“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind... ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?’”
        – Job 38:1,4

    Today is Evolution Sunday – the second annual!  I’d intended to preach on this Sunday last year, but wasn’t able to, due to my chemotherapy schedule.  Robin stepped into the breach, though, and brought you all a fine sermon.  Thankfully, I’m in a very different place this year, health-wise: so, now, I’m able to return to this topic.  That means I’ve had a whole year to think about it...
    First, a bit of background.  Evolution Sunday started a couple years ago.  It was the brainchild of a college professor named Michael Zimmerman, who used to teach in the University of Wisconsin system.  Now, he’s Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indiana.
    Dr. Zimmerman became alarmed when the local school board in Grantsburg, Wisconsin – under pressure by conservative Christians – placed restrictions on how Darwin’s theory of evolution could be taught in the public schools.  He approached ministers and priests in the area, and got 200 of them to sign a statement supporting the teaching of evolution in the schools.  When they saw how many Christian religious leaders weren’t worried about the theory of evolution contradicting Christian faith, the school board changed its mind, rescinding its previous action.
    Something got started that day, though, that couldn’t be stopped.  It became a movement. Dr. Zimmerman’s Clergy Letter Project, as he called it, went national.  Over 10,000 religious leaders from all over the country – including Robin and myself – have signed it.  It’s kind of a long letter, so I won’t share the whole thing with you, but here’s just enough of it to give you a flavor:
    “We... 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 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.”

