Some Christians and scientists seem to enjoy fighting about evolution, natural selection, and creationism. At least I hope they enjoy it. It would be a shame to spend so much time doing something that you dislike.
The scientists bring a lot to this fight. They’re scientists, first of all, and we hold them in awe because of that. I know whenever I see a scientist on the street, I stop and stare. It’s the white coat, goggles, and the little flask with a rubber stopper that get my attention. Also scientists can write down all sorts of information using mathematical symbols. I don’t know what that stuff means, but it makes me think that they know something. And you have to give them this: the scientific method is impressive. The scientists always do their homework. They aren’t sloppy.
The Christians always come to the fight with the same old, tired argument. The second law of thermodynamics. They LOVE the second law of thermodynamics. It’s their trump card, their patron saint of science, their “nanny-nanny boo-boo,” and they never get tired of talking about it.
You see, the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases within a system. Things move toward disorder. When left to their own, things do not grow more complex. The energy in the system diffuses, and the system winds down toward inactivity.
In other words, if you toss a ham sandwich on the sidewalk, you wouldn’t expect to come back 10,000 years later and find it smiling at you.
So the basic argument coming from the creationist’s point of view is that you shouldn’t expect complex things like fingers and flippers and fundamentalists to develop out of single celled organisms. And this argument sounds pretty good on the surface.
Except that it’s completely wrong.
The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems that have no external source of energy. But if there is an external source of energy, things move from disorder to order all the time. You don’t believe me? Go clean up your kitchen.
The earth, you see, has an external source of energy. Turn your eyes toward the sky. Now move your head around until your eyes start to hurt real bad. See that huge ball of fire? There you go.
Things on the earth do move from disorder to order. Not in my daughter’s bedroom, mind you, but in other places. This is what the scientists are talking about. They have seen evidence of complex systems developing out of lesser complexity. If I was a scientist I could demonstrate this – plus I’d get the lab coat and goggles – but you can trace the energy behind putting your kitchen in order all the way back to the sun.
God doesn’t have to micromanage the rise of complex organisms from more primitive forms. The sun plus unthinkable amounts of time do the trick. If you want to believe that God handles every detail, you can, but that doesn’t work very well, philosophically. It makes the problem of evil hurt real bad. Like sun on your eyeballs.
If this upsets your theology, I know that’s hard. It’s always hard to change the way you think about God. But you need to let your theology flex and bend to fit our ever-growing understanding of the way the world works. I know that sounds like heresy, but our theology changes as our knowledge of the cosmos grows. It always has.
I say we should take this conversation to the stars. Lift your eyes from the squirming fur that covers our planet and consider the heavens. Leave the shadows of the cave wall and stop spitting paint on the back of your hands. Stop worrying about why your uncle grew a third nipple and look to the galaxies and the universe.
I don’t know who came up with the idea of stars spinning around black holes in beautiful, random patterns while life does or does not develop in all its awesome diversity, but that person is a fucking ARTIST. That is large. Fling the stars onto an ocean of dark matter and let them do their thing. I swear I can feel the joy rising to my skin and then up to my scalp when I think of it.
That artist. That’s who I’m talking about. Whoever or whatever set all of this in motion. Whoever dreamed up the stars and delights in their handiwork.
That’s who I’m singing to.
rlp
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Very well thought out and very well said.
An echo of my own feelings on the matter, but much better put than I ever could have. Thanks. :-D
A careful thanks. Careful because I want to avoid being tickled pink at NOT being lumped in with other Baptist ministers. (I am tickled, but I'm trying to be bigger than that) I went though the stage of saying, "I'm not like other Baptist preachers, honest." And there is something weak about that. Better to be yourself, be bold, let the chips fall where they may.
So without any thought about any other ministers, I'll take the compliment of my writing with a smile. Thank you!
I guess I'd mention, in caution to your last paragraph, that the same power that makes you sing to your god is one secular humanists share with their fellow man. The universe and its wonders are truly awesome.
