February 25, 2001

Rev. Eugene Nelson, Jr.

The Community Church of Sebastopol

Genesis 2:1-7

            A number of years ago, in a column passionately advocating the teaching of the creation story in Genesis as part of the science curriculum in public schools, Henry M. Morris proclaimed, “The teaching of evolution is the root of atheism, communism,  Nazism, behaviorism, imperialism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice.”  And then, going for a big finish, he concluded, “Evolution is the source of promiscuity, pornography and perversion.” (wonderful alliteration!)

             I don’t know, perhaps the views of Mr. Morris were just a bit extreme.  And yet they serve as a stark reminder of the great passions felt on both sides of this issue.  In 1860, one year after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asserted that Darwin’s views were “contrary to the revelation of God in the scriptures.”  We continue to hear that argument today, most notably in recent years from members of the Kansas State board of Education.  It was just a couple of weeks ago that their decision to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas schools was overturned by a new Board.  And we probably have not heard the last of it.

             On the other side of the argument, just to demonstrate that it is not only religious folks who overstate their case, Cornell biologist,  William Provine, has said that evolutionary theory is “the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.”  The blind, purposeless process of natural selection, controlled only by chance and necessity, has left no room for any God except a very remote and disinterested one.

             “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”  Formed by God from the dust of the earth…human beings animated, given life, by the very breath of God.  What a wonderful image.  I wish I could think of images like that.  But we ruin it, we miss its most profound meanings, when we try to take it literally; when we argue that it is more science than poetry.

             Physicist, Niels Bohr, in describing the study of sub-atomic particles, says this:  “We must be clear, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as poetry.”  His point is that our language is not adequate to describe things we cannot see, much less understand.  The best we can do is to create images that give us some handle on how these things act.  Thus modern physics is less concerned with what nature is than with what can be said about nature.

             I think Niels Bohr understands Genesis far better than today’s Creationists.  I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this point because I don’t really think it is a hot button issue here in our church or even in our community, but just let me say that those who insist we use Genesis as some kind of science textbook, display a profound misunderstanding of the Biblical word.  They say they are Biblical literalists, but I don’t think they really get it.  When those ancient Hebrews looked out upon the universe and creation, when they considered their own lives, they wondered how did all this - how did we - get here? What do our lives mean?  And the only language available to describe the indescribable, to understand that which was beyond understanding, was the language of poetry.  They created verbal images.  “And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life…”  Is it a literal description of the creation of human beings?  Of course not.  Is it true?  You’re darn right it’s true.  The how of creation is not the issue here.  Genesis is not science.  But it is a beautiful, poetic, and profound expression of religious truth, namely that all life finds its foundation, its source, its very being…in God.

             The trouble with this talking about this issue, is that it is somewhat like a spider web.  When you start talking over here, something begins trembling over there.  This assertion that we come from God leads us to a whole other question, one asked by both science and religion.  Namely…are we here by accident or design?  Is it just the luck of the draw that we are here…or were we meant to be here?  If I remember Darwin correctly, he argues that we are here as the haphazard product of random variations; we are the outcome of the blind, purposeless process of natural selection.  But rather than being the final word on the matter, this assertion raises some interesting questions for both science and religion; right here, the once impenetrable boundary between science and religion begins to erode.  It’s hard to tell where the science ends and the theology begins.

             For there are people these days in both disciplines who seem to be staking out a middle ground between a literal reading of Genesis and an unwavering devotion to an evolutionary process that is strictly random.  In her helpful book, The Luminous Web, Barbara Brown Taylor describes this middle ground with these words:  “In this story of creation there is something beyond blind chance at work in evolution.  Instead of a collection of genetic accidents, there are patterns more like blueprints that tend to organize cells the same basic way every time.”  Chance or design?

             I suspect every person here this morning at some time has set on the edge of a bathtub and stirred the water with your hand.  You know more or less what you will create when you do that.  The water is not going to shoot straight up toward the ceiling, nor is it going to remain motionless.  It has its own dynamic of self-organization, its own design, which means it will behave in certain ways.  When you stir the water, you create some form of ripples and waves every time.  Their size and shape may change, but their general pattern is predictable.  Fishermen learn how to read a stream or river.  They watch for ripples or eddies.  They depend on these predictable and repeatable patterns to tell them where fish are holding.  Fish depend on them too for food.

