Darwin, Science, and Spirituality

I find after Mary’s post a fitting place for my entry. Last year, Fort Worth Country Day School went through a fetish for Lee’s play Inherit the Wind. It was one of the entire upper school’s summer reading books, we had numerous forums that the student body attended about evolution and the play, and then the drama department was forced to put it on as the fall play. That upset me. We were scheduled to do Noise is Off!, which would have been a hilarious and fitting production for me to end my career on. However, we were stuck in the Scopes monkey trial. I was cast as “General Brady,” er… William Henry Harrison. The whole situation irked me for two reasons. First – our school had already beat Inherit the Wind into the ground. Secondly, because I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole thing. I kind of like to avoid the creationism / evolution topic whenever possible. I didn’t want to turn my back on unavoidable evidence. But at the same time, I didn’t want to “see evangelism as a ‘ball and chain’” (Bump 260).

In the past I have wrestled with science and my faith. They seem never to coincide. But recently, there have been all the more instances where science and spirituality can coexist quite nicely. It may seem silly, but even Inherit the Wind made me change around my views about some things. A main point in that book is that the “day” is not specified as 24 hours. It is merely a day. The climax of the play comes when Brady admits that the first “day” could span hundreds of millions of years. The town is shocked, and it seems the Bible has lost its credibility. However, I didn’t think either side lost here. Both sides made sense to me. There are so many theories and explanations circling around this issue that it is easy to find yourself lost in it. Intelligent design, pure creationism, strict Darwinism. I certainly don’t have the answer to this. But I think that the answer lies in unity. The most sensible answer seems to be a combination of them all. The camps of science and religion, preaching “God has designed the universe with specific purposes in mind” (Bump 260), don’t have to be separated. Unity has been the key in everything else. Unity should also be the answer in this case.