Absolutely agreed. Some years ago I realized, to my great surprise, that I had a deeper emotional connection to careful, thinking, secular humanists than to most Christians I knew. I watched the movie "Contact" and burst into tears. I happen to think Carl Sagan's sending the golden disk out with Voyager is the most prayerful and hopeful and kind of crazy thing I've heard in a long time. Who is more unrealistic? Me for praying to an intelligence or him for hoping someone might find his disk?
What if I expanded our word worship to include all feelings of joy that come when we peacefully consider the size of the cosmos and humbly acknowledge that we are not the center of it? Let me just cut to the chase: I've done that. So any peaceful human, careful and thinking and willing to pay any kind of homage to the beauty of creation is a brother or sister to me.
It's semantics. We're both making poems about reality and I'm not going to quibble over the details.
A quick story:
Last night, right before bedtime, my son asked me about how the Universe came to be (he's 7 and a half)...and asked me what I believed.
First I quoted Genesis at him...."Let there be light", and explained that the Bible talked about God creating the Universe from nothingness. THEN I explained the Big Bang Theory a bit (whose name he thought was hilarious, by the way).
Then he asked me again "what do YOU believe?". I told him "Well, who do you think made the Big Bang? I think God did." He nodded in agreement, closed his eyes, and started to drift off to sleep.
Evidently it was a good answer.
Spirituality and science don't have to be exclusive; but, as you say, it's hard to change how one thinks about God. Or science, for that matter.
Nicely done, sir.
- es
Along the lines of, "Well, it changed cuz you wuz lookin' at it."
(I do have one tiny, nitpicky suggestion, which is that you should change "you're uncle's" to "your uncle's" in the title (unless it was intended as an odd pun (you are uncle's third nipple?)). I'm not usually such a grammar nazi but the error is right on top and it doesn't strike nicely.)
Also I want to congratulate you on your appropriate use of foul language. The thought of the phrase "fucking ARTIST" coming from the mouth of a Baptist preacher tickles me greatly.
I enjoyed your post and the fact that it was written by a Baptist minister.
The NY Times recently had a interesting article,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/education/24evolution.html?pagewanted=all , concerning the efforts of a high school science teacher to teach evolution in a conservative Christian town in Florida. Several of the students in his classes strongly disagreed with the concept of evolution, mostly on the basis that it clashed with their interpretation of the Bible and that they found the idea that we have evolved from apes to be extremely distasteful.
I share your sense of awe in looking at the night sky and, similarly, in reading about how scientists are endeavoring to untangle the intricate web of life on our planet. But I have found that many conservative Christians disagree with your comment that “our theology changes as our knowledge of the cosmos grows.” Look at the life Galileo for an example.
To many conservative Christians, the unchanging, bedrock authority of the Bible, their pastors, and their church community is a critical part of their identity. Challenging these beliefs with the facts of science is extremely difficult because it threatens the very essence of how they define themselves.
I find this situation discouraging on many levels, but I am most distressed by what it is doing to the education of young people in the basic sciences. Evolution is an extremely powerful tool in allowing us to understand the web of life in which we find ourselves. Animal breeding, the creation of new plants adapted for particular environmental conditions, and the development of new drugs and antibiotics, to name a few, are all based on an understanding of evolution. Conservative Christians are doing our country and our children a very great disservice by insisting that our schools teach that evolution is “just” a theory and that it be taught in conjunction with the oxymoronic “creation science.”
Again RLP, thank you for your thoughtful post. I would appreciate your comments about how you are dealing with the teaching of evolution in the schools of your own community.
Ooh, what an embarrassing typo. Yeah. Fixed the your thing. Preaching to the choir. Well, it's really more about a response to the often misunderstood complaint about the 2nd law from creationists. Not trying to convince you guys. On the other hand, if I've given you some ammo for the next time someone hauls out that tired argument. I'm cool with that.
