"Was Darwin Wrong: Creationism Revisited"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
March 2, 2003

Meditation/Reading: Darwin 's Mistake

Three monkeys sat on a coconut tree,
Discussing things as they're said to be;
Said one to the others "Now listen, you two
There's a certain rumor that can't be true
That man descended from our noble race:

The very idea is a big disgrace.
No monkey ever deserted his wife
Starved her babies and ruined her life;
And you've never known a mother-monk
To leave her babies with others to bunk,
Or pass them on from one to another
Till they scarcely know who was their mother;

And another thing you'll never see
A monk building a fence around a coconut tree
And let the coconuts go to waste
Forbidding all other monks to taste;
Why, if I'd put a fence round the tree
Starvation would force you to steal from me;
Here's another thing a monk won't do
Go out at night and get on the stew
Or use a gun or club or knife
To take some other monkey's life.

Yes, man DESCENDED - with all his fuss,
But, brothers, he didn't descend from US!"[1]

Excerpts from “Winter” from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

I wandered upstream, along smooth banks under trees. The wide, slow place in the creek by the road bridge was frozen over. From this bank at this spot in summer I can always see tadpoles, fat-bodied, scraping brown algae from a sort of shallow underwater ledge. Now I couldn't see the ledge under the ice. Most of the tadpoles were now frogs, and the frogs were buried alive in the mud at the bottom of the creek. They went to all that trouble to get out of the water and breathe air, only to hop back in before the first killing frost. The frogs of Tinker Creek are slathered in mud, mud at their eyes and mud at their nostrils; their damp skins absorb a muddy oxygen, and so they pass the dreaming winter.

Also from this bank at this spot in summer I can often see turtles by crouching low to catch the triangular poke of their heads out of water. Now snow smothered the ice; if it stays cold, I thought, and the neighborhood kids get busy with brooms, they can skate. Meanwhile, a turtle in the creek under the ice is getting oxygen by an almost incredible arrangement. It sucks water posteriorly into its large cloacal opening, where sensitive tissues filter the oxygen directly into the blood, as a gill does. Then the turtle discharges the water and gives another suck. The neighborhood kids can skate right over this curious rush of small waters.

Under the ice the bluegills and carp are still alive; this far south the ice never stays on the water long enough that fish metabolize all the oxygen and die. Farther north, fish sometimes die in this way and float up to the ice, which thickens around their bodies and holds them fast, open-eyed, until the thaw. Some worms are still burrowing in the silt, dragonfly larvae are active on the bottom, some algae carryon a dim photosynthesis, and that's about it. Everything else is dead, killed by the cold, or mutely alive in any of various still forms: egg, seed, pupa, spore. Water snakes are hibernating as dense balls, water striders hibernate as adults along the bank, and mourning cloak butterflies secret themselves in the bark of trees: all of these emerge groggily in winter thaws, to slink, skitter, and flit about in one afternoon's sunshine, and then at dusk to seek shelter, chill, fold, and forget.

The muskrats are out: they can feed under the ice, where the silver trail of bubbles that rises from their fur catches and freezes in streaming, glittering globes. What else? The birds, of course, are fine. Cold is no problem for warm-blooded animals, so long as they have food for fuel. Birds migrate for food, not for warmth as such. That is why, when so many people allover the country started feeding stations, southern birds like the mockingbird easily extended their ranges north. Some of our local birds go south, like the female robin; other birds, like the coot, consider this south. Mountain birds come down to the valley in a vertical migration; some of them, like the chickadees, eat not only seeds but also such tiny fare as aphid eggs hid near winter buds and the ends of twigs. This afternoon I watched a chickadee swooping and dangling high in a tulip tree. It seemed astonishingly heated and congealed, as though a giant pair of hands had scooped a skyful of molecules and squeezed it like a snowball to produce this fireball, this feeding, flying, warm solid bit. [2]

Sermon: “Was Darwin Wrong: Creationism Revisited”

The Darwinian vs. God Contest

One day a group of Darwinian scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one Darwinian to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.

