About 2 years ago the Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 to remove evolution, and the Big Bang theory as well, along with for good measure the concept of geological time and plate tectonics. Anything that conflicts with the idea that the world is older than the Bible says is no longer required knowledge in Kansas. The Kansas City Star reported that there was much rejoicing and that the evening began with a standing ovation for Linda Holloway, the chairwoman of the Kansas Board of Education. The main speaker, Phillip E. Johnson. a law professor who has written books debunking Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. saluted Holloway and the other "courageous people" on the state board who voted to remove questions from state tests about macro-evolution, the idea that one species evolved from another. Mini evolution: the idea that species can change over short periods of time is apparently still ok.

Well my first thought upon hearing that piece of news was to remember Dorothy and her magical travels from Kansas to the land of Oz. Only today she might say once she got back home: Oh, Toto this is Kansas but I don’t think we are in the real world any more! My second reaction was sadness and a certain amount of outrage. What will they take out next? The history of slavery because it is uncomfortable and make our forefathers look bad? How about the study of human anatomy? Anti religious no doubt ! After all the second story in Genesis states clearly that Eve was made from Adam’s rib but an examination of male and female skeletons will show that we have the exact same number of ribs. Should we stop looking at the evidence? What kind of looking glass world are we creating here?

Stephen Jay Gould writes: the new standards do not forbid the teaching of evolution, but the subject will no longer be included in statewide tests for evaluating students - a virtual guarantee, given the realities of education, that this central concept of biology will be diluted or eliminated, thus reducing courses to something like chemistry without the periodic table, or American history without Lincoln.

I agree with what he says. Yes one can certainly believe in God and evolution at the same time and in fact even the Pope has said as much. Thus Darwin is accepted by the Catholic church only about 100 years after his death, while poor Galileo had to wait more than 300 years for a similar privilege and apology. The headline in U.S. News & World Report said it all: Charles Darwin gets thrown out of school

But Kansas is only the latest battleground. There was the 1925 "monkey trial" of Tennessee substitute teacher John Scopes, who was convicted of teaching evolution. Scopes was vindicated by the Supreme Court as late as 1968. Two decades later, the justices ruled that teaching creationism violates the separation of church and state. Recently, antievolution groups have changed their tack: Instead of trying to get Genesis into the classroom, they're attempting to toss Darwin out. In the past four years, legislators in Texas, Ohio, New Hampshire, Washington, and Tennessee have sought, but failed, to challenge the primacy of teaching evolution. Alabama law now requires biology textbooks to have stickers on them labeling evolution a "controversial theory" and reminding students of the obvious: that no humans were around as witnesses when life first began appeared. Hopefully these stickers saying controversial will have the unintended effect of making students more interested, sort of like an x rating in the movies. The controversy over evolution is not supported by the majority of educators. Teachers find that most students have no problem maintaining their religious convictions while learning that life evolved over an estimated 3.9 billion years. No this Kansas decision was meant to satisfy or placate those who take the Bible utterly literally and insists on reading it not as a religious text but as a biology and history text book. The world is 9000 years old in their view and God sat in the garden of Eden and created all the creatures, great and small. Dinosaurs are said to have died in the great flood, I suppose because Noah couldn’t quite fit them in his ark. Not that I blame him, a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex would make any prolonged sea voyage rather difficult.

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking. But critical thinking is not what creationists are interested in. Don’t ask, don’t tell and that way we will keep our faith pure. But what kind of faith are we talking about if it will not stand up to examination and exposure to scientific theories and knowledge? What kind of faith is it that will make of God less than man? Why could God’s creation not work through the process of evolution?

As Stephen Jay Gould points out in no other Western country is the teaching of evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French, German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital. No one looking at the physical record would determine that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, that fossils represent the creatures drowned in Noah's flood and so on. The only way those notions would even occur to you is if you considered the Bible an unerring historical document. Yet if you repeat a lie often enough it will become to some an accepted truth. The Topeka Capital-Journal asserted that "creationism is as good a hypothesis as any."

Why is this battle still going on? What are the deeper issues here? Certainly it has a lot to do with who we think we are. I recall a cartoon where a Michelangelo type God with a long white beard is standing on a cloud, brow wrinkled, deep in thought. A bright eyed angel next to him exclaims: I’ve got it! You don’t have to make an entirely new model. Just remodel the monkey! If we accept evolutionary theories, if we realize how close we are genetically to our nearest relative the chimpanzee, then we must accept our relative insignificance in the great web of life. Our self importance has suffered yet another blow. First we thought, before Galileo, that the sun and all the stars evolved around us, then we were told by Darwin that we evolved from one celled amoebae and other slimy crawling and in Victorian eyes, inferior and disgusting creatures. I can hear the debate at the time of Darwin: Really can you imagine us fine gentlemen in top hats related to a slug?

Considering what some of these fine gentlemen did, such as the slave trade, perhaps it should be the slugs or the monkeys that were offended. No chimpanzee ever invented the atom bomb. No gorilla had to worry about gun laws. Ultimately how we feel about evolution has to do with whether we need an exaggerated view of our own importance or not. And it has a lot to do with our image of God. Trust plays a part too. Can we, are we willing, to take a leap of faith and trust life and the mystery beyond life knowing we will never have all the answers? Or do we want to know for sure about everything? Even if we have to deny our own questions, our own doubts, the facts that do not fit? Who has greater faith, an ardent evolutionist who still believe in God or a creationist who must deny evidence to believe?

