It seemed worth while to try how far the principle of evolution would throw light on some of the more complex problems in the natural history of man…

The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment is that man is descended from some less highly organised form. The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in innumerable points of structure and constitution, both of high and of the most trifling importance… are facts which cannot be disputed…

The high standard of our intellectual powers and moral disposition is the greatest difficulty which presents itself, after we have been driven to this conclusion on the origin of man. But every one who admits the principle of evolution, must see that the mental powers of the higher animals, which are the same in kind with those of man, though so different in degree, are capable of advancement. Thus the interval between the mental powers of one of the higher apes and of a fish, or between those of an ant and scale-insect, is immense; yet their development does not offer any special difficulty; for with our domesticated animals, the mental faculties are certainly variable, and the variations are inherited. No one doubts that they are of the utmost importance to animals in a state of nature. Therefore the conditions are favourable for their development through natural selection. The same conclusion may be extended to man; the intellect must have been all-important to him, even at a very remote period, as enabling him to invent and use language, to make weapons, tools, traps, &c., whereby with the aid of his social habits, he long ago became the most dominant of all living creatures.

The development of the moral qualities is a more interesting problem. The foundation lies in the social instincts, including under this term the family ties. These instincts are highly complex, and in the case of the lower animals give special tendencies towards certain definite actions; but the more important elements are love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy. Animals endowed with the social instincts take pleasure in one another's company, warn one another of danger, defend and aid one another in many ways. These instincts do not extend to all the individuals of the species, but only to those of the same community. As they are highly beneficial to the species, they have in all probability been acquired through natural selection.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives- of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals...

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. No doubt a man with a torpid mind, if his social affections and sympathies are well developed, will be led to good actions, and may have a fairly sensitive conscience. But whatever renders the imagination more vivid and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive, and may even somewhat compensate for weak social affections and sympathies.

… Nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection.

I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious… [and the] main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt… that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system-with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

   ^{1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.}

   4… and God divided the light from the darkness.

   5… And the evening and the morning were the first day.

7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

   8… And the evening and the morning were the second day.

   9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear..

   11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass,… and the fruit tree

   13And the evening and the morning were the third day.

   14And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

   19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

   20And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

   23And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

   24And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth…

   25… And God saw that it was good.

   26And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…

   27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

   28And God blessed them..

31And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

2And on the seventh day God… rested… from all his work which he had made.

A walk can be a simple thing and a walk can be a profound thing. I’ve walked protesting nuclear weapons, for women’s rights, for the hungry of the world, and I’ve walked for leisure and exercise. I’ve had walks of discovery with my wife, walks of opportunity with colleagues, and walks of wisdom with mentors. I’ve strolled, sauntered, skipped, marched, with light feet and a joyful heart, and with heavy feet and heart. I walked the streets of the Florida town my parents retired to when my father died, and I walked the hospital hallways when my children were born. I now find that religious and spiritual discoveries are found when life is viewed as a walk, as is the case in this church community where we pledge to “walk together.” Walking with others as a symbol of the spiritual life, is a particular way to view how the profound depths of existence are discovered. They are discovered on a journey. And those profound depths are not discovered whole, but partial, incomplete, ever-unfolding. We never have the meaning of all existence and all time in our grasp at any moment of our lives. It is not in the nature of man to know all things, and it is in the nature of creation to reveal her mysteries gradually and over much time.

As Unitarian Herman Melville wrote in his classic, Moby Dick, “Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a passage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.” Religion should be about leading humanity on a search, a voyage of discovery, instead of being the anchor that is dragged! Friend and colleague Earl Holt, minister at one of our oldest Unitarian churches, King’s Chapel in the heart of downtown Boston, seals this view of the spiritual life in our tradition, writing, “To believe that life is a journey is to have a religious view of life, while to be non-religious is to believe that there is no journey to take.” (“The Hero’s Journey”, Earl K. Holt, III, 1994)

Every journey is important, every walk and every voyage, for life’s most profound meanings are uncovered and discovered along the way.

In 1831 Charles Darwin took a “stroll” across the ocean aboard the ship, The Beagle, as the Pilgrims two centuries before him had on the Mayflower, and Melville’s Pequod would in literature before the century was out. Darwin was twenty-two years old, and was invited by the Captain to accompany the ship when another man got sick and couldn’t go. Darwin was chosen because of the shape of his nose, as the Captain thought that bespoke character, and because Darwin had once studied religion and the Captain had a passion to collect evidence of the Lord’s creation as described in Genesis. Darwin wrote about his voyage that changed the world, in his later 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species:

WHEN on board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species- that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.

In this year’s Lenten Sermon series we have been looking at thinkers who threaten modern religion. So far we have considered how Thomas Jefferson’s concept of equality undermines religion’s attempt to separate humanity into the saved and the damned. Last Sunday we saw how the man who in the 19th century was heard by more people in this country than any other, Robert Ingersoll, extolled the virtues of critical thought which, when applied to religion, renders much of it as the product of ignorance, fear, and irrationality.

