Sermon for Sunday,  February 19, 2006

DO SCIENCE AND RELIGION HAVE TO BE ENEMIES?

7^th in a series on Questions from the Street

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

 Scripture: Genesis 2:4b-9; 15-18

^4b In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ⁵ when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; ⁶ but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground ⁷ then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. ⁸ And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. ⁹ Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." ¹⁸ Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner."

The headline from last weeks New York Times told of another chapter in the debates about what should be taught in high school biology classes: The Ohio Board of Education has decided that evolution will be supported in 10^th grade biology classes and will not be subject to the skeptical questioning that the proponents of “Intelligent Design” would like to impose. It was the second defeat in two months for Biblical literalists who believe that the theory of evolution is not compatible with the book of Genesis and who want to force people to believe one way or the other instead of believing that God can use the process of evolution to create the universe over a long period of time.

The headlines about possible differences between science and religion—or between the scientific method and fundamentalist religion—have filled the newspapers over the last few months. The creation/evolution discussion is only one part. There are differences between conservative religious leaders and biologists on whether left over stem cells produced in the lab for in vitro fertilization should just be destroyed as is planned or whether they should be available for research on curing diabetes or Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease. There are debates between literalists and biologists on whether sexual orientation is something that each person chooses consciously or whether it is a result of complex factors such as genetic predispositions—that is, it is a given—like eye color or skin color. 

And much too often, the discussion is falsely cast in this way: you can either believe in the scientific method or you can be a Christian but you cannot be both. Two of our former members of our church who have moved out of state now experienced just that false choice a few years ago when they were attending a well know literalist congregation in town. They are both scientists and teachers—he in geology and she in biology—and they were in a class in that church where the teacher told them they could not be Christians and believe that God worked through the process of evolution. They knew they were in the wrong place and left that church and found a congregation where science and religion are not enemies but are different ways of searching for truth.

That is one of the differences between the leaders of the religious right in our country and the leaders of mainstream Protestantism and of Catholicism. In Methodist churches and other mainline churches, as well as in Catholicism, the scientific method is not an enemy to religion. You can be a person of faith and believe in both the truths of Genesis and of Darwin.

I have placed several articles on the foyer table about this and I will talk more about details in a moment, but let me first quote Vatican Cardinal Paul Poupard who said a few months ago that Christians should listen to what science has to offer because religion risks turning into fundamentalism if we ignore scientific reason.

There are scientists and church leaders who do not see science and religion as enemies. The Rev. Nancy Murphy who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary is one of those church leaders and her position at that seminary has been threatened by Biblical literalists who are very angry that she sees Genesis and Darwin as compatible with each other. And scientist Jay Gould is quoted in your bulletin cover saying that science and religion are complementary and not contradictory methods of human understanding.

Also, James Moore who teaches science at Cambridge University and is a visiting scholar at Harvard as well as author of an important biography on Charles Darwin, says that the observations that Darwin made about the evolution of species provided for Darwin evidence of an orderly Christian God and showed him that God’s hand is present in all of creation. Darwin’s faith was shaken later on when his young daughter died and he had trouble imagining that a loving God would let children die, but it was not his scientific observations about nature and evolution that he found threatening to his faith.

There has been a suspicion and mistrust over the past centuries between religious leaders and scientists, and one of the most dramatic examples is when Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16^th century posited that the earth is not the center of the universe as they were taught by the church but that the sun was the center of our solar system and all our planets revolved around it. For that heretic position they were censured by church leaders and forced to recant—even though the legend about Galileo says that he muttered under his breath after his public recanting that his theory was still true.

The word “theory” is an important one in all of this dialogue. Religious literalists have tried to use that word to discount the notion that species have changed and that humans and primates have a common ancestry. They have tried to give the impression that a scientific theory is something very shaky when most of you know that the word “theory” in scientific discussions is not a shaky thing at all—gravity is still a “theory” that can be tested and observed. I believe some church leaders have been dishonest by saying that if something is a theory it should not be taken seriously.

I want to spend the last few minutes looking at what people who call themselves ”creationists” have done with the first three chapters of Genesis contrasted with the way Methodists and others look at Genesis. So called “Creation Science” takes the Bible as a geology book and by numbering the generations listed in the Bible between us and the first human beings, teach that the earth is about 6,000 to 10, 000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs co existed. Geologists and others tell us that the earth is at least about 6 billion years old and that different ages existed separately from each other.

The real crux is how we approach our Bible.

