Evolution Sunday
This Sunday is Evolution Sunday. It is a celebration of the achievement of Charles Darwin on the 201st anniversary of his birth. It is also a reflection on the role of science in assisting humanity’s self-understand. I am one of tens of thousands of religious leaders who are making a statement this Sunday that religion and science are not in opposition. Science and religion focus on different aspects of reality. Science tends to try to explain “how” the universe works. Religion focuses on “why.” Science points to God’s handiwork, and is concerned with the exploration and discovery of the world around us. Religion points to God and it focuses on our relationship with God. Conflict occurs when we mistakenly ask one to do the task of the other.
Scientific method is a process that is a journey of discovery. It relies on questioning, testing and communicating. It is a social process that welcomes debate and anticipates replication. Science pursues truth in logical measurable steps and reports conclusions as probabilities. Some degree of error and ambiguity is always present.
Unfortunately, there are people whose aversion to ambiguity leads them to cling to rigid ideology. Choosing comfort over truth, they will rarely relinquish a cherished idea, no matter how many times or how convincingly it has been disproved. Science unequivocally opposes human self-deception. Religion demands authenticity. Unvarnished truth in religion and science serves everyone’s best interest.
Recent efforts to present “Creationism” as legitimate science are shameful attempts to deceive. Creationism is a series of naive untested assertions that reflect the bronze-age cosmology found in the bible. Indeed, people are entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts. In contrast, evidence supporting the theory of evolution is abundant in the fields of biology, genetics and medicine.
As religious people, when we celebrate God as creator, does it matter to us how God does the creating? To me a God who completes creation in just six twenty-four hour periods is far less wondrous than a God who after 16 Billion years is still creating. People who try to explain creation as reflected in the literal biblical record are distorting both religion and science. Both theology and science are human enterprises and as such are not infallible.