FAITH & SCIENCE

When the Rev. Tara Leininger gathers with her congregation Sunday, the pastor of Metaline Falls Congregational United Church of Christ will open her sermon with a scene from “Inherit the Wind.”

“Do you think a sponge thinks?” Henry Drummond, the defense attorney, asks in the award-winning play – a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Trial that involved the arrest of a teacher for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“If the Lord wishes a sponge to think, it thinks!” replied Matthew Harrison Brady, leader of the crusade against evolution.

“Does a man have the same privilege as a sponge?” Drummond asks, prompting Brady to answer in the affirmative. “Then this man wishes to have the same privilege of a sponge, he wishes to think!”

“We are thinking beings,” Leininger will emphasize to her congregation. “God wants us to think.”

On Sunday, the small church in northeastern Washington will be among nearly 600 congregations nationwide to participate in Evolution Sunday – a day for clergy to discuss the compatibility of science and faith.

Established last year to celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin, Evolution Sunday has become a way for Christians to talk about how the theory of evolution doesn’t have to conflict with Biblical teachings and that there is no need to choose one over the other.

“You can be a Christian and believe in science,” said the Rev. Lauri Clark Strait, pastor of Opportunity Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Spokane Valley. “Christianity is our faith, values, morals and ethics. Religion explains the ‘why’ while science explains the facts, details and the ‘how-to.’ … They tell different parts of the same story.”

Evolution Sunday – which has drawn participation from churches of many denominations – grew out of “The Clergy Letter Project,” a nationwide effort to dispel the growing perception among some Christians that evolution and faith just can’t mix. It was started in 2004 by Michael Zimmerman, dean of Butler University’s College of Liberal Arts. After a Wisconsin school board passed a series of anti-evolution policies that year, Zimmerman and several clergy members prepared a statement in support of teaching evolution. Within weeks, nearly 200 clergy signed the statement. Teachers and scientists also sent letters, pressuring the school board to retract its policies.

Since then, thousands of Christian clergy have endorsed Zimmerman’s Clergy Letter Project, including several hundred from Washington and 36 from Idaho.

The letter states that while most Christians consider the Bible to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, they do not interpret it literally. Science, they say, doesn’t have to undermine religion.

“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,” according to the letter.

“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 believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. … We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.”

The number of participating congregations has increased by more than 23 percent compared to last year, according to Zimmerman, who has received only positive feedback from the ministers who participated in last year’s inaugural event.

“We have to open our minds to the greatness of God’s creation,” said Leininger, a former history and social studies teacher. “We can’t be so literal that we box God in and not let the wonder out.”

During her sermon, the UCC pastor also will focus on a passage from the book of Jeremiah – “They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream…”

“We are like trees. As Christians, we have to grow,” said Leininger. “If we have brains that God has created, we have to use those brains.”

To explain the compatibility of science and religion, the Rev. JP Carver, vicar of St. Agnes Episcopal Church in Sandpoint, likes to use the word “BioLogos,” a theory of theistic evolution first coined by Dr. Francis S. Collins, a physician-geneticist who led the international Human Genome Project. Collins, a devout Christian who was once an atheist, explains the theory in “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”

“It’s a way to examine the full mystery of God and the full mystery of science,” said Carver, the only clergy member in North Idaho who has signed up to participate in Evolution Sunday.

The priest decided to take part in the Clergy Letter Project because of “all the strident voices” from both the “pure evolutionists” and the “pure theologians.” He doesn’t agree with either position, he said, because both extremes limit a person’s knowledge and understanding.

“By coming from the middle, it allows me to enter fully into the beauty of science and its complexity as well as the wonder and beauty of God,” he said.

Last year’s Evolution Sunday was criticized by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think-tank that has been a huge proponent of intelligent design – a growing movement that insists evolution doesn’t offer a complete explanation and instead teaches that life is so complex it must have been created by some kind of higher power.

“Evolution Sunday is the height of hypocrisy,” Bruce Chapman, president of Discovery Institute, wrote last year. “Why do Darwinists think it is not okay for people to criticize Darwin on religious grounds, but it is just fine to defend him on religious grounds?”

In an e-mail interview, Zimmerman said proponents of intelligent design – which he and others deem as “creationism in disguise” – appear to suffer from “science envy.”

“Science is a very powerful way of examining and understanding the world around us, but it is also very limited in what it can do,” said Zimmerman, an ecologist whose field work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and other organizations. “Indeed, there are whole areas of the human condition that science simply cannot address; areas like aesthetics, morality, politics and religion. Scientists understand these limitations and respect them. Non-scientists and ID proponents seem to think that science should actually address all of these fields, as long as it does so in the way they want. If we redefine science in the way ID proponents want, to include non-materialistic explanations as science, explanations that include the supernatural, we will have completely done away with science as we know it. The consequences for society are huge.”

Those who pit creationism against evolution are often well-meaning people who are simply anxious about the power of God and the meaning of life, said the Rev. John Shepard, pastor of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in south Spokane. “For that, I love those people,” he said. “But a literal understanding of the creation story and the consequences that flow from that – that the world is only 6,000 years old – it doesn’t meet my education.”

The Biblical account of creation isn’t supposed to be read like a textbook after all, according to the clergy involved with the Project.

“There are differing ways of interpreting an age-old truth – that God is at the heart of everything in creation and loves the creation beyond anything we can imagine,” said Shepard. “We are celebrating the awesome mystery and power of a God that has the foresight to create using an evolutionary process.”