Sermon Archive

Intelligent Design?

Reformation Sunday—this is our time to commemorate the event on October 31, 1517, that led eventually to the birth of Protestantism. On that day, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther challenged a number of the reigning theological concepts of his era by posting on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany a list of ninety-five theses that he was proposing to debate academically. And the world has not been the same since.

So, Reformation Sunday seems to me to be a day ever-so-appropriate for debating some of the reigning theological concepts of our time. And one of the hottest theological debates raging today is the one still being sparked by the writings of a 19th-century naturalist named Charles Darwin. Darwin posted his set of theses some 146 years ago in the book On the Origin of Species (1859). And the world has not been the same since.

Now, the severity of the theological challenge posed to Christians in particular, and to people of faith in general, by Darwin's theory of the evolution of life on Earth-the severity of that challenge would be hard to overestimate. For example, one of the basic concepts on which Darwinism is built is the idea that occurrences in natural history are random, accidental, undirected. And this idea of the brute impersonalness of natural occurrences poses a fundamental challenge to the concept that's sounded in both of today's Scripture Lessons and that's basic to the beliefs of most Christians—namely, that the creative processes at work in our world have been designed and directed by the controlling will of an all-powerful God.

And a second of the basic concepts on which Darwinism is built is the idea that there's a process of natural selection that weeds out, in what is really quite a merciless manner, all the forms of life that are non-adaptive. Thus, to quote the distinguished Georgetown University theologian John Haught ("Darwin, Design and the Promise of Nature," the Boyle Lecture given at the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, London, on Feb. 4, 2004, and available online at www.stmarylebow.co.uk/news/boyle2004.htm, pp. 13-14), "Life's long journey ... has left such a wide trail of loss and pain that many sensitive people have given up trying to make religious sense of it all"—including Charles Darwin himself. You see, by raising to view data about the vast suffering and carnage that has attended life's evolution through the mechanism of "survival of the fittest"—by raising up these data Darwinism poses a direct challenge to the concept held by most Christians that the God who's in charge of the universe is benevolent and loving.

Yes, Christian thought has traditionally associated the creation of the world with the concept of "a divine 'plan,' 'purpose' or 'design,' but there seems to be little in the Darwinian charting of life's journey that corresponds to such cozy concepts." (Haught, p. 14)

In light of Darwinism's challenges to fundamental concepts held dear by countless millions of Christians, it ought to come as no surprise that many Americans have fought against the teaching of evolution in schools tooth and nail and that evolution did not come to be taught widely in our nation's high-school science curricula until as late as the 1970s, just 30 years ago—fully a century after Darwin first published his startling, yea earthshaking, theory. And it ought to come as no surprise that many Americans are now clamoring for science courses to teach a theory that is more consistent with traditional Christian thought, either in addition to or in place of Darwin's theory.

Therefore, it ought to come as no surprise that in a June, 2005, Harris Poll, 54% of the 1,000 adults surveyed said they did not believe that humans had developed from an earlier species, and 55% said children in public schools should be taught creationism and intelligent design alongside evolution. And it ought also to come as no surprise that last August, both our ardent, born-again Methodist President George W. Bush and our somewhat more staid but no less religious Presbyterian Senate Majority Leader William Frist became strong advocates for teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.

As I said, none of these actions should come as a surprise—precisely because so very much is at stake theologically in what our schools teach scientifically.

But here's my view on all of this. Darwin's theory of evolution is just about as strong and sound a scientific concept as there is, and at the present time, in peer-reviewed scientific journals the published empirical data supporting Darwin's hypotheses are overwhelming and uncontested in these journals. In contrast to that, in peer- reviewed scientific journals the number of published empirical data supporting the would-be science of intelligent design-the number of those data adds up to zero. There are none!

So let's just admit it. What's being advocated as an intelligent-design science curriculum is in fact religious thought, not scientific thought. Yes, the movement to introduce intelligent design into the science classroom is actually an attempt by religious folk, many of whom are well-meaning, to rescue some important aspects of traditional Christian theology in the face of Darwinian data to the contrary.

But I believe we Christians can pursue quite a different approach. I believe that, instead of suppressing or falsifying science, we people of faith need to go back to the theological drawing board in order to rethink our existing theology in the light of new data, just as Martin Luther and John Calvin did nearly five centuries ago. I believe we need to construct a Christian theology that honors both God's revelation in Jesus and the reality of evolution.

