An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician were on a train, traveling through Scotland.  The engineer looked out the window and saw a black sheep.  He said to the other two, “You won’t believe this- the sheep in Scotland are black!”  The physicist responded with, “Hold on one second, all we can actually conclude from this is that one sheep in Scotland is black.”  The mathematician said, “Hang on, you’re both wrong. All we know from what you saw is that one sheep in Scotland is black on one side.”

Now I wonder if there had been a theologian in that conversation, what would he have added?  In fact, I wonder what each of you would have added if you were there?  Let me tell you what would have gone through my mind. 

The Black Sheep Archetype

I would have mused about the archetype of the black sheep.  I would have pondered this great symbol of the black sheep-  that part of all of us which is willing to stand up for our principles, even if it means standing alone.  I would wonder about that part of all of us that is willing to continue to talk about life even when it appears that we are surrounded on all sides by death- that part of us that refuses to give up, that which continues to seek justice and truth, even in the face of overwhelming odds and hurdles.

A very wise man in the church I was running in New Zealand gave me some advice.  This man had been in the church for 55 years.  Has anyone here been in this church for 55 years? (Lloyd- 56, Bill- 65.)  Now Bill and Lloyd would be the type of blokes who would understand the advice that I got from the wise friend in New Zealand.  This man had seen many different pastors come in and out of the church.  He had watched the evolutionary flow, the rise and fall of pastors over the decades.  His advice was, “Never be afraid to be a minority of one.”  Those words have always stayed with me.

Jesus was a black sheep of the first century, the minority of one who was willing to stand on principle, even though it often meant standing alone.  He was willing to suffer for life, even when all of the evidence surrounding him was hopeless.  He experienced death, but continued to believe in life.  This church knows what it means to be the black sheep, in the tradition of Jesus.  This church knows what it means to stand on principle even though it has meant standing alone, or going solo, going independent and leaving the denomination behind.  Those who have been here for many years have been able to participate in the evolutionary journey of the church. 

This weekend my family and I joined a group of about 50 people on the corner of Jackson and Beacon who were protesting the escalation of the war in Iraq.  I drove by the same spot about a year ago and there was only one person there.  It was snowing at the time, and this man stood there with his sign raised, and very few cars blew their horns.  But this black sheep stood there, on principle, even thought it meant standing alone.  And now, a year later, there were 50 people of all ages, standing in the snow holding signs, together, on principle.  About one in three, if not every other car blew their horn in support of the signs.

Most of the great social movements through history have begun with a black sheep.  Most movements have started with one or a few people who have not been afraid to be a minority and put a voice forward, but they stood on principle, even though it meant standing alone.  They stood for life, even when all of the signs around them seemed to point to death and despair.  Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and so many others are all wonderful examples of social movements beginning with a black sheep. 

Religion as the Realm of Poetry and Passion

In any case, back to the train.  By now everyone else would have moved on to the next thing, but I am still musing about the archetype of the black sheep, and the poetry and possibility surrounding it.  You may wonder what all of this has to do with religion and science.  I believe that religion is a place where we dwell in poetry and passion.  These can never be measured or codified.  They are both a very personal and subjective experience.  Religion is the place of imagination and inspiration.  That cannot be measured.  Religion is the place where we dwell in possibility rather than the status quo.  Religion is the place where all the images of the past come together in our rituals, texts, and in our lives, and they drive our imagination into a vision for the future. 

The black sheep is one such image.  Religion is the place where we get to ask open-ended questions like “Why me?” “Why now?” and “Why this?”  And we get to ask ultimate questions, such as, “Why is there not nothing in the universe, as opposed to the something that we experience?”  Science has no answer to that question, but religion allows us to ask the question.  We don’t need answers; we can simply rest in the question.  Religion is the place of poetry, passion, open-ended questions and possibility. 