If you take away evolution because it's a theory, you can't teach science," said Steve Angel, a chemistry professor who is the president of the Auburn-Washburn school board in Topeka and a member of the committee of experts whose standards were rewritten by the state board. "All of science is theory." Theories are meant to be tested, examined, questioned and evolved. Science is ideally at least self correcting. Theories can be changed. Religion to me should be self correcting too. Our concept of God and/or the ultimate reality should evolve as well. I consider myself a religious evolutionist. As was Charles Darwin himself.

I find no conflict between my religion and evolution, on the contrary I find they complement each other. I may not feel a particular kinship to slugs but I recognize their place in the great and wonderfully variegated web of all existence. The Universe is so immense, so wondrous, so far beyond our understanding as of yet, that it is impossible for me not to feel immense awe.

Now some of you may be surprised to hear that Darwin was religious. But then much misinformation has been given out about him and his theories have been misused to validate such injustices racial inequality and social inequality. In fact he was opposed to slavery and knew only too well that his ideas would be condemned by the upper middle class to which he belonged because his theories questioned the established order of things. In Darwin, the Life of a Tormented Evolutionist Adrian Desmond and James Moore paints a vivid picture of man who only accepted his theory of the origin of the species because the evidence forced him to.

One of Charles Darwin’s grandfathers, the pottery patriarch Josiah Wedgewood was a deeply religious Unitarian. The other grandfather, Erasmus, was an ardent freethinker who called those beliefs: "A featherbed to catch a falling Christian." He asked: Did not the priestess of Nature explain all things? Josiah's Christianity discarded the Trinity, original sin and made it a religion of universal happiness in this life and the next. The Church of England found this dangerous, with God ordaining happiness for everyone impartially, without regard for rank or ritual. It was damnable too. If nature and culture were self-evolving, if the clergy could not point to miraculously created species as a sign of His power operating from above, the Church's legitimacy was undermined. The logic was stark - even if it was rarely spelled out. The day people accepted that nature and society evolved unaided, the Church would crash, the moral fabric of society would be torn apart, and civilized man would return to savagery. So the few evolutionists kept their heads down. They were usually inspired by the revolutionary French, and were often radical democrats wanting to open up society.

For Joseph Priestley who was a scientist and a Unitarian minister, immortal souls did not exist any more than immaterial 'spirits' did in chemistry. God's benevolence is expressed in a wholly material world, where the laws of nature hold sway and everything has a physical cause. Not all Unitarians went so far as to deny a soul however.

Josiah Wedgwood had appointed a Unitarian minister to teach in his school. Robert (Charles's father) was educated here, as were Susannah (Charles's mother). The name of Darwin was already associated with subversive atheism when Charles was born and wanting a better future for their son they had him baptized Anglican. Without such membership he could not in those days enter the universities or hold any public office. But Susannah stood quietly by her heritage. She took the children on Sundays to the Unitarian chapel that stood on the site of Shrewsbury's first meeting house for Dissenters, which had been razed by an Anglican mob a century before.

Thus Charles Darwin grew up in a bed of dissenters, but with a very respectable facade. After a wild youth his father laid down the law, Charles was going to increase the family’s respectability and become an Anglican clergyman. It was in the seminary that he discovered his real passion and love for: beetles. He was so enthused with the species that he even took his girl friend on beetle hunts.

It was after his passion for beetles and for science became and his family had given up on him ever becoming an Anglican clergyman that he got the offer to accompany Capt. Robert FitzRoy on his two-year survey of coastal South America aboard the now famous vessel The Beagle. .

Upon his return as he studied his notes and worked hard for years on his first book The Origin of the Species he soon realized the consequences of his discoveries. Plagued by illness, marked by the tragic deaths of two of his children he kept on working toward the inevitable conclusion: 'Man - wonderful Man' must collapse into nature's cauldron. Man, 'with divine face, turned towards heaven,' he possesses some of the same general instincts, feelings as animals.'

The theory of evolution had been born and the world had changed forever. And the debate has not changed much since Darwin’s time as far as the religious implications go.

In Skeptics and True Believers Chet Raymo writes:

Raymo’s views echo mine. We are stardust and infinity. We look up at the cosmos with our human eyes and shiver a little in the eternal dark. But life warms us like a flame that dances on the face of creation, never still, infinitely creative. God to me is the creative force for good that fuels the flame. We humans have been given infinite curiosity and the ability to ask the difficult questions like: Why are we here? Are we are perhaps the senses and conscience of this part of the universe, a way in which the cosmos becomes aware of itself? Why can we enjoy beauty? Why do we create it?

Chet Raymor writes these words with which I will close my sermon: Even more astonishing than the billions of galaxies photographed by the Hubble telescope are those few pounds of meat--our brains--that are able to construct such a universe of faint light and hold it before the mind's eye, live in it, revel in it, praise it, wonder what it means. The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich asked, "What is the use of praying if God does not answer?" In that wonderful image of more than 1,000,000,000 galaxies, caught by a magnificent instrument lofted into space by a questioning creature, God answers