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When people sit down to discuss intelligent design everyone seems to have a different definition for it. Is it political? Religious? Scientific? Is it about God or isn’t it?

Depending on where you sit at the table, it’s about all of these things.

Intelligent design as a theoretical concept provides a lens for seeing patterns and meaning in the world in which we live. Intelligent design as a scientific construct attempts to use science to show these patterns to be the work of a supernatural and intelligent designer – for all intents and purposes. God.

However, scientists, philosophers and theorists who use the phrase "intelligent design don’t use the "G" word¾ at least, not when they’re describing science. Intelligent design¾ as-science is often in direct conflict with mainstream scientists’ insistence that ID is religion masquerading as science.

One reason Dawkins has become perhaps the best-known popularizer of science in the English language is his precision – his precise understanding of biology (especially evolution), the precise way in which he transmutes that knowledge into the public idiom, and the precise manner in which he builds an argument, organizes an essay, or demolishes the wobbly logic of a rival in debate. . . .

There is nothing affected or dainty or quaint about the way Dawkins communicates science. He has a naturalist’s love of animal behavior, a theorist’s love of bold thought, a writer’s love of the well-turned phrase. All those things make him a pleasure to read. But Dawkins is no mere retailer of cute animal tales. Whether discussing the territorial behavior of stickle-back fish in The Selfish Gene or the behavior of elephant birds in The Ancester’s Tale, he sands and shapes each anecdote with the loving care of a medieval stonemason working on a cathedral. In Dawkins universe, this craftsmanship serves to embellish the edifice of evolution – enhancing not only its beauty but its solidity as a soaring monument to human reason.

That monument has come under fierce attack these days – from postmodernists (to whom truth is subjective and cultural), from creationists (to whom truth is biblical), and from religion in general (where faith is often seen to compete with reason as the fount of ultimate answers).

Most of us are aware that, during the past few months, a school board in Pennsylvania, in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, placed itself at the center of intense debate about Evolution and Intelligent Design. Of course, on November 8th, four days after the trial, the town voted out the school board members who brought the idea of "intelligent design" into the science curriculum, but Judge John E. Jones III’s decision, that teaching "intelligent design" brings religion into the schools inappropriately will probably not be the end of the story. As the Clarence Darrow character (Henry Drummond) notes at the end of "Inherit the Wind," a play about the Scopes trial, "You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you?" The human monument of evolution continues to be attacked.

This was not the first time that this debate had come before the courts, but most times it has been discussed tangentially. Previous instances of avoidance of the depth of possible debate are outlined in The New Yorker: December 5, 2005, "Darwin in the Dock":

Whether we are open to the science of this debate of Intelligent Design versus Evolution, it is part of the much larger "culture war," so named by those who wish to polarize this nation and push us apart, rather than bring us together with reasoned and spirited debate about the issues of deepest import to us as concerned citizens. It evokes emotional response in the name of science. But is it about science or religion - or control?

I hope today we may expand our thinking about the struggles between religion and science through examining – as briefly as possible in the time we have – some history of the controversy, some definitions of the issues to hand, and a call for us to get back into the business of speaking out, if not theologically, a least, spiritually and religiously.

Those who espouse the concepts of Intelligent Design harken back to some heavy hitters in the areas of cosmology. They may begin with Aristotle arguing in 350 B.C.E. "that there may be purpose present in nature, although we are ignorant of it." (S&T News, November 2005, p. 28. They quote him, "It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating." (Ibid.) This becomes the basis for the notion that a God is behind creation.

Jump ahead to 1273, when Thomas Aquinas completed his Summa Theologica, incorporating Aristotle’s concept of purpose into Christian theology, arguing that an understanding of purpose is an essential part of a full explanation for natural phenomena and that God is behind all of it.

Then in 1759, Voltaire rebelled against this line of thinking, especially in Candide, in which he ridicules the notion that there are divine purposes behind natural disasters like earthquakes. Of course, televangelist Pat Robertson has repeatedly taken the opposite tack, asserting that natural disasters are God’s vengeance upon sinful cities and peoples: a commonly stated Christian viewpoint, but certainly not Universalist.

