February 16, 2006--Praying For Darwin
“A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all.” This was a part of the reverend Patricia Templeton’s sermon last Sunday to mark the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin (see NY Times story linked below).
One parishioner was so moved that she said that alternatives to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, such as intelligent design, seem a false way to use science to explain the work of God. "It's arrogant to say that either religion or science can answer all our questions," she said. "I don't see the need either to banish one or the other or to artificially unite them."
Another pastor, Mitchell Brown spoke about how good science compels believers to avoid seeking “special effects” answers to perplexing questions. Darwin, “forced religion to grow up, to become really faith for the first time.”
These sermons were inspired by a movement within Christianity, the Clergy Letter Project, as a response to the much more powerful Evangelical assault on Evolution and the promulgation of intelligent design to explain the development of life on Earth. (Though it hit a major legal roadblock recently in Dover, Pennsylvania.)
Though this counter effort could certainly benefit from a snappier name, Clergy Letter Project doesn’t quite get the job done, it does not just represent a fringe group of ministers. To tell you the truth, when I began to learn about them I was worried that they would be easily dismissed—they seemed, sorry, to have too many female clergy to be widely effective; they felt too Episcopalian; and from some of the reports I read they were holding services in apartment house basements (that in fact is where the Reverend Brown delivered the sermon I quoted).
But then I read that more than 10,000 ministers in 48 states had signed the Project’s letter and thus felt a bit more optimistic. That letter, by the way, at its heart says: “There is a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy.”
Couple this with the recent move among a substantial number of Evangelical leaders to support efforts to protect the environment and maybe it might be possible to believe that there is hope—not just in the Hereafter but right here among the flock.
Happy birthday Charlie!
One parishioner was so moved that she said that alternatives to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, such as intelligent design, seem a false way to use science to explain the work of God. "It's arrogant to say that either religion or science can answer all our questions," she said. "I don't see the need either to banish one or the other or to artificially unite them."
Another pastor, Mitchell Brown spoke about how good science compels believers to avoid seeking “special effects” answers to perplexing questions. Darwin, “forced religion to grow up, to become really faith for the first time.”
These sermons were inspired by a movement within Christianity, the Clergy Letter Project, as a response to the much more powerful Evangelical assault on Evolution and the promulgation of intelligent design to explain the development of life on Earth. (Though it hit a major legal roadblock recently in Dover, Pennsylvania.)
Though this counter effort could certainly benefit from a snappier name, Clergy Letter Project doesn’t quite get the job done, it does not just represent a fringe group of ministers. To tell you the truth, when I began to learn about them I was worried that they would be easily dismissed—they seemed, sorry, to have too many female clergy to be widely effective; they felt too Episcopalian; and from some of the reports I read they were holding services in apartment house basements (that in fact is where the Reverend Brown delivered the sermon I quoted).
But then I read that more than 10,000 ministers in 48 states had signed the Project’s letter and thus felt a bit more optimistic. That letter, by the way, at its heart says: “There is a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy.”
Couple this with the recent move among a substantial number of Evangelical leaders to support efforts to protect the environment and maybe it might be possible to believe that there is hope—not just in the Hereafter but right here among the flock.
Happy birthday Charlie!
posted by Steven Zwerling at
12:06 PM
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