God’s Promises from Genesis to Revelation
The Bible and Science in Harmony
Sermon for Evolution Sunday, 2-11-2007
Genesis 1:1-5, 31and Revelations 21:1-4
Wow! Have I ever learned a lot these last couple of weeks since I decided to preach on the harmonious co-existence of science and the Bible! All of this started because I signed on to the Clergy Letter Project, started in 2004 by an Episcopal layperson, academic Mike Zimmerman, after a series of anti-evolution policies were passed by a school board in Grantsburg, WI. The letter, this year signed by over 10,500 clergy states in part:
“Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. … Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. … We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”
For the last two years, Zimmerman has been encouraging pastors to preach on the coexistence of science and religion—this year on the anniversary week of the 198th birthday of Charles Darwin. We know that the pastors in the more fundamentalist churches who believe in a literal reading of the Bible will not be among such a group. In what I say today, I mean no disrespect of Christians who believe differently than I do. I know there are folks here today that will not agree with me. At the same time I feel its important for me to add my voice to the side of the controversy that God has led me to believe in.
How many of you remember the Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who? As I was reminded, in that story no one believes that there are any Whos living on the speck of dust that Horton is protecting down in Whoville. Horton has them all yelling together, “We are here, we are here, we are HERE!” However, they can’t seem to make themselves heard. The scour the town to see if they can find anyone who is not joining in with their united voices. Do any of you remember—they find one shirker. And when that one shirker adds his voice to the collective yell, they are heard. So the Clergy Letter Project is along the same lines of the Who’s in Whoville. We hope at some point we can get enough voices led by their faith and their interpretation of God’s word, that the rest of the world will hear us.
I have learned from my recent readings that there are many different groups weighing in on this controversy from the most fundamentalist creationists to the proponents of Intelligent Design to the believers in the coexistence of science and religion to the atheistic materialists and several in between. The creationists believe that everything in the cosmos was created out of nothing at the same time, that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that there is no common descent: apes and humans have separate ancestry. The liberals who believe in both evolution and the Bible also believe that God created the universe out of nothing—what some of you may have heard described as the Big Bang theory; however, we believe that once God created the cosmos/universe that it continued to grow and change. Darwin’s theory of evolution states that over millions of years, all living creatures came about by gradual modification from a common ancestor. In the Origen of the Species, published in 1859, he talks about natural selection and the survival of the fittest. There is a randomness in all of these modifications.
Ted Peters and Marty Hewlett, the two authors of the book that has been my main resource for this sermon, Can You Believe in God and Evolution? A guide for the Perplexed are a scientist (biology teacher) and a theologian, both with strong Christian faiths. They point out that the theory of evolution became wrapped in many layers of what they refer to as shrink wrap, that stuff that we often have to tear through to get to the product we have purchased. Many of these layers had nothing to do with the original theory and were things such as social Darwinism-which was connected to eugenics, a theory that describes improving the species, including humans, by breeding the most desired types and even sterilizing the undesirables, a theory that actually was used by Hitler in trying to create a super race. Others saw Darwinian evolution as a new religion and one of his followers even coined the word agnostic and recommended that all intellectuals should hold this doubting view of the existence of God. From that others were led to atheism and a disdain for religion. These authors point to all of this shrink wrapping as distorting what Darwin’s theory was all about. They are both believers in science as well as the Bible; they want all students to have the opportunity to learn about the scientific method and not be afraid of it destroying their faith in God. They, like the signers of the Clergy Letter Project, are concerned that Intelligent Design not be taught as science when in fact it is a philosophical view of the world, not a scientific model that can be both explanatory and predictive with the ability to have all kinds of experiments to see if it can be disproved if sufficient data so determine. I can well remember learning scientific method, setting up hypothesis and designs for testing. Intelligent Design came about because it was felt that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes. These proponents say that living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is extremely smart.
