On January 21, 2009,
Disciples of Christ General Minister & President Sharon Watkins preached at
the National Prayer Service of the Presidential Inauguration for Barack
Obama. In her sermon, she shared this
story that is often attributed to Cherokee legend.
One evening a grandfather was
teaching his young grandson about the internal battle each person faces. “There are two wolves struggling inside of
us,” the old man said. “One wolf is
vengefulness, anger, resentment, self-pity and fear… The other wolf is compassion, faithfulness,
hope, truth, and love.”
The grandson sat, thinking,
then asked, “Which wolf wins, grandfather?”
His grandfather replied, “The
one you feed.”
I have shared this story
about the two wolves with you before. I
share it again, because I find in this story a deep and powerful truth. Don’t you?
Consider, then this story
that I read not too long ago in Roger Wolsey’s book “Kissing Fish:”
A young Cherokee brave went
to his tribal elder saying, “I can’t figure out what’s going on inside me! I want to do right but I end up doing
wrong. I want to love but I end up
hating. Can you help me?” The elder paused for a moment and then
responded by saying, “Inside every brave are two dogs that are always at
war. One of them is the dog of love,
compassion and kindness. The other is
the dog of selfishness, violence and vengeance.” The brave pondered this and said, “Which dog
wins?” The elder said, “That depends upon the one you feed.”
In his book, Roger Wolsey
then asks: “Did this event really take
place? Was there really such a brave or
an elder? Was he really a Cherokee or
was he a Lakota? Did they say those
exact words? Were they dogs or wolves?
Are there literally dogs living inside of us?”
And then Roger Wolsey
concludes by saying what all of you, intelligent people that you are, have
already realized: that such questions miss the point.
This past Tuesday evening,
there was a much-publicized debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Ken
Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky. The topic of the debate was the creationist
model of the earth, which interprets the Creation stories of scripture
literally, and concludes that the earth is no more than 6,000 years old. The Creationist model also argues that
evolution is a lie.
Ken Ham believes that, yes, scripture is to be
taken literally, and the earth is only 6,000 years old, that the 7 days of
creation really were 7 days of creation, that evolution is a lie, and so on and
so forth.
Bill Nye, on the other hand,
dismisses completely the Biblical idea of creation, arguing that solid
scientific evidence proves that there is no truth to these stories from
scripture.
Well, the whole debate missed
the point. It’s like having two people
debate about the story of the two wolves.
One insists that the story is completely true, that there are, in fact,
two wolves literally living inside of us, somehow…
while the other person argues that, since it is actually impossible for two wolves
to live inside a person, there is no truth whatsoever in the story.
Again: both sides miss the point.
We know that there aren’t
really two wolves (or dogs) living inside of us. And yet we also know that there is, in fact,
a very deep and powerful truth in this story.
Many of the
stories of scripture are properly interpreted in this way. Including the creation story. There is a deep and powerful truth in these
stories. But whether these stories
actually happened – literally happened – misses the point.
The debate between Bill Nye
and Ken Ham only presented two options, leading people to think that they have
to choose one of those two options.
Either you believe in God and you accept that these stories are all
literally true, or you deny God and deny that there is any truth in these
stories. Either you believe in God, or
you believe in science. One or the
other.
This is why people are
leaving the church! It’s a ridiculous
choice to have to make! People think
going to church and believing in God means they have to ignore all of science,
that science and God are incompatible.
That is just not true.
Science and God are not
incompatible.
Perhaps science and a
fundamentalist religion that interprets ancient texts literally are
incompatible.
But that is not how I
interpret scripture.
It’s not how millions of
progressive Christians interpret scripture.
It’s not even how the
majority of Christians over the past two thousand years have interpreted
scripture.
I can’t imagine Jesus
standing in the temple, arguing that the 7 days of creation were 7 actual,
24-hour periods of time.
I can’t imagine Jesus
distributing the loaves and fishes to the people, and taking one of the fish
and explaining, in depth, just how it was that a fish literally swallowed a man
named Jonah, how Jonah survived in that fish, with all the fish’s stomach acids
eating away at him, and then was spit back up on the beach, unharmed, 3 days
later. You’d think if the whole point of
this story is that it actually happened, someone would have asked Jesus about
it, about how it happened, given that they were around fish all the time. But no one around Jesus even ever thought to
ask. Because the thought never occurred
to them.
And if someone did ask, I can imagine Jesus saying to that person: “Dude, you’ve missed the point. You’ve completely missed the point.”
That is, in fact, what Jesus did
say to a man named Nicodemus.
Remember? Jesus was talking about
being born again, and Nicodemus, poor literalist that he was, said: “Wait, hold on! How can a man be born again? How can he crawl back into his mother’s womb
and emerge a second time? How is this
possible?”
And Jesus said: “Nicodemus, you’ve missed the point. How could someone as smart as you – a teacher
of Israel! – not understand this?”
I love Bill Nye. He’s cool.
He’s geeky. He wears a bow
tie. If the topic is science, I’ll
believe anything he says over someone like Ken Ham. Even Pat Robertson said as much the other
day, which really surprised me. Pat
Robertson said interpreting the story of creation literally is “nonsense,” and
he said to Ken Ham, “Let’s not make a joke of ourselves.”
So when the topic is science,
Bill Nye is your guy. If the topic is
religion, though, I think they are both wrong.
I think they both miss the point.
