A year ago I preached a sermon marking the first, Evolution Sunday.  Timed to land on Charles Darwin’s birthday (he would be 198 tomorrow) Evolution Sunday is the project of Professor Michael Zimmerman, currently the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Professor Zimmerman was concerned about a growing rift between science and religion.  Or rather he was concerned about the perception of a growing rift between science and religion, a very wide separation to some, but to many others not a separation at all.  Professor Zimmerman wanted to counteract that perception by showing evidence that many clergy felt no antagonism to science, saw science and religion as fully compatible, and respected and used the discoveries of science as an important basis of their faith.

The split between science and religion is especially evident in the ongoing debate between evolution, in the science corner, and creationism, in the religious corner.  The debate had arrived a few years ago at the School Board of the city where Professor Zimmerman was then living and so Professor Zimmerman began his rehabilitative project by writing a letter to the school board and inviting clergy to sign on to it, first on a local level, and then later expanded and generalized to a national level.

Here is part of that letter:

"We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. 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. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris."

Professor Zimmerman’s initial goal was to gather 10,000 signatures for his national campaign letter, a goal he achieved more than a year ago.  The current count is about 10,500

With the letter project successfully completed Professor Zimmerman then went on to organize an Evolution Sunday in which he invited congregations around the country to devote programming to the theme of the compatibility of science and religion.

This year for the second Evolution Sunday I am joined by about 600 other congregations, from every state and 5 nations.  Churches represented include all the mainline Christian denominations:  Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, and UCC plus among others, MCC, and Unitarian Universalist.

Evolution really isn’t at issue, I daresay, for most of my audience.  The advantages of evolution over the Biblical creation story as science are monumental.  To those who search painstakenly to find faults in evolutionary theory and crow gleefully when they find a gap, soon to be filled by further experimentation and analysis, the challenge to defend the Biblical story of an instant creation of all life in their current forms only 6,000 years ago is a much more difficult task, and really only taken seriously by a few.

It isn’t at heart the science of creationism that most creationists want to defend, it is the religion of creationism.  It is the religious claims of that story that are worth defending, claims such as the universe being guided by a wise and purposeful intellect, which also embodies vast creative power, and special concern for life on earth.  Claims that human beings are here deliberately not by accident.  Claims that our lives have value, and meaning, that it matters that we’re here, and it matters what we do, and that something beyond our own selves notices that we are here and would care if we weren’t.

In fact none of those religious claims are threatened by evolution.  I believe all of them, although in a nuanced way, and I also believe strongly in evolution.  The problem with the theory of evolution for some religious people, although it needn’t be seen as such, is simply that it presents an entirely workable, coherent explanation for the origins of species that does not rely on the existence of a God, or the presence of intelligence, purpose, value and meaning, which the presence of God would automatically inject into the creation account.  Evolution works on random mutations, and a natural, unguided selection process.  It doesn’t need a God making choices or judgments or creative decisions.

I’m entirely sympathetic to the religious need for intelligence, purpose, values and meaning in life.  I feel the same need.  And I have complete faith that they exist.  Evolution doesn’t say they don’t exist.  Evolution only says that they don’t need to exist.  In order to be religiously offended by evolution you have to leap from “don’t need to exist,” to “don’t exist.”  To be offended you have to misinterpret, “Aren’t necessary to account for the world the way it is,” to “Therefore, conclusively, aren’t in the world the way it is,” which is not a claim evolutionary science makes.

Evolution is, like all science, atheistic.  But it is atheism by default not by conviction.  There is no God in science because science doesn’t have the tools to examine God.  Science is also, amoral, value relative, and silent about meanings and purpose for the same reason in all the realms that science explores.  But in considering the world as a whole, science is properly speaking agnostic.  Science doesn’t know about God, and can’t know about God, because it’s the wrong tool.  Science and good scientists don’t make scientific claims about God.  And religious people shouldn’t interpret their silence as refutation, it’s simply “no comment.”  Science looks at the world through a lens that is God-blind, and also moral-blind, and values-blind, and meaning and purpose-blind, but that doesn’t mean that God, morals, values, meaning and purpose don’t exist, nor that they couldn’t be seen in the world if we used a different lens.

