Getting away from politics again, there is the rather interesting story last week of the numerous clergy who on February 12, (Darwin's Birthday), celebrated Evolution Sunday. This was all spearheaded by one Michael Zimmerman, who is the Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Zimmerman is apparently also behind the Clergy Letter Project, which stated in response to the teaching of "all views" of origins in a Wisconsin school, "We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as 'one theory among others' is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children." Apparently some 10,000 clergy have signed this statement.
Zimmerman's web site claims that some 450 or so congregations are participating in Evolution Sunday. Included are links to a number of sermons by those who participated. A cursory scan of the list suggests to me that most of the signers are from denominations plagued with revisionist tendencies of the Ecstatic Heresy, that tendency to think that the Word of God is somehow separate and distinct from the words of scripture and must be understood as not necessarily dependent on the plain words of the text. Sermonizers favoring Darwin over Intelligent Design include clergy from the United Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches, as well as from the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian church. I don't see many signers from evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds, nor from the Roman Catholic ranks, interestingly.
One sermon from Paul Beckel of the First Universalist Unitarian Church, quotes from Tao Te Ching (chapter 5) as its main text. Others are more focused on Christian source material. The message from a Roy Howard, of St. Mark Presbyterian Church, in Rockville, MD confirms more of my suspicions. His sermon illustrates the chasm between matters of faith and matters of reason, a major part of what drives some clergy to stick with Darwin while many scientists are slowly moving away from him. Says Howard,
"Matters of science, including theories of the origin of life, are to be pursued by way of the standard forms of scientific research. Matters of science, when in dispute, including theories about the origin of life, cannot be solved by theology, nor can matters of theological dispute be solved by the scientific method. Theology has to do with the pursuit of God and doxological practice that flow from our understanding and experience of God."
Like the "wall of separation" ACLU lawyers like to appeal to between church and state, many find an impenetrable wall between faith and reason, so that the scientific method cannot be applied to "doxological" matters and faith is somehow absent from all things truly scientific. Such a view would seem to imply that if a scientist were present at a miracle of Christ, he would have to defer to theologians to verify whether the miracle actually occured. Likewise, it would imply that physicians who practice both medicine and prayer must not speculate as to which one had the most effect. Of course, ordinary folk intuitively know that the wall can't be so impenetrable.
Don't get me wrong. There is a point in saying that Genesis 1-11 are not scientific texts. They aren't. They are accounts of what supposedly happened. But from Genesis 11 forward, it is clear there is real history in Genesis. It is at least inconsitent to insist that everything prior to Genesis 11 has no connection to history when clearly everything after Genesis 11 does. It is one thing to acknowledge we can't get all the details of creation from Genesis 1-3 or that we may legitimately debate the length of a day or the gap between 1:1 and 1:2. But as a matter of doctrine, Christians cannot so easily give up the historicity of the first man and woman or the fall in the Garden, without giving up an essential aspect of Christian belief, that human beings are fallen and that evil exists for a reason.
Those are, in fact, theological questions, questions of hermeneutics, questions to be discussed in Christian circles more than in a science classroom. But they are not what the proponents of Intelligent Design care about, primarily. It is true that creation science proponents like Henry Morris and Ken Ham take a position which defends the book of Genesis against Darwinism, that their primary focus is the Bible. That is not the case with ID.
It appears to me that most of the critics of intelligent design seem not to understand it. No one in the ID movement wants to silence the teaching of evolution. I don't believe there is anyone in the ID movement who wants the Public Schools to teach Genesis or even theism.
This is where this clergy endorsement of Evolution Sunday betrays its own cause. ID advocates do not oppose Darwin because Darwin contradicts the Bible. They oppose Darwin because Darwin's theory can no longer account for what we know from science. The whole point of ID is that Darwinism and its many revisions fails as science. There are certain things in nature that evolution does not explain and cannot explain. All ID proponents want is to be able to present the new ideas of information theory, irreducible complexity, the incredible balance of the cosmos in terms of the precision of the organization of the planets and stars. All of this is completely independent of the text of Genesis or any "doxological" formulation.
ID folk are generally not too concerned with the age of the earth or whether Adam had a belly button. They are concerned with how information in the genetic code can be explained as a collection of random chance occurrences or how a brain, nervous system, retina, and lens could all form simultaneously, allowing the amazing thing we call vision to truly be an evolutionary positive develpment that increases the odds of survival. ID is not an endorsement of Genesis or Christianity or even theism - it is a critique of Darwinism and naturalism.
So it is odd that those who signed this clergy letter to protest the promotion of scientific "ignorance" allegedly caused by mingling science with faith miss the point that it is science they are undercutting. In allowing Darwin's dogma to go unchallenged with new ideas, they impede knowledge, rather than protect it. As long as naturalism reigns - the idea that all events must be explained in purely naturalistic terms - not only will theology be kept in an intellectual ghetto, the science establishment itself will continue to squash true scientific dissent, smother new ideas, and hinder scientific progress.
In the name of keeping theology and science separate, which coincidently keeps morality and ethics comfortably cloistered as well, they throw their support to naturalism, an idea that denies any place for anything that is "beyond nature". Those clergy who support Darwin and his followers are not only cutting out from under themselves what is left of their theological foundation, but they are undermining the very science they claim to champion. Do they imagine that if the naturalists win the day again that those naturalists will be so generous as to sign petitions to continue the teaching of Genesis in Christian educational settings?
To borrow a phrase from Os Guiness, "he who dines with the devil better have a very long spoon."
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