The Darwinian walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man. After the Darwinian was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this? Let's say we have a man-making contest." To which the Darwinian happily agreed.

God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam."

The Darwinian said, "Sure, no problem," and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.

God looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"

This Darwin vs. God contest is a joke but the actual contest is not and it has been going on for more than 100 years. I was shocked, pleasantly, when the announcement of this topic created a bit of a stir. Several people wanted to know what angle I was going to take and wanted to be sure I had seen the recent material that they had read. Lois Hitchcock and others sent me articles that were very useful and people I don’t even know and probably will never meet, some online readers of our web site, have sent information.  I do wish all my sermons generated such interest! For my part simply asking the questions and gathering the information generated has been a great exercise for my mind. We Unitarian Universalists believe in the free and responsible search for truth and this debate is all about just that. The bottom line being we can all benefit from the discussions and we will probably never know the Truth with a capital T.

Creationism or Intelligent Design vs Evolution or Darwinism is a hot topic and it makes people anxious at a very deep level. To understand some of the emotion involved it is important to note that this topic is more than who can stack what data on their side to prove they are right. We are talking about our origins, where we come from the very beginnings of our kind. It is important to get the answer right because the right answer to the question makes it clear who has the right religion. And who has the right religion is a very big deal. If the one side wins then theists of all stripes, Jewish, Christian and Moslem are right and if the other side wins the Atheists are right. The right religion then answers other questions like where we are going, and what is our purpose in life. This isn’t just about finding a missing link or explaining the reason spiders spin round webs; its about power and economics too; its about who gets to teach what to our children and who gets to run the world.

As most of us remember, in 1987 there was a Supreme Court decision that “creationism,” as it was called, could not be taught in the schools because it was viewed as teaching a religion in the public schools which is unconstitutional. That argument has gone away only to surface in a new form. This time in places like Kansas and Ohio where there is a move to teach “Intelligent Design” as a theory of how life on earth came into existence. This theory is very old -- and gaining momentum in many places. Intelligent design is the notion that life on the planet could only have gotten to the complexity it has with the help of a creator with intelligence. From the perspective of the intelligent design simply looking at life and knowing what it took to make it begs the questions of an intelligent designer, or at the very least an ultimate starter.

It all began in 1802 when William Paley wrote his Natural Theology – or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Basically, Mr. Paley was so impressed by the universe he was sure it had been created by an intelligent being.

When Darwin came along in 1859, 50 plus years later, his ideas were all new and of course didn’t gain much ground while he was alive. Let me use the words of one of my online friends, Dr. Jon Cleland-Host, a member of our Midland church, to summarize Darwin : “Biological evolution is the theory that all forms of life present today have descended from earlier forms of life, and that these life forms changed over time as a result of replication and selection.”^[3] Most of us are probably familiar with this general ideal behind Darwin ’s theories but I have found that I am not familiar enough, despite all the helpful people in the last week, to engage in the argument with any hope of making headway on truth with a capital T.

Just so you have a flavor of what I am talking about: first it is important to understand that the two theories are in conflict with one another, so says David Berlinski in an article titled Has Darwin Met His Match?^[4] They might both be false but they cannot both be true. So as far as the folks arguing the case are concerned there is no compromise there is only provable science and theory. Intelligent design folks say evolution is not provable fact, but a theory. Thus we must teach alternative theories as well. And evolutionists say obviously Darwin ’s ideas are proven facts and there are no other theories worthy of that status.

Darwin himself wrote: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous and successive slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down”.^[5] He was, after all, a scientist and could imagine a discovery that refuted his theories. That one sentence however, began the struggle to find the one case that is the exception proving the rule, Darwinism, false. One by one the intelligent design folks have put up ideas that might spell the end of Darwin and one by one they are eventually put to rest.

