Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

February 12, will be Charles Darwin’s 201st birthday. Last year I participated along with about 1,000 other clerics worldwide in celebrating Evolution Weekend. Little known outside of Unitarian Universalist circles, is the fact that Darwin and Emma Wedgwood, his cousin and wife, were both raised Unitarians and that Darwin studied for the ministry. Darwin resisted publishing his Origin of Species for over 15 years not only because he fully realized that it would create a storm of religious controversy, but also that it would disappoint his wife’s religious sensibility.

Historically, there has been and continues to be heated debate, controversy, mistrust, fear, antagonism and outright hostility on the part of many leaders of religious institutions toward scientists who made new discoveries and, vice versa, on the part of many scientists toward religion in general. Never the less, both the open and honest endeavor of scientists and the open and honest spiritual exploration come from a deep human desire to understand the basic meaning and structure of what is.

Charles Darwin was exceptionally observant and his honest exploration of nature led him relentlessly to accept the growing evidence of evolution. Five years before Charles Darwin was born, another English scientist, Joseph Priestley died not far from here in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Joseph Priestley became friendly with John Adams, Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. All these men were drawn toward gaining a deeper understanding of both science and religion.

Generally, people know of Joseph Priestley because of his discoveries as a scientist. He discovered oxygen and from his study of oxygen and the nature of effervescence, he created sparkling beverages. This earned him the prestigious Copley Medal of the Royal Society in England. That discovery of course was the origin of our present day carbonated beverages. Benjamin Franklin recognized Priestley’s keen scientific mind and encouraged him to write a history of electricity. Priestley complied.

However, Priestley’s goal from childhood was to study for the ministry. His unorthodox religious views restricted him from attending any of the official schools. As a result, he enjoyed the sympathetic surroundings at the Dissenting Academy in Warrington, England where, if someone did not agree with you, it was not a problem to be avoided, but an opportunity to discover the truth.

Priestley became a minister. He also wrote liberal religious articles and books and continued with a wide variety of scientific experimentation. Unfortunately, he also became a target of religious and political persecution. In 1791 religious mobs affiliated with the state church burned his home, his church as well as all the Unitarian Chapels in Birmingham and the homes of many other religious dissenters. He lost many of his precious unpublished manuscripts.The Priestleys were barely able to flee with their lives.

He moved to London. There, they verbally attacked him in the House of Commons, burned him in effigy and denounced him in pulpits until he felt it necessary to immigrate to the America. English law deprived Dissenters of the rights of citizenship and did not even tolerate Unitarians. Forty years later, while a Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The Religion that is afraid of Science dishonors God and commits suicide.” (Journal 1831) That was twenty-eight years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

Today there continues to be many who deny the validity of the theory of evolution. They prefer to believe literally the biblical stories of creation. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury recently took a pot shot at the science of biological evolution when writing about economics in February 8, 2010 issue of Newsweek magazine.

Still, there are others like Dr. Ursula Goodenough, a leading cell biologist, who sees religion and science as compatible. Religion, for her, takes on an integrating role between cosmology and morality. She marries her understanding of nature and her religious response to wonder. She calls it religious naturalism that helps create a global ethos for the future.

It is difficult for many of us to comprehend the concept of evolutionary time. Can you grasp a million years, let alone a billion years? I cannot even wrap my mind around the concept of a million when people are talking about dollars, let alone years. Biologists say that humans and apes diverged a mere five million years ago. That is not very long in evolutionary time. What do you think when you try to imagine five million years?

In her book The Sacred Depths of Nature, Goodenough helped me visualize evolutionary time. She suggests that we think about it in terms of walking. A human pace is about one yard. So call each pace a century or one-hundred years. Therefore, if I walk twenty paces, twenty yards, enough for two first downs in the Super Bowl, this symbolically represents my walking back 2000 years to the time of Jesus. Keep that scale in mind. I would need to walk twenty-seven miles until I reached the time of the ape-human divergence. If I were symbolically to walk back to the time of the origin of the first animals during the Cambrian period six-hundred-million years ago, I would have to walk three thousand miles about the distance from New York to San Francisco. Finally, to return to the origin of the earth, 4.5 billion years ago would symbolically be like walking the circumference of the planet for one-hundred years at a normal pace.

That helps me picture all the years that it has taken for us to evolve into our current human form from the earliest animals. Many physical and/or biological developments occurred ever so slowly over the hundreds and thousands and millions of years that have made us the human beings that we are today. Along with physical evolution, we also slowly evolved over the hundred and thousands and millions of years into the psychological human beings that we are today.

The cover of the order of service pictures our primate evolutionary tree (from The Sacred Depths of Nature). Look at the dotted circle in the top visual. It shows when humans and chimpanzees diverged. Fascinating is it not how similar our feet and hands are to those of the chimpanzee and even the gorilla?