    There is religious truth, and there is scientific truth.  I believe that.  I also believe, as a person of faith, that God created the world – and, that the way God chose to do it was through the gradual evolution of plant and animal species – what Charles Darwin called the process of “natural selection.”
    And what of the first two chapters of Genesis – the seven days of creation, and the fashioning of man from the dust of the ground, and woman from one of the man’s ribs?  The first thing I’ve got to say about these two chapters is, they’re two separate stories – which you’ll clearly see if you look at them side by side.  There’s not one creation account in the book of Genesis, but two.  In the first one – the seven-day creation story – God calls the animals into existence first, then human beings.  In the second, God fashions man from the dust of the earth, then makes the animals the same way.  After that, God makes woman, from one of the man’s ribs.  In the first creation account, the Creator God is a distant, austere deity, who systematically calls the universe into being through the sheer power of the Word.  In the second, God comes into creation personally and actually walks the earth, scooping up a handful of dust from the ground and breathing into it the breath of life.
    If you’re going to try to use Genesis as a science textbook, as the fundamentalists do, you’ve got to first decide which of these two stories is the scientific account, and which one is poetry.  Even if you take one to be science – and most fundamentalists, I’d expect, would vote for the first, the seven-day creation account, were they forced to choose – you’ve got to come to terms, somehow, with all the evidence from modern astronomy, geology and biology, evidence that clearly points to a creation process that took place over millions of years.
    When I say that, am I somehow cheapening the Bible?  Am I undermining its authority?  By no means!  I’m simply trying to restore the Bible to its true purpose, its original purpose: as a testimony to faith.  When I want scientific truth, I look to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (and a host of other, more recent books, that build on Darwin’s original theory).  When I want spiritual truth, I wouldn’t think for a moment I’d find it in old Darwin’s book.  For spiritual truth, I look to the scriptures.
    Another way of saying it is to explain that modern science textbooks describe how the world came to be – they answer the “How” question.  The Bible, on the other hand, describes why God created the world – it answers the “Why” question.  How and Why – we need them both.  Where did we ever get the idea that How and Why can only be found within the pages of a single book?
    I’d like to spend some time with you, today, looking at the “How” of creation – as modern science understands it.  Then, I want to turn to a remarkable passage from the book of Job that helps us glimpse the “Why” of creation: the truth called “God,” who is responsible for all of it.
    So, what about this universe that we say God created?  How big is it?
    Bigger than you and I can imagine, without the greatest of difficulty – that’s how big the universe is.  Most of us didn’t get that message from our school science classes – not because there was anything terribly wrong with those science classes, but because the truth they were trying to convey is so big, it’s hard to wrap our minds around it.
    I remember, when our kids were in grade school, helping them with the obligatory model-of-the-solar system science project.  I can vividly remember helping our son Ben make his model of the solar system.  We took a cardboard box, and cut out one of its sides.   Then, we covered the inside with black construction paper.  Styrofoam balls came next, in various sizes.  We hung them from the top of our universe-box with black thread.  In the end, what we had was the nine planets (we still had nine, back then!), which Ben colored with magic markers, to approximate the colors he saw in his science book.
    The only problem is, our model was not to scale.  It couldn’t possibly be to scale: because we’d have needed a box so big, we couldn’t have gotten it into the car, let alone even carried it into the school building.
    Science writer Bill Bryson describes it this way.  Imagine the earth as a pea.  Jupiter would be a thousand feet away.  Pluto (that planet that, as of last year, is no longer a planet) would be a mile and a half – but Pluto is so small, compared to the size of the pea-sized earth, you’d never even see it.  At that distance, it would be like the size of a bacterium.  [Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), p. 24.]
    And that’s just the solar system.  Venture out beyond Pluto, into the realm of the stars, and the distances become unimaginably vast.   One writer has described it this way.  
Imagine that each star in the known universe is represented by a grain of sand.  How many stars are there in they Milky Way, the galaxy in which we live?  Enough to fill a large wheelbarrow.  That’s 100 billion grains - 100 billion stars are out there, each one potentially capable of having planets circling it.
    Now, imagine that you took a thimble, and dipped into that pile of sand in the wheelbarrow.  Your thimble would scoop out at least 10,000 grains of sand.  That’s more than enough to account for all the stars you and I can see from the earth, if we stand outside on a clear, dark summer night and gaze up at the heavens.
    OK, so the wheelbarrow-full is the Milky Way, and the thimble-full is the stars we can actually see with the naked eye.  How many stars are there in the entire universe?
    To answer that question, we have to think of a freight train, pulling great, big hopper cars full of sand.  Now, if a wheelbarrow represents the Milky Way, then each hopper car holds enough sand to represent hundreds of galaxies like our own.  Imagine that the train cars begin to pass us, one by one, at the usual speed of a freight train.  We’re sitting in a car at the railroad crossing, waiting for the train to pass before we can drive across.  How long will be sit there, counting railway cars, before we finally see the caboose?
    Three years.  Three years of sitting and counting hopper cars – each one of those cars containing hundreds of Milky Way galaxies! [Terence Dickenson and Jack Newton, Splendors of the Universe, Firefly books, 1997; cited by Ralph Milton in the Rumors e-newsletter, June1999.]
    Much the same is true of the universe on a microscopic level.  Most of us learned in school about molecules, that are composed of atoms.  Atoms, in turn, are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons.  The physicists have discovered even smaller particles than those, but that’s enough for now.
    I can remember our grade-school science teachers all had models of atoms sitting on their desks.  The models were composed of wooden balls, connected by tinker-toy type spokes.  Those grade-school science atoms always looked, to us kids, like they were so neat, orderly and manageable.
    The only problem is, those models are no more accurate than the styrofoam balls Ben and I tried to use to model the solar system.  Science writer Bill Bryson describes it this way.  Look at your church bulletin (or any other printed text) and find a hyphen.  The hyphen is probably about a millimeter in size.  Now, imagine that you divided your hyphen into a thousand parts.  Each one of them is called a micron.  This is getting into the size of microrganisms, those tiny, one-celled animals you can see under a microscope.  A paramecium, for instance, is about two microns wide: that’s two one-thousandths of a hyphen.  If you wanted to take a look at that paramecium, swimming in a drop of water, with your naked eye, you’d need to enlarge the size of that drop of water until it were forty feet across.   Yet, what if you wanted to see an atom?  How much bigger would that drop of water have to get?
    The answer is: fifteen miles.  That’s because an atom is a whole lot smaller than a paramecium.  Remember, the paramecium is two microns wide: that’s two one-thousandths of a hyphen.  To get down into the realm of atoms, you have to take one of those microns and divide it into not one thousand, but ten thousand smaller segments.  To compare one atom to the thickness of our one-millimeter hyphen is like comparing the width of a sheet of paper to the height of the Empire State Building  [A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 134.]
    You and I talk cheerfully about the world of atoms and molecules, but in fact, the level of that world is so infinitesimally small, we can hardly shrink our minds enough to comprehend it.  But yet, we believe that God is the author of all of it – of everything that exists.  God crafted the atoms and God also crafted the stars.  What sort of mind must God have – if, indeed, we can call it a mind – to have created the universe in both its vastness and its minuteness?  Not only that, but we also believe that God the Creator didn’t walk off the construction site after the job was done, but has stuck around through the millennia since then, as building superintendent.  God the Creator is also God the sustainer.  God is the one for whom, Jesus teaches, not even a sparrow falls but God does not know it, and even the hairs on our heads are numbered [Matthew 10:29-30].
    There is a man in the Bible who struggles to come to terms with the vast and complex reality of God.  His name is Job, and he’s got a quarrel with the Almighty.  Job’s quarrel is not with the world’s complexity of design, but rather with its seeming unfairness.  For Job has suffered far out of proportion to his deserving, and he figures the Lord owes him an explanation, if not an apology.
    An explanation, though, is not forthcoming.  The Lord is silent through most of the many chapters of this epic poem, as Job argues with friends and neighbors alike about the necessity of keeping faith with God – even though the world seems at best, random; and, at worst, downright hostile.
    Finally, at the end of the book, God breaks silence at last, responding to Job’s question, “Why?”  The answer, needless to say, is not what Job expects.  The Lord answers his question with another question – or, rather, a whole slew of questions, that go on, verse upon verse.  Job asks the question, “Lord, why do bad things happen to good people,” and God responds, saying – in essence – “I am God.”  That’s all the answer Job gets.  Yet, for a deeply faithful man like Job, that’s all he needs.  Here is a portion of the answer God gives, “out of the whirlwind”:

    “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
     Tell me, if you have understanding.
    Who determined its measurements – surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
    On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone
    when the morning stars sang together
    and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”    [Job 38:4-6]

    In other words, who is the creature, to question the creator?  What right does Job have, to try to second-guess God?
    None whatsoever, as it turns out.  Job’s only recourse is to “repent in dust and ashes”:

    “I know that you can do all things,
    and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
    ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
    Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
    things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
    ‘Hear, and I will speak;
    I will question you, and you declare to me.’
    I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
    but now my eye sees you;
    therefore I despise myself,
    and repent in dust and ashes.’    [Job 42:2-6]

    What would you ask the Creator, if you had the opportunity?  Would you, like Job, demand to know why bad things happen to good people?  Would you ask why it is that some people have an abundance of faith and others none?  Would you wonder how it is that God knows everything that’s going to happen, but yet still we human beings have free will?  Or, perhaps you’d want to ask that question about evolution: why it is that God chose such a long, drawn-out – and monumentally messy – way of creating the world, and all that dwells in it?
    Even if you our I could look God in the eye and ask those questions, I’m not sure the answers would be any more satisfying than the one the Lord offers to Job.  “I am God,” says the Lord.  That’s the answer.
    Yet, from the Christian point of view, we can say we have another sort of answer to all those nagging theological questions.  The answer is Jesus Christ.  The Gospel of John says of him:

    “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”    [John 1:1-4]

    If we truly take the insights of modern science seriously, and apply them to God as Creator, then we end up with a deity who is so remote, aloof and – seemingly – uncaring, that it’s hard for us to direct any sort of love and adoration in God’s direction.  Yet, the truth is, God doesn’t just leave us with the same, philosophically unsatisfying answer Job receives.  For lo, these many centuries later, God has spoken another word – different from the word that called creation into being, but yet, also the same.  For that Word is more than mere syllables, spoken into the shadowy void, the dark chaos before creation.  That Word is a living, breathing human being: who lived the same life we live, died the same death we will die, and was raised to the same new life to which we trust – in God’s grace – we, too will one day be raised.
    The bottom line, for me and my faith, anyway – as, I hope, is true for yours, as well – is that, no matter what question you and I may hurl defiantly in God’s direction, the answer comes back.  And that answer is love.
    Let us pray:
    Gracious Creator of the moon and stars,
    sculptor of galaxies spinning outward,
    beyond the vision of our tiny telescopes:
    we marvel that you have chosen to dwell within the temple of our hearts.
    Our hearts are such crowded, chaotic places,
    filled with many a worry, many a doubt.
    It is little wonder we spend so much time feeling baffled and confused:
    for we ourselves are creatures,
    and you, the one we question, are the creator.
    Grant that we may receive from you the gift of inner peace,
    that, in the fullness of your time,
    we may learn to let go of our anxieties
    and be freed simply to rest in your love.  Amen.

 
Copyright 2007, by Carlos E. Wilton.  All rights reserved.