Because there is truth in the
Creation stories of scripture. Just not
the kind of truth that Ken Ham insists upon.
Another really cool science
guy is Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and host of a new
TV show starting next month called Cosmos,
which is a sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos
TV show from years back.
I caught an interview between
Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Moyers recently.
Tyson’s comments show that he is hostile toward religion. And yet he also said things which, to me,
sounded very religious.
He said, of his life’s
work: “The universe called me.”
He said that “science gives
us an understanding of our place in the universe.”
To me, these sound like very
religious statements, statements that seek a longing to connect with God – the
energy behind the universe. But Neil
DeGrasse Tyson doesn’t see these as religious statements, and I think the
reason is that religion has become distorted; distorted to mean an
unquestioning acceptance of the literal factuality of the stories of scripture.
This distortion of religion
is dangerous. It’s dangerous to religion
and to the church. As I mentioned,
people are leaving the church. Membership
in churches has been, for several decades now, in decline. A big part of the reason for this is that
people have been told that in order to be a part of the church, you have to
ignore science. You have to stop
thinking. You have to check your brain
at the door.
The distortion of religion is
also dangerous to science. America used
to be a leader in scientific discovery.
That’s no longer the case. Our
students rank way down the list when it comes to scientific and mathematical
knowledge. Certainly part of the reason
for this is that Americans are turning away from science as they embrace a
literal interpretation of creationism. Over
a third of Americans now say they believe in creationism. And the other developed countries of the
world just shake their heads.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson points
out how crazy this is: For Americans, he
says, “their cell phones, the health care they receive, their computers and the
social media networks they use to share their non-scientific views all depend
on the scientific principles they reject.”
A group of paleontologists recently
visited the Creation museum… Lisa Park, a paleontologist from the University of
Akron, cried at one point as she walked down a hallway full of flashing images
of war, famine and natural disasters which the museum blames on belief in
evolution.
In addition to being a
scientist, Park is also an elder in the Presbyterian church. She said: "It's very bad science and
even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive.”
This, by the way, is the
reason I’ve chosen to preach on this today.
To blame war, famine, or natural disasters on belief in evolution isn’t
just wrong, it’s dangerous and offensive, because it means we’re ignoring the real causes of these things; and if we
ignore the real causes of these things, we can’t do anything to end them. This, in turn, means that people are dying because of this false theology.
Another paleontologist, Daryl
Domning from Howard University, held his chin and shook his head at several
points during the tour.
He said: "This bothers
me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion
and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science."
This weekend, in
approximately 600 communities of faith across the country and around the world,
preachers are speaking on evolution. The
date is chosen because it is the closest weekend to Charles Darwin’s birthday,
which is February 12. And 13,000
Christian clergy, including me, have signed a letter which states that “the
timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may
comfortably coexist,” that “evolution is a foundational scientific truth,” and
that taking the Bible seriously does not mean one has to take it literally.
I find deep truth in the
words of scripture. I also find deep
truth in the discoveries of science.
In his interview with Bill
Moyers, Neil DeGrasse Tyson talked about dark matter, which scientists say
makes up about 96% of the universe; and they don’t even know what it is.
That’s fascinating!
Scientists look at the
universe. They can see the effects of
gravity. They know that something must
be causing all this gravity, yet all the objects in the universe that we can
see account for only a tiny percentage of that gravity. What accounts for the rest?
Dark matter. Which is just a name for something we know is
there, but we don’t know what it is.
That’s fascinating to
me. It’s fascinating to me that for
every answer science gives us, we get ten new questions that, previously, we
didn’t even know to ask. And how many
questions do we still not even know to ask?
It’s not that we don’t have the answers… we don’t even know the
questions to ask yet.
Several times during last
Tuesday’s debate, when asked to explain something, Bill Nye the science guy
said, “I don’t know! It’s a
mystery!” Which led me to realize that
good science, like good theology, is open to new questions and discoveries. Bad
science and bad theology both try to put a box around the answers one is
comfortable with, and try to prove that everything is contained within that
box.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson says
that, on his death bed, “I will relish all the questions that came up that I
never thought to ask…” His greatest
achievement in science, then, is not coming up with more answers, but coming up
with more questions.
That, to me, is as
awe-inspiring as the Biblical stories of creation. There is so much mystery in the universe, and
so much mystery in God. So many more
questions, questions that I haven’t even yet thought to ask.
And in the great vastness of
all this mystery, I find that there is more than enough room for both faith and
science. In fact, I find that I feel
closest to God when I allow faith and science to not only exist side-by-side,
but to engage in conversation with each other, to marvel in the discoveries,
the answers, and the questions that arise from each.
It’s not about a debate
between science and faith.
It’s about a
conversation. A dialogue. A partnership.
A life that takes one but not
the other is like having two hands that want to clap, but clap independently of
each other.
It’s about finding solutions
to the world’s problems. Things like
war, famine, and natural disasters.
Science and faith, working together, can find the solutions. Science by itself, or religion by itself, can
actually make the problems worse.
Science that develops technology with no ethical or religious foundation
leads to technology that is just as capable of destroying life as saving life. Religion that attributes war, famine and
natural disasters to human belief in evolution, or to God punishing humans, is
just as dangerous, as it prevents science from providing the tools necessary to
provide relief.
God gave us religion. And God gave us science. Both are gifts from
God. You don’t have to choose one over
the other.
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