A Sermon Preached at
the Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ
Bethesda, Maryland
by the Rev. Rich Smith

February 15, 2009                                                                                                              Psalm 8

The Evolving Faith of Charles Darwin

	This past week witnessed the celebrations of two bicentennials, the two hundredth birthdays of two towering figures who were born on the same day, February 12, 1809.  Historians like to call the shared birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin an “intriguing coincidence,” which it is, but to me the really amazing thing is that these two giants of the 19th century are still so significant, and even contemporary, in the 21st!  And while Lincoln is almost universally celebrated now, in ways he was not in is own time, Darwin is just as controversial as ever – at least in this country.  In England his likeness adorns the ten pound note,  as well as a new two pound gold coin minted in honor of his bicentennial.  He shares the front with a monkey.  But here, it’s often a different story, where he is still vilified in many quarters as an atheist and enemy of faith, and where in some states it remains difficult to give his theories the weight they deserve in the public school classroom.  And a brand-new Gallup poll finds that just 39% of Americans believe in evolution, and only 24% of weekly churchgoers!

	Darwin is part of that triumvirate of scientists whose theories and findings dealt shattering blows to the human ego over the past several centuries.  First there was Copernicus, who figured out that the earth is not the center of the universe, rather an tiny speck in a sea of inconceivable vastness, with humanity pushed to an obscure corner of space.  Then Darwin, who found that we humans are not all that different from the animal world.  We weren’t the product of a special divine act of creation, but evolved from other forms of life, and thus are not the rulers of nature, merely part of it, part of not a hierarchy, but a web, sharing a kinship with all life.  Finally, there was Freud, who suggested that the human person is most complex, and there are depths of the unconscious mind that greatly influence our behavior.  Which is to say, we seem to be denied mastery of even our own earthly house.

	It’s a far cry from the Psalmist, who gazing at the immensity of the night sky asked, In the midst of all the amazing cosmos, “what are mortals, that you are mindful of them?” and answered, “a little less than God, crowned with glory and honor and given dominion over all things...”

	Now, I am not sure that the fact of evolution refutes all that, destroys human dignity or alleviates human responsibility, but it remains, 150 years after publication of On the Origin of Species, a challenge to old ways of thinking.  And I say “fact” of evolution, because scientists are virtually unanimous about its validity, and the modern study of biology is based on it.  To me, it’s like gravity, pretty much beyond dispute, although people like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan have made me wonder about that.  

	Today, along with nearly a thousand other churches world wide, we are observing “Evolution Sunday.”  Part of me thinks, why should we even have to do that?  Wouldn’t it be like having a “Gravity Sunday,” or a “Round Earth Sunday?”  And yet, evolution is still controversial and still threatens the faith of too many.  As I said, only 24% of regular church-goers embrace it.

	But that’s what happens when world views are challenged, when old ideas are questioned, heart-felt organizing principles are put to the test and found inadequate.   When faced with new scientific truths – or major paradigm shifts, or personal experiences that force one to question one’s beliefs – usually one of three things happens:

	–Some people reject the evidence and cling to their faith.  If the Bible says the earth was created in six days, six thousand years ago, then those who present this evidence, like fossils, and carbon dating, and the like that seem to say otherwise, must be the enemies of faith.  The result is persecution and pseudo-sciences, like “Creation Science,” to account for the new “facts.”  God put the fossils there to test our faith.  Humans and dinosaurs co-existed at one time.  The “Great Flood” of Noah’s time created the Grand Canyon. Things like that.  Or, on a personal level, they understand a tragedy as part of God’s plan – “God needed a little angel in heaven.”  

	–Others go to the opposite extreme, and lose their faith altogether.  If faith says the world works one way, and it plainly does not, then there must be a problem with the faith.  If the earth is four billion years old, then what do you do with Genesis and six days of creation?  If the world is full of suffering – whether that be holocausts of Hitler’s Germany or modern Rwanda, or an airplane full of good people crashing in an ice storm – what is a supposedly benevolent God doing in allowing it?  Or is an all-powerful God somehow incapable of preventing it?  And so we have a contemporary atheistic movement with folks like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris leading the charge and topping the best seller lists.

