Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know; Out of your heart, cry wonder: Sing that we live. – Robert Weston, Sing the Living Tradition, 530

Just two weeks into February and I wonder where we get the energy and stamina, the inspiration, to affirm, as we did in the responsive reading (#530), to say that “This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know; Out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.”

The month began with the space shuttle Columbia disintegrating. Then we watched as Secretary of State Colin Powell rattled the sabers of U.S. leadership before the UN Security Council. The build up of our nation’s military continued as we come ever so close to what amounts to a unilateral, preemptive invasion of Iraq. Then just a couple of days ago, Attorney General Ashcroft told us that the terrorist alert color has changed and we need to be more vigilant for, well, we’re not told for what – just go about your lives, do nothing different, but be warned that the danger of terrorist attack is heightened. And it’s only two weeks into the month! How can we “cry wonder, sing that we live.”

All of this was on my mind recently when the church’s board had an all day workshop. During lunchtime, a small group of us were sitting at a table and I asked them how they thought the faith community of their past – of childhood, young adulthood, or ever more recently – had influenced what they believe today. I asked this question fully aware that 90% of us come faith traditions other than Unitarian Universalist. How has this faith of the past shaped who you are today, is what I wondered, even though today you may see yourself as very different.

All of my questioning and probing was in the context of these first two weeks of the month, because it’s been my experience that when people are hard pressed with events that are difficult, uncertain, horrific, chaotic – up against crisis events that are difficult to understand or simply unfathomable – that they have a fall back position, default mode that doesn’t include their adult, “mature” faith. But they revert back to something they were taught as children, that they were raised with, feelings and beliefs that have never been completely released because they are imbedded in the psyche.

On Tuesday evenings, I facilitate a class where we’re reading David Simmon’s book Learning to Fall. This last class we discussed his chapter on “Wildness,” where he writes about returning to our original selves, that of animal instinct, of living wild, and live with a single focus and purpose, not having to think about the world’s events which cause us worry and anxiety – like these last two weeks. I recall a cartoon that captures Simmon’s point: it’s just one panel that shows five figures. The first is an amphibian leaving the water to become a mammal. The next two are more developed mammals. The fourth is a chimp. And the last is a human being. Over each of the four figures is a thought bubble that reads: “Eat. Survive. Reproduce.” But over the human being is a thought bubble that reads: “What’s it all about?” What a curse! Maybe Simmons is right – just to return to the wild! I’m also reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s creation story where God has created “mud-as-man.” God slaps mud-as-man to consciousness and he says: “What the meaning of all of this.” God says: “Everything must have a meaning, have purpose?” “Of course,” replies mud-as-man. And God answers: “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all of this.” What a burden. Maybe we’d like to just crawl away into a cave and be left alone. It can hurt to try to make sense of it all, to “cry wonder: to sing that we live.” So where do we get our energy, our stamina, where do we get whatever it takes to keep going: What’s the baseline that we fall back to.

For me, the early, subtle, nearly unconscious theological underpinnings of belief came through music. To this day, I love singing hymns. I remember sitting around campfires as a cub scout, as a boy scout, at church camp and then during family outing and singing all those songs. One of them was, and sing along:

Tell me why the stars do shine.

Tell me why the ivy twines.

Tell me why the skies so blue.

And I will tell you, why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine.

Because God made the ivy twine.

Because God made the skies so blue.

Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

A simple song with a lot of comfort. And horrible theology.

In a recent Gallup poll, the results were that nearly 50% of Americans believe that God created human beings whole and complete, as we are, less than ten-thousand years ago: whole and complete less than ten-thousand years ago. This is contradictory to everything science – good scientific evidence – tells us today. One author suggests that these results clearly show Americans ignorance of Darwin and evolution science.

I can’t help thinking that songs like “Tell Me Why,” as well as other campfire songs and hymns from our youth which provided comforting explanations and subtle belief messages, that these are still playing themselves out in adult faith especially in times of hardship, crisis and tests of belief.

In Victorian England, when Darwin was raised and practicing science, they were firm believers in Natural Religion. In part, this was the way that they dealt with their tumultuous times; this was the way they answered their society’s difficult questions and challenges. Science was a way to explore the universe in order to prove the existence of God and what was in the Bible. Natural Religion was a way to reveal what already existed as opposed to Revelatory Religion which came to people via revelation from God. So science was religious, affirming and substantiating the texts of scripture. Then along came Charles Darwin who shook all of this up.

