Proud to Be Animals
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
January 8, 2006
Jane Thickstun

Reading

Today’s reading is from a paper written by my colleague Gordon Gibson last year for our UU minister’s study group.  The full title of the paper is “Charles Darwin: Grandson of Lunar Men, Progenitor of the Interdependent Web,” and it describes the Unitarian influences on Darwin and Darwin’s impact on Universalists and Unitarians. 

            Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in November, 1859.  In England, a number of Anglican clergy were among those who found it possible to embrace Darwin’s re-casting of the development of animate matter.  Many scientists had grave problems.  In at least some instances, it was the scientists rather than the clergy who had religious issues with Darwin.  One author writes, “it was a few theologians and many scientists who dismissed Darwinism and evolution . . . [O]ne is forced to conclude that Christian men untrained in science showed themselves considerably more open-minded than Christian men of science.”

            One of the British scientists who had trouble with Darwin’s theory at first was Charles Lyell.  Lyell had greatly advanced the understanding of geology, in 1830 publishing Principles of Geology in which he presented evidence for the earth being millions of years old, rather than thousands of years.  Darwin had become familiar with this book during his voyage on The Beagle, and during that time had embraced this new theory as a superior understanding of the phenomena that he was encountering.  Although Lyell was something of a revolutionary in geology, he was by inclination conservative biologically.  In Principles of Geology he had argued for successive creation of plants and animals in response to changing environments.  According to James Moore, Lyell deeply wished to preserve a separate creation of humankind, “time’s noblest offspring,” and foresaw that once transmutation of species was begun it would inevitably include humankind.  Initially encountering the ideas of . . . Darwin in the mid-1850's, Lyell began to wrestle more deeply and seriously with transmutation through natural selection.  By 1863 he had come around, but with respect to humankind his was a “yes, but . . .” acceptance of evolution.  James Moore says, “In the Antiquity of Man, published in 1863 Lyell abandoned non-progression and endorsed transmutation; but in referring to a higher ‘law of development’, which rendered natural selection a ‘subordinate agency’, and to the ‘intervention’ of ‘new and powerful causes’ associated with the ‘moral and intellectual faculties of the human race’, he merely demonstrated how far apart Darwin’s views were from his.”  At least Lyell was willing to be engaged with Darwin in an active back-and-forth correspondence about the data and their differing interpretations and understandings of the data. (p. 4-5)

Sermon

I recently saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the movie made from the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis.  In Narnia, the redeemer is a lion.  In Narnia, animals talk and are the equals of humans . . . and dwarfs and fauns and centaurs.  In Narnia, the animals are smart, and help save Narnia from the wicked White Witch. 

            Long ago there was a TV show called “Lassie” about a dog who always saved the day.  Lassie wasn’t just smart, she was able to do good for others, too.

            There are many examples in literature, film and television of what most pet owners know to be true – that animals are intelligent creatures, capable of loving.  The Chronicles of Narnia are considered children’s stories.  Lassie was too.  Perhaps it is only in children’s stories that animals interact with humans as their equals.  I’m having a hard time coming up with an example from literature aimed at adults that portrays a human/animal relationship at all.  Maybe the TV show, Mr. Ed – remember it? – about the talking horse? At least the relationship is between an animal and an adult.

            Animals are usually portrayed, if at all, as dumb brutes who exist to serve our needs.  But literature merely reflects the anthropocentrism that runs deep in our general culture.  Anthropocentrism is the view that human beings are the center of the universe, are superior to any other beings. 

            This point of view is so deeply ingrained that we don’t even talk about it.  When Copernicus discovered that the earth revolved around the sun and wasn’t in fact the center around which all else revolved, it took a long time before his view was accepted, and even longer for the church to accept it.  But that paradigm shift opened up a whole new way of understanding the universe that was beneficial because it was based in truth.  I believe we need a comparable paradigm shift to see that the universe does not revolve around our species any more than it does around our planet. 