To help you to understand where I’m coming from and hopefully where I’m going, it’s necessary to explain the non-literal interpretation of the Bible. I believe that the Bible is based on truth; however, the words are not the exact meaning or exact description of what happened. First of all the Bible was based on oral tradition, stories told over and over again for many years before they were written. Once they were written down they were written in languages other than our own, languages that have many English words for the Arabic or Greek word. Plus the scripts were copied by hand originally with many mistakes. So this is just a beginning of why I cannot accept the Bible as the literal word of God. I see it more as a myth, myth meaning that words are used to describe a reality that cannot be described directly with our human language. One of the examples I like about myth is the phrase that is often used in some of the Native American folktales, “ I know that this is true, and some of it may have actually happened.” An example which is important in the creation story is the use of the word day. A non-literal interpretations sees day used to mark a chunk of time and what God does in that chunk of time. It doesn’t mean that it was 24 hours long or 1000 years long; myth is not interested in exact, literal details. “Instead, myth paints a picture using words to portray reality.” In religious talk we still speak of heaven above and earth below whey science has shown us that such directional terms don’t make sense. We still speak of the sun rising and setting even though we know it doesn’t really do that but seems to do so as the earth and other planets revolve around it. Both creationism and intelligent design misunderstand the mythic aspect of the book of Genesis by trying to ‘scientize’ that which was never meant to be scientific in the first place.
For another view of creation, I want to share with you a poem written in 1964 by one of our most esteemed scientists as well as a faithful member of this church, Glenn Price. Glenn as done a paraphrase on the some of the verses in the first chapter of the Gospel of John:
First I need to define a word he uses: “ylem: a chaotic dense, very hot mass of matter, the supposed original substance of the universe…” from World Book Encyclopedia.
“At time zero/ which marks the beginning of all time;/there was the ylem,/a nuclear condensate of the entire universe. /But the ylem was a chaotic and formless conglomerate because God had not yet touched it./ Then God brought his life and truth to the ylem,/ igniting a great cosmic explosion, /forming the elements in an instant, /and sending the galaxies hurtling into the infinite darkness. /There was nothing to impede them in their outward flight,/ for the darkness was void. / In a fleeting moment God had imparted light and life to the universe. / The universe that formed,/ and the life that emerged began with that act. /But man comprehended it not./
And God sent his son, Jesus Christ, /a paragon of truth and life, to dwell among men, /that we might behold and comprehend the glory and wisdom of God.”
Authors Peters and Hewlett say that God even before the Big Bang or Glen’s “cosmic explosion”, gave the world a future, in two ways—in the sense of openness and fulfillment. I would tend to agree with their conclusions that God gave us an openness that allows choice as well as randomness. This openness allows growth, self-organization and freedom, the possibility of becoming. I see this as a great gift that keeps on giving. It is what the UCC means when it says God is Still Speaking. God created the condition that made and still makes ongoing change possible. God’s direct act is the primary cause: God establishes the world and does not than leave us but remains with us in every way as that great divine Spirit. In Genesis 1:31, God saw everything that he had made, and, behold it was very good.” And then in the last book of our Bible, Revelations 21:1 we have: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” This goes along with God’s promise in Genesis that in the end everything would be “very good”. God is not finished with us yet. The world in which we live is still being created. I hope that I will see that day when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” (Rev. 21:4). Can you imagine such a world? That same power that brought the world into being out of nothing continues to sustain our world today.
God’s gift of the future allows evolution by providing openness to change and self-organization on one hand; on the other hand, God’s long term future is for all God’s creatures to live in harmony, for us all to be whole by God’s redeeming grace.
I hope you are less confused than before I started preaching. I don’t believe that theology should take the place of science or that science is the enemy of theology. Theology teaches us the whys of the world while science tells us more about the hows. As people of faith I encourage you to interpret the Bible in light of modern science, knowing that the best science and the best thinking about God and our Christian faith can go together. May we celebrate the One who is in and beyond science, in and beyond scripture, in and beyond us and all creation—the God who is greater even than intelligent design.[1]
[1] Rev. Jennifer Amy-Dressler, “Beyond Intelligent Design”, 2006 Evolution Sunday sermon.