There’s confusion about what Darwin said and what he didn’t say. What he didn’t say in 1859 with the publication of The Origin of Species, which people were waiting for, in fact it sold out through the several initial printings, what he didn’t write about were at least two things: origins and the species. When I say he didn’t talk about origins, I mean that he didn’t write about how life – human life – began. He doesn’t talk about beginnings, which means that he doesn’t write about God. So, he doesn’t mention the origin, as the title suggests. He left this for others.

He also didn’t talk about the species, as in human beings. One of the mistakes people often make when speaking about this seminal writing is to misspeak the title, naming it as The Origin of the Species. It was almost as if Darwin deliberately didn’t include the article the because then readers would think it was about humans. This came as a big blow to many whom wanted to know about the origin of people. But Darwin was very aware of this desire. Remember that this was a book that had been near publication for years. Since 1836, after returning from his 5 year around the world voyage on the H.M.S.Beagle, he’d been working toward this book. It was during this trip that he began sketching out in words and drawings the preliminaries of his theory of evolution. For over 20 years he worried about publication because he knew the reaction his work would receive from skeptics, but most of all from the church, would be harsh.

At this point in his career, Darwin reminds me of the parish minister who was out one morning working in her garden when a member of her congregation walks by and exclaims: “Oh look what a wonder job you and Lord have done in creating such a beautiful garden!” And the parish minister responds: “Right, you should have seen it when it just belonged to God.” Her comments reflect a similar attitude on the part of Darwin who was aware of the tension between the accepted understanding of creation and humankind with his theoretical version of the origin of species. So Darwin didn’t try to respond to this tension and challenge, he left it up to others, to people like Thomas Huxley who was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” he left it up to them to respond to the challenges and queries, to complete the picture that he was beginning.

One of those pictures I’ve included on the cover of your order of service bulletin. It’s a wonderful drawing, a cartoon, that appeared in Punch’s Almanac, a London magazine, in 1881, the year before Darwin’s death. It flow of the picture begins in the lower left corner where crawling out of chaos is a primordial worm (in 1881, Darwin was working on a book about worms). Then, following the process counter clockwise, the worm develops into a chimp, into an upright Homo sapiens and eventually into a human being, and finally into Charles Darwin. There were cartoons, like this one, from the beginning of Darwin’s work. He didn’t have to explain to his public where his speculation was going; the cartoons did an adequate job of this! He didn’t have to say a thing, the commentary said it all: “Man Is But a Worm.”

It’s been said that the most controversial thing Darwin ever did was die. He was such a controversial figure due to his writings which had nearly destroyed, single-handedly all that Natural Religion had stood for. But Huxley and others felt that a figure who had had such a profound impact on science and the world, that it was befitting such a personality and person of science, that he should be interred in Westminster Abbey. Of course, there were many who disagreed and were prepared to fight this level of recognition. But their voices were quickly silenced by those who came to understand the revolutionary character of Darwinian evolution. And so it is that there is a Unitarian interred in Westminster Abbey!

So, what did Darwin say? Darwin’s dangerous idea is really several. The first dangerous idea is his theory of natural selection, that over billions of years that species are modified and these modifications allow the species to survive. Those who are modified are then better adapted to their environment and continue to survive. And it goes on and on, with the outcome being that living things today are the result of billions of years of natural selection with modification. Of course this ran right up against the Victorian science’s affirmation that God completed us whole and complete as human beings. That was a mind expander for Darwin’s contemporaries, and evidently it still is today.

His second dangerous idea was that this all took place as a process. It took so much time, it wasn’t a one-shot occurrence, as in boom! and it was over, species were created whole and complete as described in Genesis. It was a process and took time.

What Darwin did was to tinker with the Victorian Cosmos Pyramid. On top of this pyramid was God and on the bottom was Nothing. In between was Mind, Design, Order, and Chaos. Darwin tinkered with these middle four subjects to such a degree as to cast doubt, skepticism, and new light on the top and the bottom. He didn’t have to address God and Nothing directly. Simply tinkering with the middle of the pyramid did that, it led people to draw their own conclusions.

