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Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster

Knowledge or Faith: How We Live in the World
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
February 11, 2007

Today, there are at least 580 congregations in this country participating in the second annual Evolution Sunday.  Evolution Sunday is a movement among liberal and some orthodox Christian congregations who believe that the Bible cannot be read as a scientific textbook.  They believe that there is no ultimate contradiction between the information of science and the wisdom of faith.  They believe that you cannot treat apples as oranges, or oranges as apples.  Furthermore, they are appalled by those far right fundamentalist true believers who can't see the difference and would sacrifice the wisdom in faith to make faith, not fact, dominate science. 

This movement is primarily designed for those intelligent Christians who see the wrong-headedness of Intelligent Design.  Unitarian Universalists, agnostics, atheists, pagans, and other non-Christian religious types are not the constituency of this Evolution Sunday effort.  But they are invited to lend support to those liberal and orthodox Christians who are trying to bring their faith into the 21^st century.  It is on the basis as a fellow traveler that I am speaking on this topic today.  I truly hope this movement grows and helps religion in this country become a positive, not a negative, force for human progress. 

The pictures on the front of the order of service were chosen to set the stage for my remarks. To speak metaphorically, they represent the issue of whether God created human beings or whether King Kong sired them -- that is, whether humans are an end result of the evolution of apes. 

These pictures depict rather clearly the emotional and intellectual dimensions of the two poles.  The straightforward portrait of Darwin (whom I suspect you recognize) shows a straightforward man who is simply trying to make the most of what he sees around him without resorting to the trick imagery of theological suppositions.  The other is a picture that, I suspect, came out of the so-called "monkey trial" of the 1920s in which Christian literalists condemned evolution because it contradicted the Bible. 

The anti-evolutionists won at that trial.  The teacher who was accused of teaching evolution, which actually was against state law to teach, was convicted and fined.  But, overall the Christian literalists came off, themselves, looking like monkeys, sort of like the picture that they used to demean Darwin.  They lost a lot of ground then, but one thing about true-believing literalists that we must never forget is that they often are energized by failure.  To them, a loss only means they must redouble their efforts.  After all, the point is not so much to win as to fight the devil and secure one's place in heaven.  

Well, they came back in force.  In the latter part of the 20^th century they tried to displace the teaching of evolution with the same kind of claim they made in the 1920s.  Essentially, they were saying, "This is a Christian nation and nothing should be taught in the schools that contradicts the Bible."  Since "God created man", they said, "it is wrong and blasphemous and should not be public policy to teach that human beings came about in some other way than is described in the Book of Genesis."  But too much reliable biology had been taught since the 1920s and a more informed understanding of the methods of science had been learned by too many people, so the creationists (the name by which they were going) began losing their court cases.  They realized that, if they wanted to influence a more scientifically conditioned public, they would have to appear more scientific themselves.  So, they bundled up the more undeniable aspects of science (things like genetics, physics, chemistry and the like), took this bundle to the sacristy, added the notion that this whole shootin' match of existence had to have been designed by an outside intelligence of some kind, and then baptized all this under the name "intelligent design." 

And so we have a raging debate over whether evolution or intelligent design should be taught in our schools.  The strange thing about this debate is that the intelligent designers, after their moment at the sacristy, assert that they are pursuing science; and, I presume that means they think they are following the scientific method.  They assert that naturalistic explanations of some biological events are not possible but can only be explained by intelligent causes.  They maintain that the existence of such naturally unexplainable events is proof of the existence of God or of some kind of super-intelligent alien out in space.  (It looks like the TV series Star Trek had an effect even in Sunday morning bible school.)  They claim that intelligent design should be taught in the science classroom as an alternative to the science of evolution.   Evolution, they say, is only a theory - obviously unaware that they don't grasp how simple-minded they are sounding. 

The word, theory, has a number of distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge.  The way the intelligent designers are using it is the common usage in which it signifies an opinion, or a conjecture, or a speculation.  In this usage, a theory is not necessarily based on facts and is not expected to be true independently of what people may think about it.    

But, in science, a theory is independent of what people may think about it.  In science it is a proposed description of the manner of interaction within a set of natural phenomena.  It is an effort to defend or refute an hypothesis.  It is capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind.  It is capable of being tested through experiment or falsified through empirical observation.  For scientists, theory and fact do not necessarily stand in opposition.  The fact that an apple falls toward the earth gave rise to the current theory of gravitation which can only be contradicted if, under similar circumstances, apples are observed to fall in another direction.  Evolution, as a theory, has been and will continue to be subjected to rigorous efforts to verify the way it fits the facts together.  So far the results have been in some ways to show some gaps but, overall, evolutionary theory has been enormously strengthened.  To suggest that it is only opinion shows both a biased mentality and a disregard for the way science works. 

Intelligent design, however, is a theory of the opinionated kind.  It looks at the complexities of evolution and declares that they could only exist because something is supervising from the outside.  It asserts that things as complex as the development of the eye or the wings of birds can only happen because an intelligent designer called for them to happen.  It says there has to be both a formal cause that starts it all and a final cause that sustains it all.  The irreducible complexity and the specificity of that complexity could only happen under outside supervision. 

What they don't seem to grasp is that they are trying to force an enormous amount of verified data into a belief, an assumption, an opinion rather than exploring the data for what they imply.  Intelligent design starts with an assumption not with an observation.  It is an effort to support that assumption by cramming scientific information into it rather than by testing the data to see if it supports a working hypothesis.  That makes the intelligent design. theory too small to begin with. 

