The Evolutionary Accident

Wednesday, October 4, 2023

O Lord, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth!  Your glory is higher than the heavens.  You have taught children and infants to tell of your strength, silencing your enemies and all who oppose you.  When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—the moon and the stars you set in place— what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?  Yet you made them only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.  You gave them charge of everything you made, putting all things under their authority—the flocks and the herds and all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, and everything that swims the ocean currents.  O Lord, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth!  Psalm 8:1-9

In an Advent sermon (Advent - Facing God in the Face of Nothingness), Dr. Stanley Hauerwas[1] shared a message so desperately needed today in our world, stuffed-full of nihilism, emptiness, vanity, the sense of zero purpose and meaning.  Here is an excerpt from that message:

Christian humanism is not based on the presumption that our humanity is self-justifying.  Rather Christians are humanists because God showed up in Mary’s belly.  We are not an evolutionary accident.  We are not bubbles on the foam that coats a stormy sea.  We are God’s chosen people.  We have been given good work to do in a time when many no longer think there is good work.  What an extraordinary claim.  What extraordinary good news.

The Psalmist shares Dr. Hauerwas’ point, that God’s presence fills the earth, stretching even further than the heavens, to that unknown “above”.  The Psalmist also touches the nerve every human experiences:  WHY…why am I here; is there any purpose to my existence, or am I an extraordinary, albeit meaningless accident, produced by the chance collision of matter with a black hole?  Indeed, we all ask:  What are we…who, and what am I?

The opening remarks of Hauerwas’ sermon quotes William James, a late 19^th century Harvard professor and philosopher, who called the earth and its universe a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist.  Let there be no question about James; as an atheist, he would have us believe that God is simply the figment of imagination…we create Him because we need something to cling to in all the emptiness we inhabit, devoid of any sense of hope.

For William James the age of (so-called) enlightenment proclaims the light of the heavens is merely a scientific reflection of man’s glory, an ode to the human ability of observation.  According to divinely-revealed truth, the heavens and earth are God’s invitation to explore the wonder and majesty of God’s glory, not a reflection of man’s genius, produced by a clumsy-collision of atoms and anti-matter.  All of life, the very existence of humankind, and the deepest question of the ages calls to the deepest part of that unanswered question, who am I, and what am I doing here.  In Christ alone we find the truth:  you are my beloved, and in me you will know your worth and purpose.

For You Today 

Questions call for either hypothetical guesses, or reasoned evidence.  Both take a measure of faith.  So, did we make God in our own image to stifle an uneasiness with an unsatisfactory answer, or are we created in God’s image to be His glory?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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There are about 2,600 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road library.

Title Image(s) courtesy of Marci Joines Macha on Facebook                   

Images without citation are in public domain.  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT^©  

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[1] Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke Divinity School and Duke Law School.