Religion has recently come under a heavy attack from certain scientists and philosophers;  Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in particular, and Daniel Dennett to a lesser extent.  We need to take their critiques to heart. Too much religion is anti scientific in its refusal of evolution and all its consequences. But not all religion is literalistic, and it doesn’t by nature have to be dogmatic. In some ways Dawkins and co. have created a religious straw man, a very narrow form of religion, which is easily blown down.  I want to encourage you to hold on to your religion.  Be boldly religious.  Hold on to that place within you where poetry and passion collide.  Dwell in wisdom and possibility, and do not allow me or anyone else to take that away from you.  

Science and Religion on a Spectrum

What I want to illustrate this morning is that many people have taken many different approaches to this relationship between science and religion, and you can place them along a spectrum of belief.  I don’t want to tell you where you should be on this spectrum, but rather offer the spectrum so you can see the range of possibilities, and become more aware of where you stand, and how you bring science and religion together. 

The first scientist I want to speak about is Francis Collins, one of the world’s most significant scientists.  Collins is a physicist and geneticist, and has had the wonderful opportunity to be present when certain disease genes have been discovered.  He leads the Genome Project, and he describes the discovery of genes to be like an act of worship.  Francis Collins is an avid believer in both evolution and in God.  He believes that evolution is God’s way of upgrading creation.  He believes that the purpose of creation is communion with the creator.  Up until the age of 27, Collins was an atheist.  However at age 27, Collins found God.  He was reading C.S. Lewis, and it struck him intellectually that God had placed a law on the hearts of people.  The law told people what was right and wrong in the world.  So he began to understand the claims of Orthodox Christianity, but it was only when he had the following experience, that he took to heart the essence of Christianity.

He was hiking in the Cascade Mountains and came upon a three-tiered waterfall.  It was significant that it was three-tiered, speaking to him somehow of the trinity.  When he saw it, he fell on his knees, and at that moment he understood in his heart that God is God, that Christ is the Son of God, and he would now live his life in honor of that god.  That was his “A-ha” moment. 

Collins believes that divine intervention is not necessary for nature to continue to operate.  He is a modern day deist, believing that God created the world, and then allowed evolution to be the way that God would act in the world.  He is very much a theist, believing in a supernatural force outside of creation that is capable of intervening even if this intervention is not necessary to nature. And out of his experience of reading C.S. Lewis, and falling to his knees at the waterfall, he had his conversion moment and placed a very particular theological meaning on the experience.

Now, consider the same experience through the eyes of another scientist, Ursula Goodenough.  Goodenough is a cell biologist.  She may describe herself as a Christian, certainly as a religious person.  She would describe herself as a religious naturalist.  Faced with the same scene of the three-tiered waterfall, she too would fall to her knees.  But she would draw a very different meaning from what she is experiencing.  She would draw three meanings from the waterfall.  The first thing is that she might sense her place in the evolutionary scheme of things.  The second thing is that the waterfall would illicit from within her very deep feelings of gratitude, joy, and awe.  The third meaning she would draw from the waterfall is communion.  All of creation is in communion with itself ; one with another. 

So, we have one person who would call himself a supernatural theist, and he would draw a certain meaning out of the experience, and then another person who says the meaning is written into the very landscape of the experience.  You can see the difference in the way they approach nature. 

Moving along, we come to the more radical scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Dennett is the good cop and Dawkins is the bad cop, but together they have launched a savage critique on religion.  They have said this:  One person who is suffering from a delusion is described as insane.  When many people suffer from delusion, it is called religion.  Dawkins believes that the world would be better off if there was no religion. 

Dennett has just written a book called Breaking the Spell.  This book does not so much critique God, which he is indifferent about, but it critiques belief in belief in God.  What he is critiquing is a dogmatic belief in belief, a literal living our life by our very particular beliefs.  He says that religion has always been there in one form or another, and says that if religion helps people to live a meaningful life, then that is great. 

What I want to say is that we should hear the critique of Dawkins and Dennett.  They are bringing something very important to us, but we don’t have to buy right into it.  We can take the best of their critique while retaining the best of religion.