But there was a dangerous idea that was unbearable for the Anglican church – for the Catholic church – and Victorian England, and remains both difficult and dangerous today. It was this: Darwin dismantled the Anthropic Principal, which said that humankind is at the center of it all, that all of creation exists for the delight of human beings, that Homo sapiens is the species. Darwin said no, I’m sorry, human kind is no more at the center of the cosmos as was the earth at the center of our solar system. We are merely one of the species and who’s to say what it will look like in another billion years, as the process of natural selection and adaptation continues. Darwin destroyed the egocentrism of humankind which put us at the center of Life, that said we’re the end product of it all. Darwinian evolution pulled the rug out from under religion, then and now. It erased the baseline, the fall back position, the default mode, for people of faith. Some reacted so strongly to Darwin, they were so overcome by the fear that humankind was not at the center of the cosmos – that this wasn’t what they had been taught – that there was no alternative but to reject what Darwin said regardless of its truth. To think that we might be no better than the trees, the ants, or the bears because we are all part of this diversity and process – this was crushing for many who would rather talk of how God made the ivy twine, the skies so blue, and God made you that’s why I love you.

Stephen Dunn has a poem that speaks about our love of story, our desire to hear fiction, of how difficult it is to hear truth and reconcile it with faith.

It was supposed to be arts and crafts for a week,

but when she came home

with the “Jesus Saves” button, we knew what art

was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs

they sang when they weren’t

twisting and folding paper into dolls.

What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith

in good men was what

we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,

that other sadness.

O.K., we said, one week. But when she came home

singing “Jesus loves me,

the Bible tells me so,” it was time to talk.

Could we say Jesus

doesn’t love you? Could I tell her the Bible

is a great book certain people use

to make you feel bad? We sent her back

without a word.

It had been so long wince we believed, so long

since we needed Jesus

as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was

sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln

or Thomas Jefferson.

Soon it became clear to us: you can’t teach disbelief

to a child,

only wonderful soirees, and we hadn’t a story

nearly as good.

On parents’ night there were the Arts and Crafts

all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats

in the church

and the children sang a song about the Ark,

and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down

for Jesus.

I can’t remember ever feeling so uncertain

about what’s comic, what’s serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.

You can’t say to your child

“Evolution loves you.” The story stinks

of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn’t have

a wonderful story for my child

and she was beaming. All the way home in the car

she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus.

There was nothing to do

but drive, ride it out, sing along

in silence

(in Houston Smith, Why Religion Matters, pp. 56-58)

I disagree. Evolution has a wonderful story to tell. It’s told by Barbara Kingsolver, about an interdependent web that is so tightly woven that even a she-bear missing her own young would pick up and walk away with a baby and feed it.

It’s the story of a parish minister out gardening and giving voice to the tension between Nature and her plans, and how to reach respect for what both have to offer each other, where each benefits from the other.

It’s the story of Laurel Clark, flying above earth, crying wonder; looking at the beauty of the earth and sharing it not with theological language. Not using religious language to justify that beauty but simply saying, What a marvel. What a jewel suspended in space. Just appreciate it.

It’s the story of Charles Darwin putting together an incredibly difficult and complicated jigsaw puzzle of Life over such a long period of time; wrapping it up as a gift and presenting it to everyone.

And it’s the story of truth speaking to power, to the established church, and saying, You need to reconsider what you’ve been telling people.

There are these stories and more. And there are songs, like the one we heard this morning using the words of Robert Weston – a powerful melody to powerful lyrics. There’s a message there, a story, we can tell our children, that we can tell all.

Evolution, the process described by Darwin, is what our Seventh Principal is all about: The interdependent web of all living things. This is what Darwin was talking about. This is religion. Religion comes from the Latin root religio meaning “to bind together” and this is what Darwin does. One author has commented that Darwin has come the closest to having a unified theory of life matter than anyone. And with all the genetics research and discoveries that are occurring today, rather than tearing apart Darwinian theory, it’s substantiating it. It really is amazing that his words of 1859 have stood the test of time, to be meaningful for science, for living, for religion – for what binds our lives together.

Why isn’t it good enough to look at our lives, at the interdependent web, to look at the cosmos, and simply say, What a wonder! What a marvel! How lucky we are! Why do we have to say, And we’re at the center of it; God created it and us just as we are. I think it’s more profound to look at the way Darwin has described this marvel in all its complexity and say, Incredible! We don’t have the words to describe what he has revealed to us.

The “Reflection” that’s in the bulletin this morning comes from the last paragraph of The Origin. It’s the last sentence of the last paragraph. The last word is evolved, which is the only time that word appears in the book. Let these words inspire us and give us direction:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

What a marvel! What a world we share. “Out of your heart, cry wonder: Sing that we live."

Go back to the Sermons Archive or the UUCA Home Page

Send Mail to the Church.