            We’ve seen a lot in the news and in our editorial section lately about intelligent design, which is the latest incarnation of creationism, attempting to be more scientific.  Proponents of both intelligent design theory and creationism claim that evolution is atheistic and materialistic, and leaves no room for a creator god as they understand it.  Evolution holds that new species are created by natural selection acting on random mutations.  While creationism insists that the earth and everything on it was created literally as it is described in the Book of Genesis, including the 6000-year time frame, intelligent design allows for the antiquity of the earth, but insists that, while variations occur, whole species could not have been created by evolution.  Intelligent design holds that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some intelligent source.

            There’s a lot of passion behind the push to reject evolution.  What’s at stake is the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, and belief in a god that evolution renders unnecessary.  But intelligent design theory gives up a literal interpretation of the Bible by departing from the biblical time-frame. 

            I submit that what’s really at stake here, what really drives the passion, is an abhorrence at the thought that humans are descended from animals.  The really sacred belief that alternatives to evolution are put forth to defend and protect, is the belief that human beings were created “in the image of God,” created, according to Genesis, to “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:28) What really drives the passion to reject evolution is a need to feel separate from and superior to animals, a deep and unquestioned anthropomorphism.

            I recently read a paper written by my colleague Gordon Gibson for last year’s meeting of our UU minister’s study group.  The reading was taken from it.  I was intrigued to hear how Darwin’s theory of evolution was received when it was new, and the issues that came up then.

            In one example, Gibson says, “In the April, 1860 issue of the Universalist Quarterly, publication of Darwin’s work was noted.  Three years later, in the October, 1863 issue . . . there was a discussion of the book and its ideas.  The author of the review, identified only as “I.C.K.,” . . . was not happy with Darwin.”  Gibson quotes him as saying:  “It is humiliating.  If our fathers or grandfathers were murderers or idiots, we do not want the disgraceful fact continually thrown in our face; and if our great, great grandfathers were monkeys, lemurs, worms, and animalculae, we are ashamed of it.” (Gibson, p. 7)

            I myself find it shameful to put animals on a par with murderers, and what about the poor idiots?  Of course we wouldn’t call them that today, because we have learned to have more respect and compassion for our human brothers and sisters whose development is challenged.  And I should think the monkeys at least would take offense, if not the worms.  I wouldn’t dare to read that passage out loud in the jungles of Africa. 

            This is the most blatant expression I’ve heard of the anthropocentrism that can’t accept the theory of evolution.  And this from a Universalist, one of our enlightened brethren.  But even scholars had a hard time with it.  In the reading we learned that even Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, who shifted our view of the earth from thousands to millions of years old– even he had trouble accepting the idea that humans could have evolved from animals.  He is said to have “deeply wished to preserve a separate creation of humankind,” and had “a ‘yes, but . . .’ acceptance of evolution.” (Gibson, p. 5) 

            In spite of this early reluctance to embrace evolution, apparently more by scientists than clergy, it did come to be accepted in the scientific community.  As early as 1900, a Universalist minister in Minnesota wrote, “If the religious world denounced Copernicus and Galileo an Newton and Kepler, still more bitter – if possible – was its denunciation of Mr. Charles Darwin when he published his Origin of Species and Descent of Man.  In many a church, even to-day, this illustrious discoverer is accounted as a blasphemer, and his work identified with atheism and materialism.  But his work has triumphed.  There is hardly a respectable authority in science to-day that does not adopt and teach, in some form or other, the doctrine of evolution.” (Gibson, p. 9) This was 1900, 40 years after the publication of Origin, and more than 100 years ago today.

            Unitarians and Universalists were mixed in their initial reception of Darwin’s theory.  But they might have had an easier time of it than some because of their liberal theology.  Universalist historian, Ernest Cassara wrote in 1959 that “from the time of Hosea Ballou’s A Treatise on Atonement ([in] 1805), Universalists had given up the idea of man’s fall and his innate depravity.  It was probably easier, therefore, for Universalists to conceive of man as having climbed from low beginnings than as having slipped from the state of perfection.” (Gibson, p. 8-9) Of course, the Unitarians also rejected the doctrine of original sin, so the same would be true of them.

