Clergy Letter Concerning Religion and Science

With Evolution Weekend here, and my congregation again participating, I thought I'd put up the wording of the open letter, written by Dr. Michael Zimmerman, and signed now by more than 11,000 clergy, religious leaders and scholars.

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Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
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. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.

Click the links that follow to see the alphabetical lists of clergy members who have endorsed this letter
Numbers of Signatures by States
Signatures are current as of 8 February 200811,177 signatures collected to date

Comments

John Shuck said…
You know, Bob, we need a phrase with which to wish one another greetings on Evolution Weekend. Until then, Happy Evolution Weekend! Hope you have a great service!

Merry Mutating,
John
Rastus said…
I sincerely appreciate the clergy who support this view. Interpreting science should never be conditional with respect to faith. Faith must embrace discovery as the revealing of God's handicraft.
Robert Cornwall said…
If we believe that we should worship God with our minds as well as our hearts, then the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads should be part of our service to God! Thanks for the note.

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