For religious people morals, values, meaning and purpose, exist in the world just as concretely as do apes and human beings and chromosomes and Galapagos finches.  It’s frustrating that science, which has so much to say about one, has nothing to say about the other.  The silence feels like skepticism, even though it isn’t, necessarily.  It can feel like a refutation or even a condemnation, even when it’s merely silence.  It feels like science is laughing at those of us who see values and meaning in the world, as though our beliefs in an ethical and purposeful rather than a random world, were fantasies we should grow out of.  And scientists should be aware of projecting an air of arrogance that fuels that perception.  Perhaps creation is only random, but evolution does not prove that any more than it disproves a purposeful creation.

The reason that science can seem arrogant in the religion vs. science debate is that the relationship between the two is unequal, and religion is at the disadvantage.  Science doesn’t need religion to do what it does.  In fact, to do what it does, religion must be excluded from the scientific process.  Any hint of religion will muck up the works of science.  Science needs to be objective, value-nuetral, and concerned only with sensory evidence.  Those rules of science make science the success that it is, in the areas where it is effective.  Bringing religious considerations into the scientific world would make the objective, subjective; would invite consideration of values; would want to include non-sensory data like ideals, and aesthetics and ethics.   It’s true we need all of those things for a complete world picture.  As Einstein said in 1941, “Science without religion is lame.”  He also said, “Religion without science is blind.”  But the time to add religious considerations to science is after the science if finished.  Doing religion while you’re doing science, will spoil the science.

I’m not saying that science shouldn’t be ethical.  I’m just saying that ethics is something that should be added to science, it isn’t an essential part of science itself.

Religion on the other hand, needs science right from the start.  There can be no religion apart from science.  Science is an essential part of religion.  This makes religion dependent on science, and thus vulnerable to science, in way that science is not vulnerable to religion.

Religion needs science, because, although the sphere of morals, values, meanings, and purpose, belong to religion, uniquely (that is they aren’t part of science), morals, values, meanings, and purpose are not the only elements of religion.  Religion also contains a description of the world the way the world is in all its particulars, both the physical and the non-physical.  The religious world is not only peace, love and justice, the stuff that science could leave alone to it, the religious world is also people and plants and rocks and sky.  The religious world is human bodies, as well as human souls.  The religious world is compassionate relationships, and biochemical relationships.  The religious world is both the weak and the strong, and the weak and the strong electromagnetic forces.

Religion begins with a statement of beliefs.   And what beliefs are is a description of the world, the same thing that science gives us.  A complete description of the world isn’t limited merely to such obviously religious subjects as whether or not angels exists, or whether or not there is an objective source for morality, a complete description of the world also includes whether or not the sun exists, whether we get our personality traits from a soul injected into the womb or from our genes, or from the way we were raised as infants.  A complete description of the world includes how old it is: 4.5 billion years, or 6,000.

In creating its statement of beliefs, religion makes all kinds of statements describing the world, just as science does.  Religion begins by describing the world the way that religion sees it.  “The sky is like a bowl turned upside down over the land.  Attached to the bowl are the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars.  Above the bowl are waters and every now and then God opens the gates of heaven and the water falls through in the form of rain.” “Human beings were originally created good, but then we rebelled against the original design and ever since then we’ve been sinful by nature.”  “When we die our souls stay by the body for three days but on the fourth day we travel to the Chinvat bridge.  If we were good in life we can cross the bridge to paradise, if we’re weighed down by sins we will fall off the bridge and spend eternity in torment.”  “The god Vishnu has been incarnated 9 times in history, the seventh time as Rama, the eighth time as Krishna, and the 9th time as Buddha, and he will be incarnated one more time as Kalki to bring this world age to an end.”