            The same Minnesota minister who wrote of the respectability of evolution in 1900 also wrote: “And we do hold that it is better and nobler, – better to have risen from cave and jungle than to have fallen from Eden; better to have developed from the animal than to have degenerated from the angel; better to have begun at the bottom and toiled to the top, than to have begun at the summit and rolled down to the base; better to have the golden age before us than behind us; better to be on the way to perfection, with hope and courage, than to be trudging discrowned and dishonored, away from perfection.” (p. 9)

            But if we Unitarian Universalists are able to avoid the pride that would require us to reject evolution, there is another way to anthropocentric pride that we need to watch out for: a way of seeing in evolution itself justification for our believing ourselves to be better than our animal kin.  It is common to look at evolution as a progression from lower to higher organisms, and it did in fact start with the most basic life form and develop increasingly complex forms of life over time.  But to see complex life forms as higher organisms is a value judgement.  Our view of evolution sometimes leads to a hubris, a dangerous pride, that we humans are the pinnacle, the top, the final destination of evolution.  To me, this is just one more way of saying we’re better than animals; one more way to justify our treating animals as means to our ends.

            But I believe animals have the same divine spark in them that we humans have.  They have inherent worth and dignity just as we do.  They deserve our respect, they deserve to be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to our ends.  We are not different in our basic nature.  We humans are animals.

            I don’t mean to suggest that we all need to become vegetarians and stop buying leather, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea.  Animals eat other animals.  We are no different.  A contemporary author, Joan McIntyre, describes how that doesn’t need to be an issue, and isn’t for non-technological peoples.  She says:

            “Perhaps the major difference between the way non-technological peoples see animal nature and the way we see it, is that we have abstracted out of it all contradictory qualities. We look at creatures as single purpose units; they do this for that reason. The American Indian, the Congo pygmy, the Siberian shaman, recognize the contradictory livingness in all animal life; understand that an animal can be both/and/or. That is, an animal can be something to eat/something that embodies wisdom other than human/something that participates in the spiritual life of the community/friend/enemy/trickster/ghost. A non-technological hunter/gatherer would never get stuck on the “logical” dilemma that “you can't love animals if you eat meat.” It is this openness to the coexistence of all qualities that characterizes the “primitive” view of the living world.” (Joan McIntyre, from “Mind Play”)               

            As Unitarian Universalists we generally accept evolution as the explanation of life on our planet.  We have no problem accepting that humans evolved from apes and, if you go far enough back, from bacteria.  But we need to guard against our own form of anthropocentrism, our own hubris in relation to animals.  We are not the life-form to end all life-forms.  We are constantly searching for ways to set ourselves apart from the animal world – whether it’s our use of tools, our use of language, whatever.  Of course studies of primates have shown that they have those same capacities, even if they’re not developed. 

            Instead of looking for ways to set ourselves apart, what would happen if we embraced our animal nature, and could see animals as our brothers and sisters, our equals?  If it became respectable to be an animal, maybe anti-evolutionists wouldn’t have as much passion about rejecting good science. 

The 19^th century philosopher Schopenhauer  wrote, “Because Christian morality leaves animals out of account, they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere ‘things,’ mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!”

            My colleague Gary Kowalski wrote a book called The Souls of Animals.  In it, he says, “Animals are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being.” Kowalski asks, “Can we open our hearts to the animals? Can we greet them as our soul mates, beings like ourselves who possess dignity and depth? To do so, we must learn to revere and respect the creatures, who, like us, are a part of God’s beloved creation, and to cherish the amazing planet that sustains our mutual existence.

            Not only do we share a common ancestry with our animal friends, we share a common future.  Our fate is tied inextricably to theirs.  If we destroy the conditions for animals to live on this earth, we destroy our own habitat as well.  We need a new understanding based in the truth that we are animals. Let us embrace our animal nature.  Let us be Proud to be Animals.  Let us see a divine redeemer in the lion, or a savior in a collie dog . . . and they just might save us.