	–But then there are those whose faith itself is a product of evolution, who welcome the insights of science and scholarship, who face squarely the human tragedies that come, whether they are global or personal, and who somehow manage to enlarge their faith, to embrace mystery, to say, “I don’t know.  God is still speaking, and I’m listening!”  They are comfortable with both religion and science and do not see them in conflict but as complementary.  Science deals with the “how” questions, the “what”; faith with the “why,” the questions of meaning and purpose.  And as science and knowledge grow, so does faith.  And God grows larger, not smaller, although often different.

	There was a time when faith was used to explain what wasn’t yet known.  There was a time when there was a fairly good understanding of how the solar system worked, but the laws of physics couldn’t quite explain why the planet Neptune’s orbit was a bit irregular.  So they said that whenever it got off course, God must intervene to put it back on track again.  This approach is known as “the God of the gaps.”  And then – at an observatory on Northern Arizona where as I fifth-grader I once spent a wonderful night star gazing – came the discovery of the planet Pluto.  Guess God is out of a job here.  Pluto has since been downgraded to a planetoid, which I think means “big rock,” but its gravitational pull still accounts for the irregularities in Neptune’s orbit.  When the gaps get filled, what happens to God?

	Charles Darwin faced these same challenges in his own spiritual journey, and while I’m not sure his is an exemplary model, it is instructive; and he certainly was not the poster child for atheism, not bent on tearing down faith, although he certainly poses a challenge to certain kinds of faith.  He has been described as an honest and vulnerable human being in a perpetual state of soul-searching.  And perhaps the willingness to say, “I don’t know” and embrace mystery and stay open to newly discovered truth is a far greater gift than being absolutely certain.  Remember that Abrose Bierce defined “certainty” as “being wrong at the top of your voice!”

	Darwin was born to a wealthy English family of doctors and china makers.  Anyone own Wedgewood?  That’s where it came from! He was baptized in his father’s Anglican Church, but grew up attending the Unitarian Church of his mother.   At the age of 16 he entered the University of Edinburgh, with the intent of following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a physician.  But he had a weak stomach, and recoiled when, as a part of his training, he had to observe surgery being performed without benefit of anesthetic.  So he left and enrolled in Cambridge, where he studied for the priesthood, a  good respectable second choice for a career, at least in the eyes of his family.  But even then, he found himself much more interested in natural history, which his natural curiosity aroused by his growing up in the country had exposed him to.  And so upon graduation he accepted an offer, over his father’s initial objections, to join a round-the-world voyage of exploration on the HMS Beagle, as an unpaid naturalist.

	The journey was to last nearly five years, but it really was the beginning of a life-long journey of discovery and personal evolution for Darwin.  He began as a traditional “theist,” believing that God was in control of everything, who frequently intervened when things threatened to get out of hand.  By the time he returned back he had become a “deist,” like Thomas Jefferson.  Deists hold that God created the universe, set it in motion, and then pretty much disappeared.  Deism has been called the “Watchmaker theory” – the universe was like an intricate and exquisite pocket watch – designed by an infinite intelligence, wound up and turned loose to run its course.  It was how he was able to hold on to faith, while accounting for so much of what he saw in his travels that didn’t mesh with his previous views.  

	He wrote, “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that while 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.”

	After he got back from the voyage, and married and raised a family, he spent over twenty years amassing data to support his newly formed theories.  He understood quite well that while they were scientifically sound, they would also be socially and theologically controversial, and so he held off sharing them publically until he realized that others were on to the same thing, and since he didn’t want them to get there first, in 1859 he published On the Origin of Species, which became an instant best seller, and was, as predicted, controversial.  He came under swift attack from the church.  He had recurrent nightmares of his own execution, and suffered all the more because of his weak stomach and migraine headaches.  People of faith just could not abide the idea that all life forms were not created in a fixed state, over a short period of time, as had been the accepted belief.  It went back to Aristotle, who posited a static universe with the earth at its center, an idea that was enlarged by Thomas Aquinas in the 14th century, given theological validity, and was called “special creation.”  But Darwin looked at recently discovered fossils and concluded that life forms have changed over time, species were not fixed.  And from that it wasn’t too great a leap to suggest, as he did in his sequel, The Descent of Man, that humans had a common ancestor in apes.  For orthodox religious folks, it appeared he was saying: we were created not in the image of God, but of monkeys.  As the wife of the bishop of Worcester supposedly exclaimed, "Let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known."