Science is entirely about providing a description of the world.  That’s where science begins and ends.  Religion begins with a description of the world, (called beliefs), and then goes on to concern itself with values (I believe this, therefore these things are important to me) and then to actions (I value this, therefore I should do that).  And because the belief statements that religion makes in describing the world sometimes overlap with the realm of science, religious statements can sometimes, be disproved by science.
This irritating ability of science to disprove religious beliefs, and to progressively disprove more religious beliefs as time goes by and the tools of science get more refined causes understandable annoyance to those religious folks who find their religious beliefs, some cherished, some thousands of years old, overturned by a smart guy in a lab coat.  That annoyance turns to anger, and in some cases to backlash, such as we see in the current debate about evolution.

Ironically, though, the religious people who are most annoyed by science are the ones who give science too much credit.  Science is powerful but only in a limited sphere, and much of religion operates outside that sphere.  Religious people who feel threatened by science need to look again at the very small areas in which science has anything to say to religion.

First, religion is about beliefs, values and actions.  Science is entirely absent from the last two of those three areas.  Nothing in science would ever discover what is important, or could ever give advice, that is strictly scientific advice, on what you should or should not do about what’s important to you.  Science is about describing the world, not placing value judgments.  Science can describe to you what will happen if you hold a lighted match close to a gasoline can but whether or not you should do it, is beyond the realm of science.  It’s religion that tells you you shouldn’t do it, because religion not science deals with shall and shall nots.  And it’s religion that says you shouldn’t do dangerous things because human life is important, because value statements are the province of religion, not science.  Scientists also care that you not hurt yourself, but that’s scientists, not science, and they didn’t learn their morals from looking at them through a microscope.

So two thirds of religion is entirely beyond the ability of science to criticize.  Religion need never fear that science will disprove statements like, “life is inherently valuable” or “you ought to treat other people with compassion,” “or its important that our search for truth and meaning be conducted freely and responsibly,” or “we ought to make our goal a world community of peace, liberty, and justice for all.”  Science has no comment.

And then, even in the one third of religion where science does have something to say, our belief statements, science can really only comment on about one half of what we believe, and probably for most religious people not the most interesting half of our beliefs. If a religion claims that there are waters above the sky, or that the earth is 6,000 years old science can prove religion wrong. But if a religion claims that God was incarnated as Rama, Krishna, and Buddha, or a different God was incarnated as Jesus, there isn’t anything science can say one way or the other.  It’s only the parts of the world available to observation and experimentation that science can comment on.  All the parts of the world available only to internal experience, mysticism, or revelation science can never touch.  So if you believe that God exists, or Heaven exists, or angels exists, or the Chinvat bridge exists go ahead, science is never going to argue with you.  Nor should you assume because science doesn’t talk about these things that God, or Heaven, or angels, or the Chinvat bridge don’t exist.  But if you believe that Adam and Eve were created at 9 AM on a Sunday, in the year 3928 BC, science will have something to say.

That’s a real threat.  But it’s a small threat.  It’s a threat to only a very limited part of religion. And it’s really very easy to turn the threat around and see the contribution of science as a gift.  Science helps religion by replacing erroneous information in our description of the world with accurate descriptions, without, meanwhile, impinging at all on any of our religious values or calls to action in the world in pursuit of our religious goals.

It is true, that while science does not directly speak of values and actions, because our values and actions are based on our beliefs, revising our description of the world is likely to have some effect on what we hold to be important or what we think we ought to do.  You can imagine a religious tower built on a base of beliefs and then rising through values to actions.  Science has the roll of challenging religion at the base.  And those who are committed to traditional religious beliefs watch in horror as the whole tower shakes.  But when science replaces a mistaken description of reality with a better one, the real picture is of moving the religious tower off of a broken foundation and on to a more strong and stable foundation.  The tower may need to be moved several feet, to the right, or the left, as it were, but it will stand just as tall, and for far longer.