Feathers are one such case, as there were no fossil records of a precursor to birds with feathers for flight; a creator was evident and necessary. However, in the March 2003 Scientific American^[6] article, Which Came First, the Feather or the Bird? which Lois sent me, there has been first a discovery of a non-flying dinosaur with feathers and second work from developmental evolutionists that points to the possible process that the gradual development of a feather might have taken as it was eventually pressed into use for flight. In this case it was the feather first and the bird and flight next. So Darwin triumphs again. But of course that is not the end of the argument. These folks go at each other with all the vim and vigor of anyone arguing for their lives, because each believes they are in fact doing just that; arguing for their lives. If you are interested, there are two web sites -- origins.org for the creationists and talkorigins.org for the Darwin enthusiasts -- that will give you all the data you could possibly want on who is currently ahead in this debate.

The most interesting to me has been the book the book group will be reading in May; The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Don Caley suggested it to me. Dawkin’s title, of course, indicating that the watchmaker, or creator, of Paley’s natural theology would have had to be blind to create some of the crazy and backward things that have occurred in nature. I have always said I don’t get the avocado – shouldn’t that pit be smaller.

Dawkins refers to it as the “Argument from Personal Incredulity”^[7] where theologians use words like; “there seems no explanation, or I cannot see how” to justify a creator. Here Dawkins quotes the Bishop of Birmingham who finds it difficult to understand the white color of polar bears. The Bishop writes:

“As for camouflage, this is not always explicable on new-Darwinian premises. If polar bears are dominant in the Arctic , then there would seem to have been no need for them to evolve a white-colored form of camouflage.”

Dawkins translates the Bishops words to:

“I personally off the top of my head sitting in my study never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar bear in the wild and having been educated in classical literature and theology, have not so far managed to think of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being white.”

Indicating that what Bishop is missing is the notion that not only prey but also predators benefit from camouflage.

Now this is certainly sarcastic and not very complimentary of either side of the argument. We rarely are made better by reducing ourselves to sarcasm, although I will admit to laughing out loud when I read it.

More importantly, however, this passage in the Blind Watchmaker served to remind me that any one of us could fall victim to our own limited experience. Anyone of us can become guilty of discrediting something simply because we personally can’t imagine it. Maybe the Bishop didn’t realize how limited his sight had become. It is good to subject Darwin ’s theories to the most rigorous tests any intelligent design person can find. And it won’t hurt the intelligent design folks to have to stand up to observable data in their search for a creator. We can all benefit from another’s experience and information. Once again, open questioning and continued questioning proves to be a good thing; each of us stimulated into thinking new ways and finding new data.

All this has spurred my thoughts in such areas as what part does chance play in all of the Darwin theories and in my life, what are the myths that the science is based on, is later always better and more improved, and if there is a god what does the intelligent design say that god is like? Fun questions and great for discussions with family and friends – if you can stand the heat!

To some extent my reading on this topic has made me less afraid of such things as the Santorum Amendment to the “No Child Left Behind” bill signed by Mr. Bush, which states:

"(1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and
(2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject."

Sure it is the folks who want creationism in the schools that put this amendment forward and they have a religious agenda they are trying to push. And that can be scary. But they aren’t winning – in fact they may be defeating themselves, as the more education, the more exposure to the debate itself that a person has, the less likely they are to believe the creation story. It is simply not true that more scientists are becoming convinced that a deity is the source of life. Fifteen years ago only 5% of scientist held a creationist view and that percentage remains the same today.^[8] Whether or not intelligent design is a scientific fact, as it so much wants to be, will continue to be debated. For our part we need not fear that debate. Our children need not be sheltered from that debate. It becomes most dangerous when in the name of science the light of scrutiny is only shone on one side. We all benefit from having science called to answer the same questions it asks of others.

Its important to stay vigilant to make certain that religion is not taught as science and to make certain that no one religion is given the blessing of a public school curriculum. But at the same time we can struggle to maintain one of the highest principles of our faith, “the free and responsible search for truth.” Free as in all players are welcome to the table, even the ones we disagree with and responsible as all submitting to reason, logic and further study. May it be so.