	Darwin himself tried to stay out of the controversy, letting others carry the load in the public square.  For example in 1860, at Oxford a debate was held between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Sir Thomas Huxley.  The bishop chose sarcasm as his rhetorical weapon, and concluded by demanding of Huxley, “Does this gentleman claim to be descended from a monkey on his mother’s side or his father’s?”

	To which Huxley responded, “I would far rather be descended fom a monkey on both my parents’ sides than from a man” – and here he faced the bishop – “who uses his brilliant talents for arousing religious prejudice in discussions of subjects about which he knows nothing!”   The debate raged on, not in the scientific community so much as the religious one.  As I said, when faith and science conflict, it is a common response to reject one or the other altogether, and usually it is science that gets vilified.

	Meanwhile, Darwin kept struggling with his own faith.  He had seen so much on his journeys, and in nature, and in his own life, with the death of three of his ten children, that made him question Christian orthodoxy.  He could no longer abide the literal truth of the Old Testament, with its intervening and controlling God, instantly creating species which thereafter remained exactly as they were created.  And he could not understand the loving God of the New Testament, especially after his beloved daughter Annie died at the age of ten, and after he had witnessed the poverty in which much of the world’s population lived, as well as the harsh injustice of slavery.  He found himself tending toward agnosticism.  He had seen too much cruelty in the human world, and too much carnage in the natural one.  He was “bewildered,” he wrote, by “too much misery.”

	And yet, he was also able to write, “On the other hand, I can’t be contented to view the wonderful universe – and especially the nature of man – and to conclude the everything is the result of brute force and I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of chance.”

	He may have given up on the orthodox Christianity of his day, but he still believed in doing good and promoting justice where he could.  Like his family before him, he was a committed abolitionist, a conviction which some say drove his research.  For if he could show that humans were all related, had all descended from a common ancestry, then it would undercut the argument that dark skinned people were somehow of a lesser species, that the races were fundamentally different.    And in his last years, he is known to have financially supported tent ministries, treatment centers for alcoholics, and an Anglican mission outpost in Tierra del Fuego, where he had first observed aboriginal people in what he saw as human misery.

	Darwin’s faith journey led him from theism to deism and finally to agnosticism, but never to atheism. He was rather like the late Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote, “I am an agnostic in the wise sense of T. H. Huxley, who coined the word in identifying such open-minded skepticism as the only rational position because, truly, one cannot know.”

	And in the end, Darwin never really resolved the supposed conflict between science and religion, because for him there really wasn’t much of a conflict. He came to see religion as a personal matter and regarded science as completely separate from religion. In general, he thought that the question of God's existence was outside the scope of scientific inquiry. However, he did think that his theory of evolution was compatible with a belief in God.

	Near the end of his life he wrote: "I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

	Charles Darwin died in 1882, at the age of 73.  He had changed the world, and even though he desired to be buried simply at his country home in Down, he was given a state funeral, and laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, next to Isaac Newton and John Herschel. It is said that Darwin didn’t know 99% of what biologists know now, but “the one per cent he did know was the most important part.”  And, this past September, the Church of England issued an article saying that the 200th anniversary of his birth was a fitting time to apologize to Darwin “for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still.”  It’s never too late for admitting that.

	And it’s never too late for us to examine our own faith, to ask ourselves: how has it changed, how has it grown?  Have we evolved as well, into more caring and compassionate people?  Have we become more Christlike?  Do we embrace life as an adventure, living the questions, seeking truth and not fearing where truth will take us?  And when our faith is challenged by that new truth or new paradigm, what will we do with it?  And will we embrace a God, however understood, who is far grander that we can ever imagine, “close to us as breathing, distant as the farthest star,” a God who knows us intimately but who we can never fully know, and with the Psalmist chant, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”