The Porpoise Driven Life

Let me tell you about something very exciting that happened to me this morning. I was making oatmeal for my kids, and it came to me.  I am going to write a book which my sense of fun would like to call The Porpoise Driven Life.  It came so clearly to me after several conversations that I have had this week, and then this epiphany over oatmeal this morning. 

Pastor Rick Warren wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life and he did us a great favor with this book.  He talked about the human need for meaning and purpose in life, which is exactly right.  It is an inspiring book, as it encourages us to seek meaning and purpose.  The problem with the book is that it has set very narrow terms around the motivation for meaning and purpose in life.  He says that only if you believe in God in a very particular way can you have meaning in your life. 

And so I want to call my book The Porpoise Driven Life, which reminds us that all the way back and all the way forward, all the way down and all the way up, it’s all porpoises.  If we understand our place in the evolutionary flow of history, we can take our life and make a difference with it.  I want to encourage people to find a purpose and meaning in life, and be motivated by everything that is in everything around them, to be motivated by the very landscape of their lives.  Fall to their knees at the sight of waterfalls and people, streets and trees… to fall at their feet in wonder and amazement at the meaning and purpose that surrounds them.  It’s porpoises all the way down.  The sooner human beings come to understand their place in the evolutionary flow of history, the sooner we can take our lives and live with that right balance of humility and purpose. 

How do you find the balance between science and religion in your life?  How do you take the best of religion, that which dwells in poetry and passion, in possibility and open-ended questions?  How do retain the best of religion along with Dennett’s challenge that we leave behind the preposterous gods who kill people that disagree with them?  How do we leave behind the preposterous gods who have political agendas?  Those preposterous gods who, when taken literally, completely contradict the findings of science?  How do we leave them behind, and hang on to meaning and poetry and passion? 

Jesus and Evolution

That’s what I believe the religious endeavor is all about.  I believe it is one that Jesus understood.  It was a fascinating reading from John’s gospel this morning.  (see below)
I’m not suggesting that Jesus had any inkling of what evolution is.  And yet, when I hear the reading from John, I hear that Jesus and those that gathered the stories around him understood the spirit of evolution and increasing complexity.  They understood the spirit of all things progressing through history, becoming more complex and expanding, transcending and including all that has gone before.  Jesus and those that gathered the stories understood the spirit of evolution. 

The other reading this morning, which spoke to the failing of consumerism and the failure of war, speaks also speaks to the failure of literalism. (see below no. 2)

Literalistic religion can only survive for so long in the face of the critique from science.  But we stand at the cusp of a wonderful opportunity, which we call progressive religion.  Religion that takes the best of both science and nature, and sees both as wonderful opportunities for meaning and purpose in life, and moves forward, believing that everything is in everything.

Two weeks ago we spoke about the archetypes of religious history, and I ended with a line that said, “It’s all real, it’s all metaphor, and there’s always more.”  I want to leave you this morning with the thought “It’s all science, it’s all religion, and there’s always more.”

* 1 - John 14; 12Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
15”If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
*2. I realized later that every religion is coded with such an image of a radical new quality of life, but it had to be encoded in the metaphysical or mystical realm. With the advent of awareness of our new capacities and our potential for conscious evolution, I see now that what has been intuited, as life after death, may indeed be life after this stage of evolution.  Not as some perfect Utopia, but as a state of being that normalizes direct apprehension of the divine, of the implicate order, and that sees ourselves as expressions of that unfolding pattern of creation, cocreative with it. When you put together our full potential -- spiritual, social, and scientific/technological -- you see a quantum jump, a new species, a universal humanity that in fact may embody many of the characteristics of spiritual visions of life beyond this world... a new heaven and a new Earth, a new Jerusalem, beyond sorrow, beyond death, the former things passed away...

Perhaps we are indeed coming to the end of this world, to the end of civilization, the end of separate self consciousness as we have known it. And this is good. We are being instructed by Failure – the failure of war to win, the failure of consumerism to satisfy, the inevitable rise of the seas in response to global warming brought on in part at least by human destruction of nature. All of these evolutionary drivers may indeed be the impulse needed to jump our species to a higher order, or to self destruction. -Barbara Marx Hubbard