Today we are looking at someone who poses a special threat to modern religion, orthodox Christianity and Judaism in particular. When my wife was in undergraduate school at Belmont College in Nashville, Tennessee, then President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Adrian Rogers, after leading one of her classes in prayer, proceeded to lecture on the three people responsible for the downfall of modern religion: Soren Kierkegaard, John Dewey, and Charles Darwin. When my wife told me that I was surprised. These are some of the people I would credit with the rise of religion out of ignorance and fear, and towards reason!

It was not the way Darwin lived his life that posed the threat. He came from a scientific family, his famous grandfather Eramus Darwin was an old evolutionist who lacked the intellectual capacity to proffer it as a coherent theory. Darwin was exposed to both the Church of England and its heretical adversary, the Unitarians, but it was not Darwin’s religion that posed the threat. He married a Wedgwood, of pottery fame and an old British Unitarian family, but it was not Darwin’s lifestyle or his morals or radical politics that posed the threat. It was what Darwin surmised from his observations of the natural world and what he proposed as the most cogent theory of the origin of humanity and life.

Darwin didn’t discover evolution, and didn’t even use the word in the original edition of his book, but he gave it a firm foundation as a reasoned theory of life origins and especially the origin of human being, through natural selection. He first looked at the way human beings “design” domesticated animals through selective breeding, especially pigeons bred in his time for decorative plumage. In our time dogs are good examples, especially as they are shown at shows. He then likened variation in nature to the selective intentions of human beings. It has a rhyme and reason if not a purpose we can discover. His argument for evolution continued:

…(summarized by the great biologist Ernst Mayr as follows:) First, species have great fertility. They make more offspring than can grow to adulthood. Second, populations remain roughly the same size, with modest fluctuations. Third, food resources are limited, but are relatively constant most of the time. From these three observations it may be inferred that in such an environment there will be a struggle for survival among individuals. Fourth, in sexually reproducing species, generally no two individuals are identical. Variation is rampant. And fifth, much of this variation is heritable. From this it may be inferred: In a world of stable populations where each individual must struggle to survive, those with the "best" characteristics will be more likely to survive, and those desirable traits will be passed to their offspring. These advantageous characteristics are inherited by following generations, becoming dominant among the population through time (Fig. 2). This is natural selection. It may be further inferred that natural selection, if carried far enough, makes changes in a population, eventually leading to new species.

The idea of organisms struggling for existence was a notion he got from reading the early 19th century political economist Thomas Malthus after he returned from his voyage, and that solidified in his mind the characteristic in existence that leads to variation and, eventually, to species development. Thus, Darwin posed that the fittest survive in a kind of natural selection, as species adapt to new life conditions brought on by climate change, the creation and destruction of the organism’s environment through natural occurrences, like the recent tsunami or the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, all over millions and millions of years of adaptation to millions and millions of changes. Organisms adapt or die, become varied or extinct, and life evolves through inheritance. Early in the next century when the work of Darwin’s contemporary, Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel, was discovered - genetic inheritance, variation, and mutation - the evolutionary appearance of new species as a scientific explanation was complete.

* * * * *

There were two points upon which Darwin’s contemporaries challenged him. First, there could be no proof that species transmuted, that one species, an ape, could, even over a long period of time, turn into a human being. Darwin’s critics pointed to their domesticated cats, whose physical form had not varied in any way from the thousands of years old, mummified cats found when ancient Egyptian pyramids were discovered. And secondly, natural selection and natural evolution, even over millions of years, could not completely account for something as intricate in design as the human eye; nor could natural selection account for something as useless as a mole’s eye. His detractors pronounced that it was not possible for these things to have come about without a supernatural act of creation.

Though Darwin was for most of his life a confirmed theist, he became an agnostic later in life. However, his religious views were secondary to his passion, observing nature, recording his observations, and trying to reason these into a coherent, unified view of how life in its immense variation came about in such a manner that there is also shared characteristics throughout a great variety of species.

What is interesting to me is that in the nearly 150 years since Darwin’s publication of his findings and his theory, the small number who argue against evolution do so with scientific observations not dissimilar to the origin protests. Creation is too complex not to have a God-like intelligence behind it, thus “intelligent design”; and there is no observable evidence that species transmutate, creating new species out of old ones. It is interesting, too, that in the same span those in organized religion who see evolution as a threat, do so in ways that haven’t changed in 150 years either. Perhaps it is because orthodox religionists feel a responsibility to represent in their view of creation the stasis they claim is characteristic of the truth of religious doctrines!

Evolution as Darwin first avowed it threatens much of organized religion then, and now, Christianity and Judaism primarily, in two ways that cannot be reconciled with it: in the nature of God and of human being.

