READING

Our reading this morning comes from The Universe Story, written by two authors, Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, and Thomas Berry, a passionist priest and theologian.

“As industrial humans multiplied into the billions to become the most numerous of all of Earth’s complex organisms, as they decisively inserted themselves in the ecosystem communities throughout the planet, drastically reducing Earth’s diversity and channeling the majority of the Gross Earth Product into human social systems, a momentous change in human consciousness was in process.

”Humans discovered that the universe as a whole is not simply a background, not simply an existing place, the universe itself is a developing community of beings. Humans discovered by empirical investigation that they were participants in this fifteen-billion-year sequence of transformations that had eventuated into the complex functioning Earth.

“A sustained and even violent assault by western intelligence upon the universe, through the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Buffon, Lamarck, Hutton, Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, Herschel, Curie, Hubble, Planck, Einstein, and the entire modern scientific enterprise, had brought forth a radically new understanding of the universe, not simply as a cosmos, but as a cosmogenesis, a developing community, one with an important role for the human.

”In the midst of the process. over fifteen-billion years the universe brought forth stars, galaxies, supernovas, the first cells, … the proliferation of the animals and plants, and the conscious self-awareness that has come to permeate so thickly the many components of the Earth community.

”The future of Earth’s community rests in significant ways upon the decisions to be made by humans who have inserted themselves so deeply into even the genetic codes of Earth‘s process.”

So ends the reading.

PRAYER

Creative and Infinite Spirit, may our hearts be lightened this morning with the good we share by being together in community. May we feel the warmth of those around us, and offer our own warmth, our own loving hearts back in return.

Where there is pain, may we find healing and solace. Where there is joy, may we find an abundance of sharing, the offer of smiles to others and gratitude.

Where there is turmoil, may we find forgiveness, strength and comfort. Where there is peace, may we find calm and the ability to share and bring that peaceful spirit to others. Teach us ever to be grateful for the wondrous gift of life and love. May the lightness of this morning, the inner joy of being with one another and the inner light within our own hearts, remain with us and sustain us in the week ahead.

AMEN

SERMON

In the ever-continuing battle between creationism (now called intelligent design) and evolution, we know who the players are. Intelligent design is proposed by essentially conservative Christians who don’t want their Genesis Creation story in the Bible upset by science; and evolution is the broad name for the biological lens used by scientists trying to understand the development of life on earth.

What has become painfully obvious in the last 50 years or so, is that there is no credible way to hold in mind a creation story that only gives us 3,000 to 4,000 years of history to work with - whatever your view of god or humankind may be.

The Genesis creation story is simply not science, and as Karen Armstrong mentions in her book, A Brief History of Myth, which I used in last Sunday’s discussion of the loss of the mythic imagination, it’s not even good religion to insist upon creationism being literally true.

But what’s also happened in the last 20 years, or so, is a whole new way to take the amazing knowledge that science has brought us through evolution and seriously discuss creating a new religious outlook, one based upon “the wonder of evolution.” As our denominational magazine, the UU World, suggested in its recent spring addition - a new story, not really a myth, like previous religious stories, because this story is grounded in science and real time.

The Universe Story, the book I used for this morning’s reading, written in 1992, is considered that movement’s seminal “sacred text.” The UU World article is about a Unitarian Universalist couple, Michael Dowd, a minister, and Connie Barlow, a scientist, who go around the country, trying to spread this new evolutionary gospel.

They made the decision to become nomadic scientific storytellers after 9-11 because they were afraid no one was understanding, in all the controversy between creationism and evolution, the deeper and profound developments of science. Their van has on it a Darwin fish bumper sticker kissing a Christian fish bumper sticker.

I don’t know if their message is truly another religion, but their scientific observations, as well as those of Swimme and Berry in The Universe Story, can, at the very least, help us begin to understand a more complete and deeper perspective on what science really has to say about creation and humanity’s place in that creation.

First, today, I will give you a sense of what the universe story is, what science tells us, so far, about the creation of the universe, and then, I will suggest what I and the proponents of this new religious view of science believe are some significant spiritual or religious conclusions we could draw from this perspective.

The conclusions, briefly are:

1. The universe is expanding and filled with mind-boggling creative and destructive forces.

2. We are part of that universe. We are literally made of stardust and so, the universe also is part of us.

3. The interconnected web of all existence is almost an understatement, and our role in the web is crucial and connected -- literally, scientifically, and spiritually -- to all other aspects of life and the web.

4. Creative force may indeed be god, and we are of that god, and it may not be arbitrary.

First, the story. Swimme and Berry summarize it well in their prologue, so I will be quoting extensively from it, with a few asides, for the next few minutes. It -- everything we know or could imagine, began 15 billion years ago,

“In a great flash, the universe blazed forth into being (sometimes called the big bang). In each drop of existence a primordial energy blazed with an intensity never to be equaled again. Thick with its power, the universe billowed out in every direction so that the elementary particles could stabilize, enabling the first atomic beings of hydrogen and helium to emerge.”