Sermon for Evolution Sunday, 2-11-2007
Genesis 1:1-5, 31and Revelations 21:1-4
Wow! Have I ever learned a lot these last couple of weeks since I decided to preach on the harmonious co-existence of science and the Bible! All of this started because I signed on to the Clergy Letter Project, started in 2004 by an Episcopal layperson, academic Mike Zimmerman, after a series of anti-evolution policies were passed by a school board in Grantsburg, WI. The letter, this year signed by over 10,500 clergy states in part:
“Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. … Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. … We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”
For the last two years, Zimmerman has been encouraging pastors to preach on the coexistence of science and religion—this year on the anniversary week of the 198th birthday of Charles Darwin. We know that the pastors in the more fundamentalist churches who believe in a literal reading of the Bible will not be among such a group. In what I say today, I mean no disrespect of Christians who believe differently than I do. I know there are folks here today that will not agree with me. At the same time I feel its important for me to add my voice to the side of the controversy that God has led me to believe in.
How many of you remember the Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who? As I was reminded, in that story no one believes that there are any Whos living on the speck of dust that Horton is protecting down in Whoville. Horton has them all yelling together, “We are here, we are here, we are HERE!” However, they can’t seem to make themselves heard. The scour the town to see if they can find anyone who is not joining in with their united voices. Do any of you remember—they find one shirker. And when that one shirker adds his voice to the collective yell, they are heard. So the Clergy Letter Project is along the same lines of the Who’s in Whoville. We hope at some point we can get enough voices led by their faith and their interpretation of God’s word, that the rest of the world will hear us.
I have learned from my recent readings that there are many different groups weighing in on this controversy from the most fundamentalist creationists to the proponents of Intelligent Design to the believers in the coexistence of science and religion to the atheistic materialists and several in between. The creationists believe that everything in the cosmos was created out of nothing at the same time, that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that there is no common descent: apes and humans have separate ancestry. The liberals who believe in both evolution and the Bible also believe that God created the universe out of nothing—what some of you may have heard described as the Big Bang theory; however, we believe that once God created the cosmos/universe that it continued to grow and change. Darwin’s theory of evolution states that over millions of years, all living creatures came about by gradual modification from a common ancestor. In the Origen of the Species, published in 1859, he talks about natural selection and the survival of the fittest. There is a randomness in all of these modifications.
Ted Peters and Marty Hewlett, the two authors of the book that has been my main resource for this sermon, Can You Believe in God and Evolution? A guide for the Perplexed are a scientist (biology teacher) and a theologian, both with strong Christian faiths. They point out that the theory of evolution became wrapped in many layers of what they refer to as shrink wrap, that stuff that we often have to tear through to get to the product we have purchased. Many of these layers had nothing to do with the original theory and were things such as social Darwinism-which was connected to eugenics, a theory that describes improving the species, including humans, by breeding the most desired types and even sterilizing the undesirables, a theory that actually was used by Hitler in trying to create a super race. Others saw Darwinian evolution as a new religion and one of his followers even coined the word agnostic and recommended that all intellectuals should hold this doubting view of the existence of God. From that others were led to atheism and a disdain for religion. These authors point to all of this shrink wrapping as distorting what Darwin’s theory was all about. They are both believers in science as well as the Bible; they want all students to have the opportunity to learn about the scientific method and not be afraid of it destroying their faith in God. They, like the signers of the Clergy Letter Project, are concerned that Intelligent Design not be taught as science when in fact it is a philosophical view of the world, not a scientific model that can be both explanatory and predictive with the ability to have all kinds of experiments to see if it can be disproved if sufficient data so determine. I can well remember learning scientific method, setting up hypothesis and designs for testing. Intelligent Design came about because it was felt that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes. These proponents say that living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is extremely smart.