             Think for a moment about an eye.  Darwin once said his blood ran cold every time he looked into a vertebrate eye.  Trying to imagine how many lucky mutations had to occur in order to come up with one eyeball taxed even his faith in his own hypothesis, especially since it seems that eyes developed not once, but many times throughout the ages.  Was it simply random selection,  happening many times, that lead to an eye?  Could other forces have been at work?  Science writer, George Johnson says this:  “Eyes are not random accumula-tions of accidents, but patterns that arise as waves and spirals arise naturally in water.”

             In the words of Taylor, “Stir the water and you get waves.  Stir the gene pool and you get eyes, kidneys, spinal cords and brains.  Stir it again and the details may change but the patterns will remain familiar…”  Haphazard creation or a creation governed by certain biological designs?  And where might these designs come from?  The answer to that depends on who you ask.  For people of faith, the answer seems easy enough.  From a Designer, of course!

             It’s an old Jewish folk tale.  One day God said to Abraham, “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be here.”  To which Abraham replied, “True, but if I weren’t here, there wouldn’t be anyone to think about you!”  Since we are here, was the universe put together in a certain way, was evolution shaped and designed in a certain way, so that we would eventually come into being?

             Sir Fred Hoyle, a chemist, studied carbon atoms.  He wondered why there was such an abundance of carbon in our galaxy when its creation requires a triple collision of helium nuclei, which is quite rare.  How could  it happen?  The answer lay in the internal resonances of carbon and oxygen nuclei, where figures as small as half a percent make all the difference between carbon and no carbon.  I don’t completely understand what I just said about internal resonances and all, but I do understand this:  since carbon is essential for life, that half a percent makes all the difference between us and no us.

             Hoyle wrote that his lifelong atheism was shaken by this discovery.  In his words, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”  Needless to say, many other scientists beg to differ, but again, Hoyle’s conclusions raise some fascinating questions about just how random, random evolution really is.

             Like chickens penetrating the mysteries of their own eggs, we have been given the ability to glimpse and reflect on our own origins.  And what we see is the possibility of several different stories - several explanations for how we got here.  What meaning do we draw from these varied explanations?  There is certainly  nothing to prevent people of faith from interpreting a scientific creation story from the perspective of faith.  But I have no intention of standing here and telling you what story, what meaning, you should choose.

             But let me leave you with this - one of the meanings I choose to take from the story of creation.  Our bodies are 65 percent oxygen, 18 percent carbon, 10 percent hydrogen, and 3.3 percent nitrogen, plus a smattering of other elements you find listed on the back of the bottle of your multi-vitamin pills.  Where did these essential elements for life come from?  From the creation of the cosmos.  Within us, we have the ashes of the stars.  In Taylor’s words, “Chemically speaking, the only difference between us and trees or rocks or chickens is the way in which our elements are arranged…We are all made out of the same stuff.  We are all children of the universe.”

             Every cell on earth, whether it belongs to a patch of blue-green algae or a human brain, consists of the same fifty organic molecules.  All need twenty amino acids.  All carry our blueprints in the form of DNA or RNA.  What this suggests is that all life comes from the same source, which makes us all kin: algae, tadpoles, skunks and blue jays, not to mention elephants and rainbow trout.

             And wonder of wonders, here we are - conscious beings who can think, wonder, perceive and say; beings who can praise our Maker.  Whether your answer is seven days or seven billion years, it remains a miracle that we are here at all, that we can look to the sky and say, “Thank you for all of this.”

             Reflecting on her own research, Taylor writes, “While I was putting all this together, I asked a friend how I could relate it to the biblical story of creation.  ‘Basically,’ I said, ‘it looks as if we all started out as rocks.  The story I want to tell is how God taught the children of rocks to sing hymns, but how does that square with the book of Genesis?’

             He had a one word answer, “’Dust!’”

                 Of course!  Dust!  Dust is all God has ever needed to make life - dust of stars where the primal elements were sown, dust of the earth where they all came together.  So many possible meanings.  Here is the one I choose: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”  Praise be to God!