One of my favorite cartoons about intelligent design appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer a few years ago.  See if you can visualize this:  There is a small cage for transporting animals. The bars are raised and two little men, one labeled "formal cause" and the other labeled "final cause", are standing on top of the cage, supervising.  On the ground are two other men, one labeled "irreducible complexity" and the other labeled "complexity specification", who are trying to push a tiger into the cage.  The problem is that the tiger is four or five times larger than the cage itself and they can barely get the tip of the tail and a back paw into it - and the formal cause and final cause aren't even helping. 

That pretty well symbolizes what the intelligent designers are attempting.  They are trying to cram the accumulated data of science into a little theological trap and there is not a chance that it will fit.  I suppose the real questionis, if there is an intelligent design, why doesn't it make the cage bigger, or the tiger smaller? 

The question we have to ask ourselves is not whether intelligent design is a valid interpretation of science.  An intelligent appraisal soon detects that it is an effort to prove an assumption, not examine the facts.  The question is not whether science and religion can be bedfellows.  Frankly, they have no choice.  It is the same human mind that devises them; the same human heart that affirms and revels in them.  It is the same human hand that gives shape to them both.  No, the question is a power question - whether we like to think in these terms or not.  It is a power question because it is a question of which elements of society are going to prevail by persuading the rest of society of their validity and necessity. 

That makes the question cultural.  What is to be the prevailing character of our society?  Is it to be the intelligent use of carefully derived and evaluated information about our world?  Or, is it to be dependent on an imagined intelligence that has been designed to protect a mindlessly pursued faith?  Since culture has been based largely on religious concepts and since religion will not go away, how can people of religion come to think in terms that advance all people, not just people of their own faith? 

You know, the paradox in the intelligent design approach is that evolution is consistent with a belief in an intelligent designer of the universe.  The two are not contradictory logically.  They are not necessarily competitors.  If you are studying the process itself, the way the process was started is another issue.  And, since first causes seem beyond the capacity to examine by those who were created by that cause, how it all started is logically impenetrable.  Whether evolution was started by Chaos or God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster is only a preferred assumption that lies in the heart (or in jerking knees) more than the head.  The strange aspect of the intelligent design effort is that its supporters already have the right to their beliefs outside the classroom and laboratory.  But, they want everyone else to agree with them.   

That's what makes this whole matter an issue of power and cultural change.  Who is to control our minds? And to what ends? 

Where we can make a significant tactical mistake is to think that this is only a "point of view" matter, or a theological issue, or a church and state issue, or an integrity of science issue.  It is all of these things, of course.  But, fundamentally, it is the issue of whether religious mind-controllers will dominate our society (even more than they do).  They have certainly made inroads into our politics and our economics.  To allow them to win out in science and public education would plunge us even deeper into such loss of intellectual, and religious, freedom that our survival as a free people would be put even more in doubt than it already is. 

The urgency of the current situation is to convince a critical mass of our citizenry that religious beliefs are to be kept out of our collective pursuit of truth.  There are many persons of deep Christian faith who believe the latter and would block the religious mind-controllers from dominating us.  They are making themselves known in increasing numbers.  We have the same goals and we welcome them to this continuing struggle. 

And it is going to be a continuing struggle.  We are involved in a cultural confrontation with unclear consequences.  To openly defeat and publicly disgrace the religious right will not make its followers go away.  It might diminish their number somewhat, only to strengthen the true believers among them.  What kind of cultural chaos would result from that?  And yet, if we are human creatures who are intellectual and disciplined and do not act by knee jerk alone, we must pursue truth as we understand it and face the consequences of that pursuit.  The practical reality is that the lid to a Pandora's Box, that was filled with the facts of evolution and its consequences, is open.  Its contents are scattered to the winds.  They cannot be ignored no matter how much a true believing intelligent designer may wish to ignore them. 

The reality is that we cannot ignore nor can we approve of dogmatic efforts to distort our scientific and educational efforts to the advantage of those who would advance their power over our public and personal lives.  But, how do we conduct our responses to them so that their power is diminished and our chances for a free society are increased?

In this situation we should remember that they are not in dialogue with us, nor we with them, although, in our UU tradition of trying to enlighten the unenlightened, we may think we are.  No, our target audience is that great amorphous middle of our society - those persons who have not paid much attention to the issues nor are clear in their own minds about how they think about them.  Efforts should be directed at the intelligent designers, of course, but our real target should go beyond them to the people who want this to be a free, educated, intelligent country but are not yet turned on to the need actually to work for it - those who, it might be said, are "sleep-walking through democracy"* because the loss of it has not yet touched them personally.   

Our duty is to sway public opinion by telling the truth as we best understand it -- and telling it strongly and often.  And, the truth we tell must not only speak to the rationality of our hearers; it must also move their hearts with a vision of humanity that is both intellectually sound and spiritually inspired.  We are natural creatures of a natural world who are awe-inspired by that world within which we have come to be.  We must enable others to see that the mind is a marvelous instrument for exploring this world and the human spirit is only human when it faces the wonders of this world with awe.  Theological efforts to command that mind and that spirit must always fail.  For human beings with the capacity to think will never let the more thoughtless of their kind take that capacity away.  Authentic living in this world is not a choice between knowledge on the one hand and faith on the other.  It is open and responsible melding of the two in such a way that truth is served and our humanity enhanced. 

*The source of the powerful phrase "sle[walking through democracy" is an article in Church and State, February 2007 quoting Jeffrey Selman, the primary complainant in the lawsuit Selman v. Cobb County School Board.