, clouds that collapsed and heated and ignited into stars.  We are the children of the stars that used up their energy, and collapsed, only to explode again and reform in new ways.   Karl Peters writes: “We are continuous with other forms of life.  We are continuous with the energy that was present at the origins of the universe.  This energy has undergone countless transformations  . . . . [and finally, now it has become] life, humanity, and human society.” (p. 4)

This shared source that lives within us—this Spirit of Life—demands respect and responsibility.  That is the third principle that evolutionary religion provides. We must live and act from this inter-related web of all creation.  Because we are truly and scientifically sisters and brothers with all other human beings, we must treat them in life-enhancing ways.  Economic and social justice, racial harmony, consideration for those who live with disabilities, equality, deep caring, and non-violence should be born from our desire to nurture those who are related to us.  And this extends beyond humans.  Because all living things on the earth share our beginning, we must act not as Lords and Masters, but as gentle stewards and caretakers and loving siblings.  And because the planet earth comes from the same source as our own body, and is the same as our own body, we must care for it in life-sustaining ways.  From this perspective, ecology becomes a religious practice.

Through this respect and responsibility, evolutionary religion breaks down the artificial walls that would separate one from another, that would harm one or another.  This radical relationship is religion in its purest form, for it binds us back together.

And we human beings have a unique role to play at this point in evolution’s unfolding. 

Through us, creation has, for the first time, developed a consciousness that can become aware of this diversity, this connection, and this responsibility. “We are the [first] life that knows how it came to be, that can contemplate its future. We are the Universe become conscious of itself.” (R. Genet, C. Davidson, A. Vaughn, source unknown) The ethic that arises from this awareness is love: living out the value of everyone and everything in every moment.

In the end, evolutionary religion becomes love.   

As Robert Weston writes:

This is the wonder of time; this is
the marvel of space; out of the
stars swung the earth;[and] life upon
earth rose to love.

The question remains: will we choose to fulfill evolution’s loving possibility?

In 1871 Charles Darwin wrote: “We must acknowledge . . . that humanity with all its noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other humans but to the humblest living creature, with its god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—humankind still bears in our bodily frame the indelible stamp of our lowly origin.”

Encoded within us is the brilliance of the stars; encoded within us is the mud and muck out of which we first crawled.  In the days ahead, may we remember who we are; may we remember where we have come from; may we remember where we are heading.  May we remember to embrace our natural diversity, connection, and responsibility.  Our future depends on it. 

Blessed Be.  Amen

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.