My congregation is just a room full of friends. I've been there 19 years. We love each other. We don't always agree. But it's clearly not a conservative bunch. This issue isn't even on our radar. They know where I stand. That's fine.
re the f-word. Yeah, I've taken a lot of heat for that over the years on my other blog. My position is simple. 1. Fuck is coarse language. Vulgar but not profane. No scriptural injunction against righteous anger or enthusiasm, and the f-word is a wonderful word for that. 2. I use that word when talking - only if it wouldn't offend the ones I'm with. I'm not a person who likes causing a scene just for the sake of it. But I do use the word occasionally, so it comes out when I write. 3. I try to write things the best way I can. I worked that sentence for 45 minutes. I tried it with and without. In the end, that's the word that best communicates how I felt when I said that to myself.
I believe it is much worse than Christians not allowing their faith to change with the ages. We might disagree with people who take that position, but at least we could appreciate their dedication and consistency. "We follow the Bible no matter what the culture says."
Heck, if a religion does nothing but echo back the values of the culture, why have it? I could respect a group that stuck with that position. I wouldn't join them. But I would respect them.
BUT, that's not the case. What in fact happens is, the Church slowly incorporates the growing values of culture. She could not survive if she didn't. That's why you find almost no churches anywhere who support, say, racism. True, racism exists underground everywhere, even in the church. But even the most conservative churches would never say that God wants them to remain segregated. That kind of thinking lost ground in the church 30 years ago. The Promise Keepers movement of the 90s (extremely conservative) was filled with people of all races.
Increasingly, women are accepted as ministers in churches. The culture is moving in this direction and the church is being pulled along. One expects the church to be a little slower than the culture on social issues of culture. One would hope the church would have been in the vanguard on issues of social justice and the love of all humans. That's not been the case.
My point is this: Let's admit that in truth we have a dance between the call of the scriptures and the call of the truth we as a people discover on our own through science or the ongoing psychological growth of humanity. We've always been that way. We've always changed with the times, albeit slowly. Let's just admit it and not pretend we do not.
As someone else noted in this discussion, we atheists are fully capable of experiencing awe when we contemplate the sublime--physics or evolution, for example. And if the word 'God' came to take on a larger meaning, that would be fine with many of us.
It bothers me greatly when I hear derogatory comments made about Baptists. While I no longer consider myself Baptist, it is not due to disagreement with their traditional doctrine, but more from disagreement about the overall direction the Southern Baptists have taken for the past generation. People, especially those who consider themselves liberal, need to remember it is just as wrong to stereotype members of that faith as it is to stereotype Jews, Catholics, or any other religious or ethnic group. Believe it or not, there are a lot of Baptists, maybe even a majority, who consider themselves either politically independent or Democrat. And they aren't all flat earth proponents.
I wouldn't normally think anyone would be interested in details about Baptists in this crowd, but since it has come up. Allow me, if you will, just a brief bit of explanation.
Baptists began in 1601. We were those in England who were persecuted and unable to worship in the ways we saw fit because we were not a part of the Church of England. John Bunyan of Pilgrim's Progress fame was a Baptist preacher. He was in and out of jail for 17 years because he preached without a state license, so to speak.
In early days we were champions of religious liberty. We have no creeds, preferring to trust in the individual's right and responsibility to read scripture. And we are FIERCE supporters of every person's right to freedom of conscience.
Nice huh?
And congregational in polity. So every Baptist church decides for itself what it believes and how it worships. There is no higher human institution than the local church for Baptists.
Nice huh?
Then came the radical religious right in America. Southern Baptists abandoned all of this and began to advocate for political religious coercion (what else would you call making a Jewish child pray in the name of Jesus in school?). Many Baptist such as myself are loathe to give up the name Baptist to a bunch of fundamentalists who do not know their history. On the other hand, we want nothing to do with the religious right.
There is a delightful liberal tradition among Baptists. In the old days we were kind of the crazy cousins in the family. Other Baptists were suspicious of us, but we were clearly invited to the family reunions and even appreciated somewhat. No longer. Southern Baptists are now all of one flavor. Jimmy Carter (for example) and other progressive Baptists have all left the Southern Baptist Convention and have formed other groups for fellowship and support.
So you see, I'm a Baptist. I'm just old school, so maybe you didn't recognize me. ;-)
Don't let your bias blind you, the way it does science on occasion.