“An Intelligent Designer?”

A Sermon delivered at the First Universalist Society in Franklin

By the Rev. Carol Rosine

October 23, 2005

There’s been a lot of interest expressed so far in this morning’s sermon.  People checking to make sure I’ve read specific news articles, leaving cartoons on my desk, sending me links to web sites spoofing the concept of Intelligent Design.  One of the links had the Lord God, Allah, & Buddha collaborating on creation with input from Apollo, Thor, Zeus, Vishnu, & Aphrodite who, as the first human being took the shape of a woman, commented, “Now it’s intelligent!”.  Another link was a letter to the Kansas School Board demanding equal time within the theory of Intelligent Design for their belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.  Seems that there’s a lot of rolling of the eyes within this congregation when Intelligent Design is brought up.

In a recent column on the Globe’s op-ed page, Ellen Goodman talked about how the emperor penguin featured in the film the ‘March of the Penguins’ has become another case study in the culture wars, with “one popular religious magazine suggesting that these 3 foot tall birds make a strong case for intelligent design.”  She notes that “penguin males balance an egg on their feet through months of an Antarctic winter. If that is intelligent design, the Big Guy has quite the sense of humor.  Under natural selection, at least they would have a shot at evolving a lifestyle that doesn’t require 70 mile marches to and from the food supply.”

And so some scoff.  Some shake their heads in amazement that 80 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial this is still an issue.  And others worry about the integrity of the public school science curriculum when people in positions of power, including our own President, call for the inclusion of Intelligent Design as a credible scientific theory.  I don’t know if you’ve been following this closely enough to know that there is a case in a Dover, Pennsylvania court right now in which a judge is being asked to decide whether the school board can force biology teachers to read a disclaimer on evolution that offers Intelligent Design as an alternative.  (Goodman) And it’s not just in Dover, Pennsylvania of course.  It’s happening in school districts in Kansas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Maryland, Illinois, and the list goes on & on. 

You may recall that it was in 1987 that the Supreme Court ruled that teaching Creationism in public schools, that belief in the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, would constitute teaching a specific religious belief within the public schools and therefore was unconstitutional.  And so what we have watched since then is the way in which the religious right has re-framed Creationism into Intelligent Design.  They have stripped creationism of some of its more outrageous claims, for example that the world was created in 7 days only 10,000 years ago and that there is evidence of Noah’s flood found within geological layers on the earth’s surface.   They’re not attempting to toss out Darwin and the theory of evolution.  They just want equal time for their theory which includes an intelligent designer that they are very careful to not name God. 

A member of the Kansas sciences standard committee has said recently: “Our overall goal is to remove the bias against religion .  This is a scientific controversy that has powerful religious implications.”  Ellen Goodman responds, “Science that doesn’t teach his religious beliefs is biased against his religious beliefs.  This is what’s going around.  At least around the political circuit.  If a court remains neutral on religion, it is immediately attacked as hostile to religion….  In this case, the opponents not only cast evolution as a flawed ‘ideology’ but deliberately characterize evolutionists as atheists.  They then insist on a false equivalency between evolution and Intelligent Design, and demand equal time for the faithful with the so-called faithless.”

One of the things that’s so interesting about this is that the majority of people in this country believe that both evolution & Intelligent Design should be taught in the science classroom.  According to the results of a poll conducted this summer by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 64% of Americans support the teaching of both. A senior fellow at the Pew Forum says that “most Americans are not especially ideological people… and this is one way, from the point of view of the average American, to solve the problem: teach both sides and let the students sort it out.”   

Did any of you stay up late enough this week to catch the debut of the Colbert Report on Comedy Central?  Stephen Colbert informed the audience that he has no intention of forming his opinions based on truth.  He’s tired of facts, he said, and will only be speaking from the heart.  Flashing to the side of the screen as he said this were the words “Head bad.  Heart good.”   This is what it seems like way too often these days as we listen to what’s happening out there in the rest of the world:  Head bad.  Heart good.  Facts bad.  Speaking from the heart good. 

We laugh and yet I think there is something much deeper going on here—something much more serious.  The thing is that most of us embrace the advances that an increase in scientific knowledge has brought.  We love our computers, our cell phones, our i-pods.  We’re grateful for the medical advancements that have enabled us to do by-pass surgery and replace arthritic joints.  We rejoice that more cancer is being cured and are relieved to be warned when hurricanes are headed our way.    The problem seems to arise when our place as individuals within the universe is called into question.  When the significance of our individual lives is called into question.  When it’s suggested that perhaps we’re no different than all other living things.  That our individual lives are just a blip when the vastness of the universe and vastness of time are realized.  Are we not special?  Unique?  Isn’t there some bigger meaning to our lives?  Doesn’t God care about us and love us and promise to never abandon us?  What’s going on here is much deeper than laughter over Head bad, Heart good. 

