Evolution Weekend Is Here


Depending on when you worship this weekend, it's quite possible you will have the opportunity to consider the relationship of religion and science. Now there are a number of ways that people do this. There's the Answers in Genesis way, which essentially means letting a literal interpretation of Genesis be your guide, and then fit things like dinosaurs into it. Jason Byassee has a most interesting essay in the February 12th issue of the Christian Century that details his visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. AIG finds all its answers, as Henry Morris did earlier, in the Flood. If you need an explanation for why there aren't any dinosaurs running around today, well, they just missed the boat.
Then there's the Intelligent Design folk. They're an improvement, but in reality this is simply a restatement of the God of the Gaps theory. We find things difficult to explain (irreducible complexity), we attribute to God's design. The problem with this has always been the new discoveries that further push God into the background.
There is of course the Richard Dawkins answer -- evolution disproves God. What you see, as they say, is what you get.
Those of us who signed the Clergy Letter concerning Religion and Science find the God of the Gaps (ID) and the anti-intellectualist (creationism) perspectives along with with the materialist perspective (Dawkins) unsatisfactory. The answer most of us accept -- something along the lines of theistic evolution -- still is under construction, but it's the only answer that seems to make sense of reality. Amy Frykholm has an essay in the February 12th issue of the Century that takes up this issue, sharing with us some of the attempts to make sense of the data -- both the scientific and the spiritual.
I hope you will join me and the nearly 800 churches and synagogues across the country and world that are observing Evolution Weekend (formerly Evolution Sunday). You can do this by considering the possibilities that both science and faith have a place in our lives. That we needn't choose between them. There are points at which their voices are distinct, but there are also places where they overlap. The task ahead involves determining which is which.
For more on this observance, click here.

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