Methodists do not value the Bible for its geological truth but for its theological truth. The Bible was written when people believed the earth was flat and had four corners. We probably do not want to teach that in Geography classes. In the Bible there is a mathematical formula for Pi but it is not the one that we teach in math classes. The Bible is not important for its science or math truths but for its spiritual truths.

And mainstream scholars look at Genesis 1-11 as prehistory where literalists see those chapters as literal history and believe there was an actual man named Adam and actual woman named Eve. If you look at this as literal history and believe this man and woman were the only ones around and they had two sons and their sons got married—can you see where the problem is? You only have to be in third grade Sunday School class to ask the obvious question, “Where did Cain’s wife come from????”

I believe in the truth of Genesis 1 and 2 and I rely on them as very important for our self-understanding as God’s people. I do not see them as history but as something more important—spiritual stories that give us our identity as creatures and as beings God entrusts to care for the earth and the environment and as beings who are accountable to God for our responsible and irresponsible acts.

Before we look closely at these chapters there is one more problem with looking at them as literal history. Do you know what the problem is? They are different and contradictory versions of the creation. They were written about 300 years apart and they give us a different sequence of events. In Genesis 1, the first thing God creates is light and God separates light from darkness. The second day God makes a dome called the sky and uses that dome to separate the waters. The third day God separates the land from the sea and puts plants on the earth. Next, God creates the sun and moon and stars. The next thing is fish and birds. The next creation is the animals, and the last thing God creates on day six is human beings—male and female together—and puts them in charge of the creation to care for it.

That is the story that many of us think of as the only story—but there is a second story, an older story that has a different literary style in Hebrew and a different word for God and is a bit cruder. It starts in Genesis chapter 2 verse 4a.  There are no plants and no rain, but there is water bubbling up from the ground to water the earth. And in this story the first thing God creates is—a man. The Hebrew word Adam means humankind—it is a generic word, not a proper noun. The next thing God creates is—a garden and God puts the man in the garden and tells him what is ok to eat and what is not ok. God sees that the man is lonely—it is not good for the man to be alone. Up to then in Genesis, everything has been declared to be good: God saw the creation at the end of each day and said it was good, and after God created human beings and told them to be fruitful and multiply, God said this is VERY good.

The first thing declared bad in the creation is loneliness! It is not good for this fellow to be alone so I will make a helpmate for him—a companion. So the next thing God creates is—a giraffe! God creates the animals and brings them to the man for the man to name them; to name something in Israel was to have dominion over it, power over it. God brought them all to the man but at the end a suitable companion was not found… so the last thing God creates in this story is a woman. Someone said, after God practiced on all those other creatures, God finally got it right with the last being created!

God brought her to the man and he named her ishah for she was taken from ish-the Hebrew words for man and woman. Later on the man calls her Eve—which is the Hebrew word for Life!

Now, I think this is a true story but not scientifically true, not literally true. These stories are about us and about our relationship to God and each other. They tell us that we are creatures—that we are not gods, so we cannot be arrogant. They say that the creation is good and is a gift from God, and that we are charged by God with caring for it and not polluting it. They tell us that we need each other—that we are created for companionship and love and not for loneliness. They say that God has set some boundaries on us and that when we live within those parameters we will be happiest. Genesis 3 tells us that we try to become gods ourselves and when we do we get ourselves into trouble we usually try to blame someone else!!

God says to the man. “Where are you? What have you done?” – interesting questions for an omniscient being! “Have you eaten from the forbidden tree?”

The man, being manly, takes responsibility for his actions and fesses up?? NO! He blames the woman whom God gave to him and the woman blames the talking snake!

I do not believe these stories are historically true but I believe they are more deeply true than just being a literal account. If you want to literalize them, you will be in the fundamentalist position of seeing a conflict between them and evolutionary theory.

There are two other insights in these stories that are very important: both these stories say that we are not here by accident!! You and I are not here by accident. There is a loving and caring creator who has created us and who has some goals and dreams for us and who has given us guidelines for life and even when we fail and fall short, still picks us up and gives us another chance to pursue God’s hopes and dreams and visions for our lives.

You are not here by accident; if you believe that God took a long time to create the universe, the universe is not here by accident. There is a purposeful creator who has a design and a vision in mind and we learn best about that creator in this book called the Bible.

The last insight is that you and I have been created in the image of God! “Let us make these human beings in our image,” God says to the heavenly beings. I will create them like me—with appreciation for beauty, with the capacity to choose and dream, with the sacred gift of life.

Psalm 8 says it this way: Lord, you are the creator and you are full of majesty and glory; what are these little human beings compared to you? Yet, you have made us just a little lower than yourself and you have given us dominion over your creation! Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

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