| February 8, 2009 | Happy Birthday Charles Darwin Reverend Jane Bramadat |
Welcome to our Charles Darwin Day Celebrations!
We are one of 929 churches and synagogues, in 14 countries
who this month applaud Darwin’s discovery of Evolution;
who thank God, or the great mystery, or life itself;
for evolution;
who agree that religious truth is of a different order
than scientific truth; they are not enemies.
“Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.
Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.
Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval splendour.”
May Sarton (SLT #428)
Be welcome here, may love touch you everywhere you are.
"The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again. That's how a young person turns toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are." —
Rumi, "The Dream That Must Be Interpreted"
SermonCharles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in England. Happy Birthday Charles! We Unitarians are interested in Charles Darwin for many reasons - he is on the edge of our Unitarian history because he attended Unitarian church school when young, he married into a Unitarian family (the Wedgwood -of fine china fame..) and later occasionally attended the Unitarian church in Shrewsbury. But the more important reason is because he represents something that Unitarians and Universalists prize most highly: having and using a rational mind and being a follower of the scientific method.
The groundbreaking scientific discoveries he made resulted in new directions being taken in many areas. He is called the “Father of Evolutionary Science” and a “pioneering Evolutionary Biologist” (http://www.adherents.com/people/pd/Charles_Darwin.html)
Just yesterday I heard a biology scientist (Steven Jones) saying that evolution is the “grammar “of biology - its plot - that it provides the evidence for biology. High praise indeed.
In fact, evolution is so taken for granted in most of the places I hang out and in most of the books I read, that I had made the mistake of thinking that it was ‘old hat.’ in the same way that any serious consideration of the earth being flat, is.
Then three things happened: I received material from the Darwin Day Celebration site demonstrating that a vicious rear-action battle is going on with those who refuse to accept that evolution is accepted by almost all scientists as truth and used as the basis for much scientific research.
Their accompanying material about the battle came from The Institute for Creation Research which recently reposted an article originally aired last year (http://www.icr.org/article/one-birthday-two-legacies/) noting that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, 12 February 1809. The article praises Lincoln for his democratic ideals while attacking Darwin for being a racist and concludes with the pithy statement, “One freed slaves, and the other enslaved minds.” Claiming that Darwin was a racist (as if, even if true, such a belief would have anything to say about the scientific merits of evolution) is a common creationist ploy.
How does one counter such an accusation? It’s almost like the fallacious, loaded question - When did you stop beating your wife?
But fortunately a new book ( thanks to access to Darwin’s personal journals) has just been written. It’s entitled :Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution and it was written by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, two well-respected Darwin scholars. It explains that not only was Darwin NOT a racist, but that his disgust over slavery was one of the central concerns that drove him to write The Descent of Man - his second most well-known book. It was this book that talked about human evolution and Darwin’s belief that the human race was one species and all ethnicities were included within it; Origin of the Species was about many species but not humans. But Darwin’s Sacred Cause just came out a few weeks ago, and so the lie about Darwin has been festering for more than six months.
The second thing that happened is that I received in the mail, unsolicited, a book entitled: Random Designer: Created from Chaos to Connect with the Creator by Richard Colling, who is a microbiologist and professor at a Nazarene University. He is also an evangelical Christian. One article I read about the book called it a ‘more intelligent, Intelligent Design.’ Colling is trying to find a way to speak to both atheistic scientists and Christians. It’s an easy read and not an angry attack on Darwinians....but it concerns me. What about all the other religions I found myself asking? Are they included in God’s plan? Who finances the cost to send these books through the mail? How many people received this book? Is it only addressed to UU ministers? Does this ever change anyone’s mind? It’s available, if anyone would like to read it!
And thirdly, I attended the monthly Downtown Ministers Association meeting this past Wednesday. When it came my turn to share what was going on at First Unitarian, I told them about First Unitarian being a church that was celebrating Charles Darwin Day. I asked if any of their churches were doing so. I was not overly surprised that none of them were, but was surprised that none of them knew anything about it! Again, I had assumed that there would have been at least awareness of this event...
So while I am pleased to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, and very glad that I live in a world that is much more enlightened due to his insightful and scientific discoveries, I keep being made aware that this is not a world that many people want to live in. Many seem still, to yearn after hierarchical, paternalistic controlled societies - because that is what “God” would want. It’s enough to make me believe in multiple Gods, because as a mystical humanist I often have a joyfulness around being part of a larger whole, almost a group mind sort of thing......and I can’t imagine that larger mystery wanting me to be less than I can be....
Let us be aware then, that evolution still needs support and affirmation and let us be willing to give it freely to friends and family
Even so, I support the cheekiness of one of my colleagues who responded to the mindset of those who insist that evolution is not real, with: "We have all heard some fundamentalist-minded person say something like, 'Don't tell me I'm related to monkeys.' The fact of the matter is that now that we have discovered DNA and its code, we know that we are not only related to monkeys, we are related to zucchini. So let's get over it." — Rev. Marlin Lavanhar, Unitarian Universalist minister, 2006
And driving in to the church this morning I continued listening to information about Charles Darwin on a CBC program - it opened with a song one line of the lyrics said something like: “ Are you going to follow the ‘Rock of Ages’ or the ages of rocks?” I know, kind of corny, but it does lift up the duality that the evolution/creationism controversy has become! And just what has to happen to change this?
“Tell me a creation story more wondrous than the miracle of a living cell forged from the residue of an exploding star! Tell me a story of transformation more magical than that of a fish hauling out onto land and becoming amphibian, or a reptile taking to the sky and becoming bird, or a bear slipping back into the sea and becoming whale! If this science-based culture, of all cultures, cannot find meaning and cause for celebration in its very own cosmic creation story, then we are sorely impoverished indeed.” Connie Barlow, 1997. Green Space, Green Time
And from Michael’ Dowd’s new book Thank God for Evolution, Christopher Bache says:
“Only after we had absorbed Darwin and recalculated the age of the Universe, after the vision of static forms of life had been replaced by a vision of fluid processes flexing across vast tracts of time, only then could we dare to guess the immensity of the symphony we are part of.”
So in honour of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, let us remember and celebrate the amazing legacy that evolution has brought to us. We are more confident explorers of the universe from which came the stardust that is our original ancestry and also we are more humble explorers of the internal universe of our minds and hearts.
As I end my brief comments this morning, let me share with you part of the clergy letter I signed for the Darwin Day Celebrations. (The letter to be sent to world leaders) It was created by a Unitarian minister, (Reverend Lisa Romantum Schwartz of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Topeka Kansas) as a companion letter to those written by Christian ministers and Jewish Rabbis:
“As Unitarian Universalists, we draw from many sources, including “Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life,” and “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.” While most Unitarian Universalists believe that many sacred scriptures convey timeless truths about humans and our relationship to the sacred, we stand in solidarity with our Christian and Jewish brothers and sisters who do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. We believe that religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. [Religious truth’s] purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
We the undersigned, Unitarian Universalist clergy, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and other scriptures may comfortably coexist with the discoveries of modern science. 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 ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”
May some piece of this morning’s service be working to transform your heart.
The Stream of Life
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
to numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
Rabindranath Tagore (SLT # 529)
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