Hydrogen, as Dowd and Barlow say, was the very first building block that would eventually lead to life on this planet, and the hydrogen of water, and all the water we carry in our bodies, and all the water that is in all of life, is a descendant from the first hydrogen that emerged fairly quickly as the universe became transparent after the big bang. The emerging universe also brought with it, or quickly developed, all the physical forces that we know -- gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and electromagnetic,

“A billion years of uninterrupted night enabled the universe to prepare itself for its next macrocosmic transfiguration. In the depths of its silence the universe shuddered with the immense creativity necessary to fashion the galaxies -- and there are an estimated 50 to 100 billion galaxies, with our Milky Way being only one of them.”

It’s hard to get our minds around the wonder of these numbers. This is a picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The caption reads:

“Galaxies Across Billions of Years: humankind’s deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe. Representing a narrow keyhole view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, this Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Within this small field, considered representative of the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe, are a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies in various stages of development.

“Some of the galaxies probably date back to the beginning of the universe, [here it says] 12 to 13 billion years ago. These gigantic galaxy structures pin wheeled through the emptiness of space and swept up all the hydrogen and helium into self-organizing systems, and clusters of systems, and clusters of clusters of systems. Each galaxy presented its unique form to the universe. Each contained its own internal dynamics. Each brought forth from its own materials billions upon billions of primal stars.”

There are truly more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

“The most brilliant stars rushed through their natural sequence of transformations and exploded in colossal supernovas that matched a billion stars in luminosity …. New stars formed out of the materials created in the billion-year processes of stellar nucleosythesis. These second generation stars were richer and more complex because they now contained carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the 100 elements that we know.

“Some five billion years after the beginning of time, the star Tiamet emerged in our spiral galaxy. Tiamet knit together wonders in its fiery belly, and then sacrificed itself, carving its body in a supernova explosion that dispersed this new elemental power in all directions, so that the adventure might deepen.

“Then, five billion years ago, sfter the universe had expanded and developed for 10 billion years, our Milky Way galaxy shocked a peacefully drifting cloud of Tiamet’s remnants into giving birth to ten thousand new stars …. One of which was our Sun, which showed its own self-organizing ability, blasting off nearly all the clouds of elements hovering about it, and spinning the rest into a multi-banded disc of matter out of which arose the bonded system of Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and perhaps, now we know, other bodies.

“On Earth, 600 million years ago, multicultural organisms arose, including corals, worms, insects, clams, starfish, sponges, spiders, vertebrates and leeches. Animals followed plants onto land, which had developed wood cells and the possibility of covering the continents with trees. But then, 67 million years ago, there were astronomical collisions with the earth, and the dinosaurs died out and all then existing life had to adapt or perish.

“When mammals first came upon the earth, 200 million years ago, they developed emotional sensitivity, and then, only 4 million years ago, in Africa, the first human forms are believed to have stood up on just two limbs and began using their hands. Then 20 thousand years ago, through its human element, entered conscious self awareness of the patterns of seeds, and seasons, and the primordial rhythms of the universe.

“From here, humans learned to develop a secure food supply, and the first Neolithic villages appeared 10,000 years ago -- Jericho, Catal Huyuk and Hassuna, The most radical social transformation ever to occur in the human venture.”

And so, as most of you know, human history began through all its ages and eras up to the present time. Well, so what? First, the universe is ever expanding and filled with mind-boggling creative and destructive forces, even now a giant, black hole plasma could be hurdling toward us, and we would be wiped out in less than the blink of an eye, and not even be a blip to the plasma force.

Edwin Powell Hubble provided us in 1929 convincing astronomical evidence that we are living in an expanding universe. And once this had been established and the background radiation of the universe from its earlier stages had been detected, then all the knowledge we now have came together quickly, and we know it is only the beginning of what we will continue to learn.

Charles Darwin -- as we learned a few Sundays back, a Unitarian, deserves some credit for the scientific imagination which started us on this path of knowledge. According to Swimme and Berry,

“Perhaps the greatest gift Darwin gave to humanity was the opportunity to see in all of life an ongoing, intelligent, creative drama, rather than thinking of a form of life as having been put on earth in a fixed form at the beginning of time, we now see each form of life arising

“Out of the Great Adventure. the ouzel, which Darwin observed, tasted something in the aquatic life that drew it in, that convinced it to pursue that world. So too, the primeval whale when it was still land bound. The great ocean waves curled under the spindrift, crashed into sea foam and promised something. Promised something irresistible, food yes, and another day under the sun, yes, but also life itself, life and its glorious adventure.”

Until Darwin, and other scientists and thinkers, too, humans operated under the ancient Greek philosophy. In western tradition, at least, that eadem sunt eadem semper, as Lucretius wrote, “The same things are ever the same.” In ancient creation stories, written in mythic time, told in a thousand different ways by a thousand different peoples, the universe was simply there, and the basic movement of the universe was perceived as an ever-renewing seasonal cycle, an eternal cycle, without beginning or end.

Now, we know there was some kind of beginning and the wonder of how exhaustively long life has been in a developing, ever changing, ever creative, even violent, process. This is a real story told in real, though still almost unimaginable, time. We are part of this universe. We are literally made of its stardust, of the atoms that generated from the beginning of time. And so the universe also is part of us. This point of view, that we are part of the universe and able to witness that creation, gives life monumental meaning.