In 1800, William Paley published his Natural Theology, in which he offers the notion of the "intelligent, unseen watchmaker" Creator. But it was Charles Darwin who set the whole world on edge in 1859 when he published his Origin of Species, offering compelling explanations for design appearing in nature without a necessary designer. Darwin, a British Unitarian who at 22 traveled from Plymouth, England on the HMS Beagle and studied natural phenomena around the globe for the ensuing five years, gathered evidence for a theory previously offered by his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had simply stated without evidence decades earlier (Jerry Adler, "Evolution of a Scientist," Newsweek, November 2005, p. 54.). Scientists began avid discussion, and theologians began to react to the idea that humanity may have evolved from lower creatures, even though the account of Genesis follows the order Darwin suggests quite closely.

In 1961, in The Genesis Flood, John C. Whitcomb, Jr., an Old Testament Scholar, and Henry M. Morris, a civil engineer, blended science and theology to create the idea of "scientific creationism." Thirty years later, U.C. Berkeley law professor and born-again Christian Phillip E. Johnson published Darwin on Trial, coining the term "intelligent design," though the concept was foreshadowed in Of Pandas and People: the Question of Biological Origins, by Percival Davis ad Dean Kenyon in 1989. (Science and Theology News, November 2005, pp. 28 – 29.)

Now I will make a short digression to a concept that has yet to surface in the debate, but that will, I suspect, be brought out by those who favor "intelligent design." Some of you will recall Victor Madsen’s service on "The Anthropic Principle" a few summers ago. As I understood it, and Victor shared his notes with me recently (Thank You, Victor!), this opens the conversation that the physics of the universe may lead one to believe that the development of the universe leads inevitably to intelligent carbon-based life forms. He defines the "anthropic principle": the connection among scientific facts, physical laws, values of physical constants, and the existence of a universe in which life can begin, develop, and exist. As a nuclear physicist, he notes that tiny deviations could have made this planet and life impossible. How close we come to not "being" at all, given the fineness of the variables that allow for life. He especially noted that Fred Hoyle used the anthropic principle to deduce the necessary coincidence that the thermal energy range of helium present in early stars is exactly the energy needed to create the possibility of carbon-based life forms, billions of years later. Further, the measure of the efficiency of the nuclear burn process and of the strength of the nuclear force shows how close the universe comes to being a very inhospitable place for life to evolve and survive – but this did not happen. As Paul Davies states in The Accidental Universe, "The universe must be such as to admit creation of observers within it at some stage." In other words, the universe is set up by the laws of physics to evolve intelligent life. Does this take us right back to "intelligent design?" I am not sure, but it does show that the process works to our advantage.

This brings me to an understanding that makes the most sense to me. I believe we need to get past ideas of God as a "being" that "does things" to the universe and move toward a view in which whatever is ultimate is process, not a being; process that includes a "divine lure toward greater intensity and harmony," as Alfred North Whitehead defines what I call "Source." Such Source is not omniscient, because process is always evolving and outcomes cannot be known. Such Source may know all possibilities, but not outcomes, because we all co-create the results through our choices, as well as chance that exists in process. This is not traditional theology, by any measure, but it is theology that outlines ultimacy in a way that is resonant with the best understanding of science, and that may evolve with new information and wisdom. It takes into account radical responsibility for our part in creation, while acknowledging our own limitations in creation and the variable of randomness. It is theology that allows – even requires - revelation to continue.

Which brings me to my conclusion: that revelation is not sealed but continues every day through science and through the search for meaning that has power to give shape to our experience, purpose to our existence, and motivation and moral energy to our human enterprises (Lloyd Averill, definition of religion). What is ultimate is process and our engagement with it. We need to continue our search for meaning both through science and the deep inner struggles of spirituality without reifying, deifying, or ossifying any of it. We need to stop using some results of the search as cause for polarization, and realize that understanding should be a source of connection. We need to recognize distinctions between science and theology without losing the value of each and both.

I believe that Unitarian Universalism, as a non-creedal, non-doctrinal process, is uniquely accepting of both science and spirituality ad offers communities in which we may build bridges rather than blow them up. We must cease our silence, our potentially arrogant aloofness from the conversations and bring our thoughtful, open, and hopeful voices into the discussion. If we are so comfortable with truth, why are we afraid of discussion? We may even wax poetic as does Joy Atinson in her poem, "The Womb of Stars:"

Now is the time for us to join the search actively, to engage as fully as our 19th century counterparts, to celebrate fully, with respect, with responsibility, and with relish for the process.

So Be it! Blessed Be!