It was for millennia in the West that God was conceived of as Creator. A month ago in worship we discussed the many names of God; that is, the characteristics of God that have been attributed throughout the history of Western religion: the Merciful, the All-Knowing, the Lord, the Forgiving, among hundreds of others. Yet, in Western theological history, particularly since the high Middle Ages, the characteristic of Creator has, for many and especially for orthodoxy, been held as primary: Creator, the First Cause, the Supreme Being. As viewed by orthodoxy, God is something that itself was not created, could not have “come into being,” for in the eyes of orthodoxy, to be this is not to be self-sufficient. And the basis of divine power, or ultimate power, of all power, is self-sufficiency. And this is so because that which is not self-sufficient is dependent, deriving power from someplace else. And something not self-sufficient but dependent, is something not complete, let alone eternal. And whatever comes into being can “go out” of being as well. The God who is not the Creator, that is not self-sufficient but dependent, cannot be the Supreme Being, complete unto itself and eternal, knowing no beginning and no end. To orthodoxy, a god who does not possess these characteristics fully and first and foremost, cannot be God. So, to the orthodox, Darwin’s theory of evolving creation and natural selection maintained a view that to orthodoxy could be nothing but creation without a Creator.

And to the orthodox evolution offers an equally problematic view of human being. Even though to the orthodox human nature is essentially sinful and depraved, and in need of the atoning sacrifice of Christ crucified and resurrected, still human being is a special creation of the Creator because we have a unique purpose. Because of humanity’s capacity to be redeemed by Christ, God’s only begotten Son, whose sacrifice atoned for sin and whose resurrection redeemed from sin, humanity helps to complete God’s plan for creation. But, how can that plan be completed if men and women were descended from apes instead of having been created by God up from dust, as is portrayed in the second creation story in Genesis? The thought that human existence is connected in such a direct way to other creatures of this planet, the lower life forms, is too debasing and irreligious because it denies man’s place in God’s plan.

* * * * *

The first proclamation of this new revelation from the natural sciences through Darwin’s theory of evolution was from the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, New York. The Reverend Newton Mann was preaching. Soon other declarations of a new vision came from other Unitarian pulpits, including that occupied by the Rev. Minot Savage of the Third Unitarian Church of Chicago. Although not all, or even most Unitarian ministers were so enthusiastic in their embrace of evolution, by the earliest parts of the 20th century unto today it is accepted and preached, because as evolution had been expanded upon by new thinking and new discoveries, it remains the best set of propositions to account for the appearance of human being on this planet. It is good science, although the religious interpretation and understanding is as varied as species variation itself. But there is one thing that is clear.

Evolution threatens religious orthodoxy, especially Judaism and Christianity. It will always do so because evolution is incompatible with a self-sufficient and never changing, absolute Creator, and with humanity as a special creation in a divine plan of salvation through the atoning sacrifice of God’s only Son. If one perceives God as either wholly self-sufficient and thus, anything other is dependence that no self-respecting god would embody, then evolution cannot be true. If one perceives men and women to have been specially created by this self-sufficient, absolute Creator, in order to be saved by that same Creator from the incomplete nature the Creator created us as, then evolution cannot be true. In other words, measured by the doctrines of orthodoxy evolution cannot be held. This understanding derived from an observation of the natural world, is not a safe theological port, a religious passage complete, for orthodoxy or for any religious viewpoint. The theory of evolution is compatible with a view that the world and existence is on a voyage, on a journey, is changing and being shaped and reshaped as life is ever being launched towards tomorrow.

Evolution poses the world is a ship ever still on its passage out. And a religion that does not welcome that journey will not find its pulpit at the prow, but as a dragging anchor!

Suppose, then, God is not either self-sufficient or dependent and not God. Suppose there is a Spirit that moves amongst men and women and all creation that in each generation successively reveals creation’s interconnectedness. That we are in relation with one another and all the created order, in ever successively intricate ways that evolve ever more deeply in each new generation. That existence is itself on a journey with no destination that we can know for sure. But, that as this voyage continues, each generation creates new additions to the ship, to the world, and discovers new ways that the shipmates and all that lives and dies upon the ship, are interrelated. That existence is like a covenant, an unfolding and ever-deepening agreement arising within creation, and it is a particular kind of spiritual bond of affection, a Spirit amongst us if you will, that leads us to see creation in this way of deep mutuality. And it is human beings, arising out of this ever more complex existence, descending down upon the deck of the ship, that possess a unique place among the crew. We have been endowed with qualities like unto this Spirit that exists among life, in order for us to proclaim its presence as we see our deeper connections among ourselves and all creatures. Imagine we are not sailing alone, either individually or as a species. God is not some self-sufficient imaginary being that does need us or the world. God is seen and shown through an ultimate Mutuality, an ultimate Covenant of Being. There is a mutuality that characterizes creation and the natural world, which increases as the complexity of life increases and as time marches on. Evolution helps humanity to uncover this because it places human existence in the center of this Mutuality, as the creature able to look upon and shape in ever expanding ways, the connectedness of creation. Thus do we human beings proclaim and aim our efforts to enact a truth: There abides a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

AMEN.