To help you to understand where I’m coming from and hopefully where I’m going, it’s necessary to explain the non-literal interpretation of the Bible. I believe that the Bible is based on truth; however, the words are not the exact meaning or exact description of what happened. First of all the Bible was based on oral tradition, stories told over and over again for many years before they were written. Once they were written down they were written in languages other than our own, languages that have many English words for the Arabic or Greek word. Plus the scripts were copied by hand originally with many mistakes. So this is just a beginning of why I cannot accept the Bible as the literal word of God. I see it more as a myth, myth meaning that words are used to describe a reality that cannot be described directly with our human language. One of the examples I like about myth is the phrase that is often used in some of the Native American folktales, “ I know that this is true, and some of it may have actually happened.” An example which is important in the creation story is the use of the word day. A non-literal interpretations sees day used to mark a chunk of time and what God does in that chunk of time. It doesn’t mean that it was 24 hours long or 1000 years long; myth is not interested in exact, literal details. “Instead, myth paints a picture using words to portray reality.” In religious talk we still speak of heaven above and earth below whey science has shown us that such directional terms don’t make sense. We still speak of the sun rising and setting even though we know it doesn’t really do that but seems to do so as the earth and other planets revolve around it. Both creationism and intelligent design misunderstand the mythic aspect of the book of Genesis by trying to ‘scientize’ that which was never meant to be scientific in the first place.
For another view of creation, I want to share with you a poem written in 1964 by one of our most esteemed scientists as well as a faithful member of this church, Glenn Price. Glenn as done a paraphrase on the some of the verses in the first chapter of the Gospel of John:
First I need to define a word he uses: “ylem: a chaotic dense, very hot mass of matter, the supposed original substance of the universe…” from World Book Encyclopedia.
“At time zero/ which marks the beginning of all time;/there was the ylem,/a nuclear condensate of the entire universe. /But the ylem was a chaotic and formless conglomerate because God had not yet touched it./ Then God brought his life and truth to the ylem,/ igniting a great cosmic explosion, /forming the elements in an instant, /and sending the galaxies hurtling into the infinite darkness. /There was nothing to impede them in their outward flight,/ for the darkness was void. / In a fleeting moment God had imparted light and life to the universe. / The universe that formed,/ and the life that emerged began with that act. /But man comprehended it not./
And God sent his son, Jesus Christ, /a paragon of truth and life, to dwell among men, /that we might behold and comprehend the glory and wisdom of God.”
Authors Peters and Hewlett say that God even before the Big Bang or Glen’s “cosmic explosion”, gave the world a future, in two ways—in the sense of openness and fulfillment. I would tend to agree with their conclusions that God gave us an openness that allows choice as well as randomness. This openness allows growth, self-organization and freedom, the possibility of becoming. I see this as a great gift that keeps on giving. It is what the UCC means when it says God is Still Speaking. God created the condition that made and still makes ongoing change possible. God’s direct act is the primary cause: God establishes the world and does not than leave us but remains with us in every way as that great divine Spirit. In Genesis 1:31, God saw everything that he had made, and, behold it was very good.” And then in the last book of our Bible, Revelations 21:1 we have: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” This goes along with God’s promise in Genesis that in the end everything would be “very good”. God is not finished with us yet. The world in which we live is still being created. I hope that I will see that day when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” (Rev. 21:4). Can you imagine such a world? That same power that brought the world into being out of nothing continues to sustain our world today.
God’s gift of the future allows evolution by providing openness to change and self-organization on one hand; on the other hand, God’s long term future is for all God’s creatures to live in harmony, for us all to be whole by God’s redeeming grace.
I hope you are less confused than before I started preaching. I don’t believe that theology should take the place of science or that science is the enemy of theology. Theology teaches us the whys of the world while science tells us more about the hows. As people of faith I encourage you to interpret the Bible in light of modern science, knowing that the best science and the best thinking about God and our Christian faith can go together. May we celebrate the One who is in and beyond science, in and beyond scripture, in and beyond us and all creation—the God who is greater even than intelligent design.[1]
[1] Rev. Jennifer Amy-Dressler, “Beyond Intelligent Design”, 2006 Evolution Sunday sermon.
posted by Sermons given at Deering Community Church @ 1:40 PM
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