The Jour­nal World asked reli­gious lead­ers: Why is there so much con­tro­ver­sy about evo­lu­tion?:

Pow­er­ful peo­ple threat­ened by changes of mod­ern life

John Brew­er, mem­ber of the Uni­tar­i­an Fel­low­ship of Lawrence, 1263 N. 1100 Road:

As a Uni­tar­i­an Uni­ver­sal­ist, I am not mys­ti­fied by the reopen­ing of the evo­lu­tion debate.

The oppo­si­tion to the rev­e­la­tion of evo­lu­tion has tak­en its place along­side resis­tance to the Coper­ni­can solar sys­tem, the rise of the mid­dle class, lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy, psy­cho­analy­sis, women in the job mar­ket, civ­il rights for minori­ties, rock music, post-mod­ernist lit­er­ary the­o­ry and envi­ron­men­tal­ism — none of which were proph­e­sied or sanc­tioned by Scripture.

These are only a few of the emerg­ing aspects of mod­ern life that have threat­ened the secu­ri­ty of groups of pow­er­ful peo­ple through the ages.

Today, some of their descen­dants feel con­fi­dent that in a con­ser­v­a­tive state like Kansas, they can win at least a sym­bol­ic vic­to­ry against mod­ernism by attach­ing stick­ers of skep­ti­cism to biol­o­gy text­books or by insist­ing that the notion of “intel­li­gent design” is ground­ed in the sci­en­tif­ic method.

That is their priv­i­lege in a democracy.

The rest of us meet the chal­lenge of new dis­cov­er­ies as best we can, even though those dis­cov­er­ies may (like quan­tum physics for me) threat­en our own assump­tions about reality.

Reli­gious doc­trines wed­ded to yes­ter­day’s nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy do not make good ambas­sadors for faith.

Aris­to­tle wrote, “Man by nature desires to know.”

Last week, I heard evan­ge­list Bil­ly Gra­ham — whose ded­i­ca­tion and sin­cer­i­ty I have long admired — quot­ed on the radio, say­ing, “Most peo­ple want to know the truth.”

With friends like that in our camp, Uni­tar­i­an Uni­ver­sal­ists are con­fi­dent Kansas will sur­vive the lat­est round of evo­lu­tion bashing.

Send e‑mail to John Brew­er at jbrewer@sunflower.com.

Oppo­nents dis­like sug­gest­ed link of ani­mals, humans

The Rev. Angela Lowe, board cer­ti­fied chap­lain, Lawrence Memo­r­i­al Hospital:

For those who view nature as gov­erned by God, evo­lu­tion is no threat. The con­tro­ver­sy and mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion take place when peo­ple are not will­ing to embrace sci­ence as a tool for under­stand­ing the divine plan of cre­ation. We don’t have to choose between the­ol­o­gy and sci­ence. The­ol­o­gy has the pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty of explain­ing the nature of God. Sci­ence has its pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty in explain­ing the world of nature. Dis­cus­sions regard­ing evo­lu­tion will depend on how this cre­ative con­cept is defined or understood.

A cen­tral bib­li­cal con­vic­tion is that God is the cre­ator of all of cre­ation. Gen­e­sis 1–2:4 is a litur­gi­cal text and shows the move­ment from less devel­oped to more com­plex forms of life. This account does not mean a com­plete world emerged in six 24-hour days, yet a process began that ful­filled God’s pur­pose and the emer­gence of var­i­ous forms of life. By faith, we under­stand that the world was pre­pared by a tri­une God, so that what is seen was made from things not visible.

Some of the oppo­si­tion to the­o­ries of evo­lu­tion is the com­mon­al­i­ty sug­gest­ed between ani­mals and humans. When DNA is stud­ied, humans have genet­ic links to the rest of cre­ation. Human and chim­panzee gene sequences have about a 98 per­cent match-up.

Sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence has dis­cov­ered that around 160,000 years ago, a small pop­u­la­tion of mod­ern-look­ing peo­ple lived along the shore of the Red Sea. Could this group have been used to make the first real humans? Could they have been the clay mold­ed by the creator?

Our com­mon­al­i­ty with the anthro­poids should not shame us. We are not acci­dents in the evo­lu­tion­ary process. Some­body big­ger than you and I made us in the image of God, with a soul that can rea­son and a heart that can be a com­pan­ion with our maker.

(My empha­sis.)

One thing that gets tricky in the the­o­log­i­cal debates is whether God ever weights the dice? Are seem­ing­ly ran­dom events ever pushed one way to give the good guy an advan­tage, or to achieve a fore-ordained result?

To answer that requires a deep­er under­stand­ing of the book of Job than any liv­ing per­son can ever claim to have had. If God rigged the game to ensure the evo­lu­tion of human­i­ty, why not inter­vene to help Job, rather than pun­ish­ing him need­less­ly. This ques­tion is not far from Jesus’s query from the cross, “My God, My God, why hast thou for­sak­en me?” I won’t pre­tend to have an answer to these questions.

Indeed, no sci­en­tist speak­ing as a sci­en­tist would ever make a firm asser­tion on such ques­tions. As a per­son of faith, peo­ple resolve the chal­lenges and seem­ing con­tra­dic­tions of Job in their own way.

For now, that’s all I want to say. When I get a chance, I want to return to Job, because I think I would under­stand all the the­ol­o­gy I care to if I could explain what hap­pened to Job.