Some of you will remember Chet Raymo who used to write a science column for the Boston Globe each week.  He’s a professor of physics and astronomy and has this to say:

 “In an earth science course that I teach at Stonehill College, I ask students to make a time line of Earth history.  One imaginative young woman returned to class with a melon-size ball of yarn.  Each foot of yarn represented 10 million years.  Major geologic eras—Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenzoic—were different colors of yarn, and multicolored button tied along the strand were keyed to important events in Earth history, described on an accompanying sheet of paper.  There was not enough space to unwind the ball in the classroom, so we took it outside into the college quad.  When the yarn was unrolled, it was 450 feet long, the length of one and a half football fields, representing 4.5 billion years of Earth history.  I stood with the class at one end of the strand—the present—and looked off to the other end where a student stood at the epoch of the Earth’s beginning, solitary and distant.  It was an impressive demonstration o the abyss of geologic time….  I stood there in the college quad with my students and held a piece of paper between my forefinger and thumb.  ‘(The thickness of this paper),’ I said, ‘is all of recorded human history.’  I sensed fear in my audience.  I felt it myself.  The universe of the geological eons is terrifying, like the space of the galaxies.  Our lives are like a drop of dye in the sea, infinitely diluted.  No wonder so many of us deny the evidence of our senses and turn to True Belief, opting for the security blanket, the thumb, the parent’s embrace.”

I think that most of us probably yearn for explanations for life that encompass more than what can be demonstrated in a laboratory and meet the challenge of peer review.  Somehow we want our lives to be more significant than that.  It’s terrifying to consider the possibility that all we care about, everything that causes us to worry or grieve or rage, everything that fills us with joy and wonder is but a blip in the vastness of time and space.  Shouldn’t there be more to life than that?  Shouldn’t there be more to my life than that?   Am I not more than a biological form descended from related primates?   Am I not special?  Unique in some way? 

It seems like such a vast chasm has opened up between science and religion when questions of ultimate concern are considered, with people standing on both sides of that chasm convinced that they are the ones who have a corner on the truth.  Religious conservatives on one side turn to the Bible for their truth, to their belief in Divine Purpose and say that it’s obvious that creation couldn’t have just evolved.  There has to be an Intelligent Designer.  It is God, after all, who is the creator of all that is.  And there are scientists like Richard Dawkins standing on the other side of the chasm dismissing the religious impulse as mere superstition.  As nothing but delusion.  It is science and science alone that holds the key to understanding the universe.  Those standing on both sides of the chasm are the True Believers, who are convinced that they are right, that they have a corner on the truth.  But it seems to me that there needs to be room for both. 

Some of you may be familiar with the Shroud of Turin, the linen cloth which for centuries was believed to be the shroud in which the body of Jesus was wrapped.  Well, back in the 80’s the Catholic Church agreed that scientists could take tiny samples of this shroud for radiocarbon dating.  The three labs examining these samples all agreed that the Shroud of Turin is medieval, dating from the mid-fourteenth century and therefore could not have been the cloth in which the body of Jesus was wrapped.  The church in agreeing to have this done was remaining consistent with a declaration by Pope John Paul II on the relationship between science and theology:  ‘Science can purify religion from error and superstition, and religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.’  (Raymo)

We need poets, philosophers, artists, theologians, and scientists if we are to understand this universe of ours and our place in it.   Because no matter how much we’ve discovered through science, there is only so much of the infinite that our finite minds can comprehend.  There is so much that remains mysterious. Chet Raymo says:

 “All that we know, now and forever, all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or will ever have, is as an island in the sea of mystery.  We live in our partial knowledge as the Dutch live on polders claimed from the sea.  We dike and fill.  We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow.  And still the mystery surrounds us.  It laps at our shores.  It permeates the land.  Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.  And occasionally, at certain disquieting moments in history (Galileo, Einstein), a tempest of mystery comes rolling in from the sea and overwhelms our efforts, reclaims knowledge that has been built up by years of patient work, and forces us to retreat to the surest, most secure core of what we know, where we huddle in fear and trembling until the storm subsides, and then we start building again, throwing up dikes, pumping, filling, extending the perimeter of our knowledge and our security….

     If we accept this metaphor, that knowledge is a finite island in a sea of inexhaustible mystery, then two corollaries follow:  (1) The growth of the island does not diminish the sea’s infinitude, and (2) the growth of the island increases the length of the shore along which we encounter mystery.  It is this last aspect of the metaphor that is most important.  We are at our human best as creatures of the shore, with one foot on the hard ground of fact and one foot in the sea of mystery.  Bureaucrats, technocrats, and scientific drudges keep to the high ground, their noses fixed in ledgers and laboratory notebooks.  New Age dreamers flounder in water over their heads, with near horizons.  It is at the shore that the creative work of the mind is done—the work of the artist, poet, philosopher, and scientist.”

Intelligent Design does not belong in the science classroom.  That’s where ledgers and laboratory notebooks belong.  But there are other classrooms  in which philosophy is being taught, in which poetry is being read, in which theology is being discussed.  We need all of these classrooms if we are to begin to understand this universe of ours and our place in it. 

(Open Mic for Discussion)