Evolutionary psychology is the scientific theory showing how human thinking, behaving and feeling might very well stem from the experiences of our primate evolutionary tree. It may not be as clear to us as seeing the similarities in our hands and feet, but it is, I believe, a sound theory that explains why we behave as we do, feel as we do and relate as we do. If the theory of biological and psychological evolution is sound and we have descended from a common ancestor of chimpanzees, what then can be made of morality or ethics?

In 1860, a year after Charles Darwin published his book, he wrote the following in a letter, “I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.” So, if in the light of natural selection there is no personal benevolent creator, no intelligent designer, why then should human beings be good? Why follow any ethical or moral code in the light of the survival of the fittest? That is very similar to the question they asked our earliest Universalist ancestors in the 1700’s when Universalists professed that God was too loving to send anyone to hell. Why (they were asked) be good if there is neither threat of hell for moral misbehavior nor any promise of heaven for good moral behavior? Yet they lived very good and loving lives.

An answer that Robert Wright makes in his book, The Moral Animal, is, “…love like hate exists only by virtue of its past contribution to genetic proliferation.” (340) The fact is, it is self-serving on the genetic level as well as on the human level to love a sibling, child or spouse even as it is self-serving to hate an enemy. We can doubt any divinely proclaimed value of love or of retribution. Still, Wright claims that love survives when you consider happiness as a moral good that has evolved down through the eons because it has survival and procreation benefits.

Remember the passage read earlier from Goodenough’s book? She described how an inherent altruistic response within her motivated her to go out into the ocean risking her life in the hope of saving her son. Still there was the moment when she had to say yes to the response and resist her very real fears. Goodenough, the cell biologist and religious naturalist, compares her inherent altruistic response to the response of social insects to carry larvae in their mouths when their nests are disturbed so that they can take them to a safe refuge. Mammals and birds, she points out, developed instincts over the eons that enable them to get their young to safety so that their progeny might survive.

We, too, have an inherent response that causes us to strive to ensure that children, especially our own, but also all other children survive, thrive and grow into maturity. Call it nurture or selfless love or the internalized self-knowledge of our biological imperative to nurture our offspring to the point of sacrificing our own lives if necessary.

Contemplate if you can, our human evolutionary family connection not only to all other human beings, but also back to our evolutionary family connection to all creatures. If we can do that, we can feel the built in compassion for all creatures that Charles Darwin wrote of when he was but twenty-eight years old. Long before he conceived of his theory of natural selection Darwin wrote, “If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine – our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements – they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor – we may be all melted together.”

That is a vision of full of awe, wonder and gratitude. Think about our human senses of gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness. They are considered truly spiritual or religious feelings. I have often heard the comment that it must be hard for someone who does not believe in a personal God because there is no one to thank.

Think for a moment that you are on a spaceship with other humans exploring the universe, searching for a home (an illustration taken from The Sacred Depths of Nature). What would make a planet perfect for such a home? We would imagine something like the visuals of the movie Avitar, lush and astonishingly beautiful. Did the earth look like that 4.5 billion years ago; of course not? We humans evolved out of the earth a small fraction of the 4.5 billion year age of the earth. The reason we feel that the earth is perfect is because we evolved from and out of the earth and we continue to be intricately part of it.

A religious naturalist can readily feel grateful for life, beauty and the refreshment of a cool drink or the warmth of an embrace just as powerfully as a theist can. A religious naturalist can marvel at the sky above as well as the oceans below and have powerful feelings of gratefulness just as powerfully as a theist has, be they Hindu, Christian, Jew or Muslim. No matter if we believe we have evolved from a long line of primates or believe some divine power created all that is, we can equally share a sense of awe and wonder about it all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of prayer and reverence, “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.”

Think of some of your most important moral issues. If there were no threat of hell or promise of heaven, would the issues stop being valuable? Might it be that through centuries of evolution the greatest sense of happiness and well-being has been produced by behaving in certain ways? That can surely make as much sense as a prophet coming down from a mountain with a list of commandments carved on two pieces of stone. Either way, we still have the option of living by these codes or not.

Truly, we can choose to live by rules that we believe are divinely given, or we can choose to live by rules that we believe are good for us, for humanity and for all living things because of millions or billions of years of evolution. In either case, we learn to choose to live by or not to live by such moral codes or global ethics.

We are not moral because we are totally and naturally that way. We need not be moral because we behave out of the fear of eternal damnation nor because we wish to obtain an eternal life of heavenly bliss. We have the potential to be moral animals because we are able to be self aware enough to know that we have some element of choice in the matter. What is often called the Golden Rule appears universally around the earth in diverse areas and vastly different times and cultures.

It is I believe totally possible to be a Darwinian evolutionist, without any confidence that there is a divine creator or divine moral guide and yet choose to strive to be a moral animal – choosing to build our lives and our society on a sense of “…our origin in one common ancestor – we may be all melted together.” (Darwin)