Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, and is still causing furor today, particularly in the relationship between religion and science. As Unitarian Universalists, we strive for a foot in both worlds — allowing science to deepen our religious experiences and our religious experiences to deepen our understanding of science.

Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (February 11, 1842-August 13, 1936), wrote about this very struggle in his 1902 book, The Spark in the Clod: A Study in Evolution. This excerpt describes his take on the nature of truth, and how advances in science enhanced his understanding of God rather than diminishing it, in direct conflict with traditional religious thought at the time.

Rev. Sunderland, originally a Baptist minister, converted to Unitarianism and served churches in Massachusetts, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he also served as a Unitarian missionary for the American Unitarian Association. His full biography is here.

As with all historical material, you may want to mentally substitute gender-inclusive language.

from The Spark in the Clod: A Study in Evolution

by Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (February 11, 1842-August 13, 1936)

We have now before us, in brief, the two theories of the origin of the world, which present themselves to modern men asking for acceptance. Is there any question which one we must receive, if we are truth-loving, and care at all to have our beliefs based on realities?

And now we come to the important question of the relative religious influence and value of the two theories.

I know the fact that one is ancient and venerable, while the other is new, and especially the fact that one is contained in the Bible, while the other is not, may seem to give the greater religious claim to the theory of creation found in Genesis.

And yet is the claim necessarily valid? Has God no truth besides that which the Bible contains?Rather, if we are not atheists, must we say that all truth is of God, whether found on parchment or on stone; whether inscribed by pen held by human hand, or by wind and rain and ice and fire on mountain sides; whether written two thousand years ago in Palestine, or to-day on the face of the starry sky above our heads, or of the earth beneath our feet.

(Read on … )

Today is the birthday of Bobby Henderson, founder of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The what, you may ask?

In response to the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision in 2005 to require the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the state’s schools as an equal alternative to the science of evolution, Mr. Henderson wrote a very entertaining, and apropos, letter, insisting that the schools must also teach his version of the creation story, glorifying the Spaghedeity, since it seemed to him to be just as probable as the theory of “Intelligent Design.”

The Wikipedia writeup of the ensuing phenomenon is quite hilarious.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, Unitarian Universalism, today we explore the relationship between science and religion. Rev. Preston Moore, co-minister of the Williamsburg Unitarian Universalist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, gave this sermon this past Earth Day (PDF), in which he posits science in our Unitarian Universalist churches as a spiritual value, and Unitarian Universalism as uniquely poised to mediate the balance between the “holy work” of scientists and theologians alike:

Working at the Water’s Edge: Toward a Reunion of Science and Religion

worship service led by Reverend Preston Moore, Williamsburg Unitarian Universalists, April 22, 2007

A little over a hundred Aprils ago, a twenty-six year old clerk working in the Swiss Patent Office dashed off a whimsical, newsy letter to a friend. “Conrad!” the letter writer began, “What are you up to, you frozen whale, you smoked, dried, canned piece of soul?” After asking about the condition of Conrad’s soul, the letter writer brought his friend up to date on his somewhat eccentric hobby: theoretical science. Squeezed in alongside being a husband, a father, and a government worker, it seems he had found time to write a few science papers.

This chatty correspondence is still around for us to peruse because the writer was a guy named Albert Einstein. In one of those spare time science papers from 1905, he worked out the special theory of relativity, the foundation for work that transformed physics forever. I bring Einstein to church with me this morning because religion and science are acting like antagonists these days; and yet Einstein, who became the living symbol of science, was passionate about their interdependence.

He described the deep religious feelings of scientists this way — “a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection . . . It is beyond question closely akin,” he said, “to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages . . . [T]he cosmic religious experience,” he declared, “is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

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