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There is no reason why any religious person should have issues with evolution any more than they should have issues with gravity,
the orbit of the earth, or quantum physics. Whatever truth science may discover will be consistent with the truth of God,
because God is truth. For a religious person, science adds to our understanding of the nature of God and of God's creation.
Evolutionary research has contributed to human knowledge to help us better understand the mystery of life. When Charles
Darwin wrote his Origin of the Species he hoped that the realization that all humanity comes from a common ancestry would
lead to peace and unity as humanity discovered its singular kinship. One-hundred-fifty years later, I would hope that a deeper
understanding of our interrelatedness with all life might inspire a more reverent respect for the entire planet. For me,
evolution is a wondrous expression of the power of life and its creative Source as well as a meaningful clue to our purpose
and our potentialities as human beings.
Theologians say that God pours out the Divine life of the transcendent nature into the material creation -- involution
-- and that creation is being gathered back to its Source -- evolution. Christianity witnesses to that process in our story
of God becoming incarnate in the fullness of time in the person of Jesus who is drawing us into the divine life of the Trinity.
We are stardust. Every particle of our bodies has a 14-billion year history. Benedictine spiritual director Thomas Keating
offers a compelling description of the journey of the spiritual life as a recapitulation of the whole evolutionary history.
Each human life begins its development in an evolutionary pattern from a reptilian-like early consciousness, immersed in the
need for prompt fulfillment of our instinctual needs for food, shelter and sensual pleasure. Self-consciousness gradually
emerges out of our animal-like primitive instincts.
The goal of human life is to become fully conscious and to discover union with the divine. There is a progression, or
evolution, in that process. Keating traces our spiritual journey as we mature through stages of tribal identification into
fully reflective rational self-consciousness. The trajectory of human evolution is pointing us to even higher states of unitive
awareness.
Evolution is a great clue to the purposes of God. We are part of a 14-billion-year unbroken yearning for life to emerge
into higher states of consciousness. "In human beings the universe becomes conscious of itself." (Aldous Huxley)
Keep up the grand search, scientists. The more you discover about the nature of reality the more we learn about the mystery
of God.
This coming Sunday I will be joining many other pastors and congregations around the country observing "Evolution
Sunday," sponsored by the Clergy Letter Project, a modest movement that originated two years ago in a small town in Wisconsin.
In 2004 the school board in Grantsburg, Wisconsin passed a series of anti-evolution policies which prompted a group of pastors
to begin a letter-petition drive to support the teaching of legitimate science. Over 200 clergy signed the letter, and the
board policies were overturned. Since that time the letter has gathered the support of over 10,000 clergy signatories from
throughout the U.S. Here is the text:
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. Many of the beloved
stories found in the Bible -- the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark -- convey timeless truths about God, human beings,
and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from
generation to generation. 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 believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought
and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God's loving plan
of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an
act of hubris. 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.
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