We are literally here to witness creation. We may even be considered, by some, to be god’s eyes. We are able to look out on what has happened to the universe over the last 15 billion years. We may not be alone in the hugeness of the universe, but we certainly are among those who can observe and witness. And, we aren’t just separate witnesses. We are part of all that is.

As Swimme and Berry poetically observe:

“The truth of the Milky Way galaxy cannot be realized by restricting our attention to its early components, hydrogen and helium. That will tell us tremendously important things about the Milky Way, but unless we also reflect on the fact that the Milky Way in its later modes of being is capable of thinking and feeling and creating (through the development of humans), we are failing to confront the galaxy as it is.

“To speak of a Milky Way that does not have the inherent powers to recombine into a form capable of inner feelings is to speak of an abstract Milky Way, one that has no existence in reality. In this universe the Milky Way expresses its inner depths in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, for Emily Dickinson is a dimension of the galaxy’s development.

“If we can say with assurance that Emily Dickinson is composed of the stuff of the Milky Way, we need to say with equal assurance that Emily Dickinson in her person and in her poetry activates an inner dimension of the Milky Way.”

So, each of us reflects the whole of the universe and we expand it or contract it based upon our actions and inactions. We add back or we take away. We observe the universe, we are it. We feel it, and we are its feelings. In the most profound way that humanity has ever been able to express the existence of all life force -- be that god, or Allah, or Brahmin, or mother earth. We learn that this force is the universe and that the universe is us.

So, the interconnected web of all existence is almost an understatement, and our role in the web is crucial and connected -- literally, scientifically, and spiritually, to all other aspects of life and the web. We are the carriers of the story and we are the witnesses to life on Earth and in the universe …. We are the eyes and mind of “god,” of the universe, and we connect everything to everything else.

The fabric of the universe is infinite as well, but because we touch our part, we are touching that infinity. As Annie Dillard writes:

“It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.”

From an ecological point of view, we must decide if we are part of the earth, and it of us; part of the universe, and it of us in order to truly care for it, sustain it, clean it, be good stewards of it -- because it is us. As British biologist Julian Huxley said, “We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.” Or, as Connie Barlow teaches children, holding up the “Big Blue Marble” picture of the earth taken by the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, our billion-year-old earth has now evolved to the point that it can send a piece of itself out to look back and say, “Whoa. This is who I am.”

And finally, something that I am always interested in - this creative force that is the background noise of the universe may indeed be god, and in a sense we are that god, and perhaps god it is not arbitrary in the big sense. This is what Stephen Hawking says in Black Holes and Baby Universes:

“I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time, at a big bang. But there’s another kind of time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end. This would mean that the way the universe began would be determined by the laws of physics. One wouldn’t have to say that God chose to set the universe going in some arbitrary way that we couldn’t understand. It says nothing about whether or not god exists --- Just that God is not arbitrary.”

In this way, god or Allah or Brahmin or Buddha mind, would be the laws of the universe, the ever evolving, complex, mysterious, perhaps unfathomable, infinite laws - perhaps gravity itself. What the concept of evolution teaches us when moved to the scale of the universe is huge - everything is in constant motion, ever developing, with new things emerging. The world is not static; life is not static; we are not static, and everything is connected.

An observer of nature and the adaptations of birds and beetles and animals, Darwin saw this on a small scale, and realized that our earth life appeared to be evolving. Then the study of sediments and the fossil record showed that life had indeed been developing for 600 million years. And now we know that the universe, itself, also has been evolving for 15 billion years. This is a deep scientific story, which is true (and will only get truer as we learn more and more), but of mythic, nearly infinite proportion.

We can view this through either end of the prism. We can consider ourselves and all of life on this planet so infinitesimally small and our lives so incredibly brief that nothing we do will matter and nothing we have accomplished will matter; or, we can look through the other end of the prism and see that we are the witnesses to it all. Life that has developed into consciousness and awareness to explore and understand what has happened in the universe.

And we may find, too, as science fiction has long imagined, that there are other life forms out there, too, somewhere in those 50 to 100 billion galaxies, also exploring and witnessing … with some of them perhaps having developed something that is even higher than self-aware consciousness.

It has taken me two years of thinking to write about this. I heard Dowd and Barlow present a weekend seminar to our minister’s group two years ago on all these theories. I bought at least 10 books and have perused, skimmed and read. I have trouble thinking of this as a new religion, but I do see how science has really overcome and passed religious thought with its unbelievable complexity.

Perhaps the scientific story of the universe should be our new story. Perhaps it would give us a new vision. Myth and religion are supposed to be salutatory, giving us a prescription on how to live and what is required to be a good person. The aim of the universe is still in question, but as Hawkings says,

“Perhaps it’s not arbitrary; perhaps its creativity is by and large a good and positive force, perhaps we are more than just minute specks of dust, that we are indeed witnesses to creation.”

More than ever, I know, at my most human, conscious, spiritual level, that life, itself, is an absolute miracle, and that all I know is now and what I do matters now.