And I know at least two persons of faith who can help us get started on this project of reconstructing Christian theology. They are: first, Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., the internationally renowned medical doctor and scientist who is both the Director of the National Human Genome Project and a professing Christian; and second, John Haught, Ph.D., the Thomas Healy Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., whose particular area of expertise is Theology and Science. Indeed, Haught's two most recent books are entitled God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (2000) and Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in an Age of Evolution (2003).

First, then, Francis Collins, who last August shared these thoughts in a Time Magazine Forum entitled "Can You Believe in God and Evolution?" (compiled by David Van Biema, Time, Vol. 166, No. 7, August 15, 2005, p. 34). Said Collins, "I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover [the divine] methods, that is something to celebrate.... For me scientific discovery is … an occasion of worship....

"While no one could claim yet to have ferreted out every detail of how evolution works, I do not see any significant 'gaps' in the progressive development of life's complex structures that would require divine intervention. In any case, efforts to insert God into the gaps of contemporary human understanding of nature have not fared well in the past, and we should be careful not to do that now.

"Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence. For me the fundamental answers about the meaning of life come not from science but from a consideration of the origins of our uniquely human sense of right and wrong, and from the historical record of Christ's life on Earth."

(And from Collins, in Christian Networks Journal, Winter, 2004) "My faith is in an omniscient and benevolent God who created the universe out of nothingness, and whose purposes included the ultimate appearance of creatures who would desire fellowship with [God]." And when, in the evolution of the chain of life here on Earth, there developed a species—humankind—with religious sensitivities and a yearning for God, "God then provided the inestimable gift of Jesus Christ to teach us how to live, and to be a bridge between our own imperfect humanness and God's perfect holiness...."

It seems to me that Collins, who is quite a distinguished evolutionist, here shows himself to be, as well, quite a fine Christian theologian.

Now, Collins does speak of a God who is "benevolent." But how can he and we affirm that, in the face of the carnage of natural selection and extinguished species? Well, to help us answer that question, here are some thoughts from John Haught (The Boyle Lecture, pp. 25-32).

God's benevolence is shown to us by God's humble choice to self-limit divine power, so that all of creation can be truly free and autonomous. For creation to be truly independent of God and differentiated from God, then God must "let it be." God must "let it alone." (ibid., p. 28)

Therefore, the contingency—that is, the "accidentalness"—of random genetic variations and of undirected occurrences in natural history is necessary if the world is to be genuinely free. "The alternative would be a world so stiffened by lawful necessity that everything in it would be determined and[, so to speak,] dead..." (ibid., p. 28)

And natural selection, with its weeding out of non-adaptive forms of life, may also be "essential if the world is to have any degree of autonomy or self-reliance vis-à-vis its Creator. The alternative, once again, is unimaginable; a construct in which every event would be directly caused by divine action—in other words, not really a world at all, but a puppet." (ibid., p. 29)

The necessary cost for the world's having the freedom and autonomy from its Creator that's embodied in evolution—that cost is suffering. Yet there is hope for resurrection, for God, who is both Compassion and the Source of resurrection—God has not at all abandoned the world to its suffering. No, God has instead become incarnate in creation, fully identifying with its suffering and fully drawing it on into the eternity that is resurrection and new creation.

This God has descended from pure divine self-being to enter "into the deepest layers of the evolutionary process, embracing and suffering along with the entire cosmic story, not just with the recent human chapters. The Spirit of God stretches the divine compassion out across the totality of creation, enfolding and healing not only human struggles and suffering but also the epochs of evolutionary travail that preceded our emergence .... Redemption must mean, then, at the very least, that the whole story of the universe and life streams into the everlasting bosom of divine compassion.... [T]he God revealed in Christ assimilates into the divine eternity, and hence into ultimate redemptive bliss, the whole story of life on earth… Because of the divine omnipresence, nothing in the universe-story or in life's evolution can occur outside of God's own experience.... [T]he eons of evolutionary suffering in the universe are also God's own suffering[, like unto God's suffering on the cross of Jesus]. And this would mean that the whole of nature in some way participates in the promise of resurrection as well." (ibid., p. 27)

So here, through the thinking of Francis Collins and John Haught—here is a start toward reconciling Darwinism and Christian theology. And isn't that more than enough for us to ponder on this Reformation Sunday?!

Let us pray: Help us, O God, as people of faith not to try to compete with the natural sciences but rather to try to dig beneath their empirical inquiries "into the subsoil ... of the deep cosmic conditions of evolution" that are Your plan for the universe. (Haught, p. 31) This we pray in the name of the one who was Your incarnation here on Earth, Jesus Christ. Amen.