Bishop Spong's Articles August 2009

To prepare ourselves for the insights of Darwin, we began the trip in Quito, exploring the magnificent and stark terrain of the Andes Mountains. Geologists tell us that North and South America were once part of the land mass that is today Europe, Asia and Africa. A cursory look at any map of the world will reveal how closely they fit. Even the continent that we call Australia was once tucked underneath the Asian sub-continent. Colliding tectonic plates and volcanoes along the fault lines separated that single land mass millions of years ago and these forces also pushed great quantities of what was once the bottom of the sea high into the atmosphere to create such mountain ranges as the Himalayas, the Rockies and the Andes.

Then by air and bus we made our way to the city of Coca, which is east-southeast of Quito and the place where Ecuador's budding oil business is now located. There public transportation ended! We then boarded a motorized canoe, and for two-plus hours rode some 70 kilometers down the Napo River, Ecuador's largest waterway and a major tributary of the Amazon. The Napo is huge, in some places wider than eight football fields placed end to end, and it was flowing at a rapid clip just prior to emptying into the Amazon. Next we traveled by dugout canoe into the rain forest where, under the guidance of local ecological experts, we hiked and explored the variety of life forms that thrive in this incredible setting.

This trip was directly related to the launch of my new book. That book's purpose was to examine the possibility of life after death, a study that has engaged me in general for over twenty years and with great intensity for the last three. My study had convinced me that the way most religious people approach the subject of life after death is all wrong. The emphasis cannot and should not be on that hypothetical place that we postulate will come after we die. That approach is nothing more than a dead end, primarily because there are no data that can be observed, cited or studied. No one is available who has ever been there and returned who might be interviewed. No one can go to this hypothetical place either to observe it or study it. Every thing we human beings have ever said about life after death can be nothing more than speculative. In the great age of faith, which we now think of as "the childhood of our humanity," such speculation was considered valid and even le arned. People in that time of history would debate endlessly on what the afterlife was like. Ecclesiastical leaders would even subdivide this speculative realm into various regions, which they presumed to describe meticulously and in many volumes. There was of course hell, with its punishing fires, and heaven, with its golden streets and lamp stands, its diet of milk and honey and its promise of eternal rest. Next purgatory was added, located, according to these learned folks, near hell but not actually being part of it. This was quite economical, for it allowed the fires that were designed to punish eternally also to be used merely to purge those who received a time limited sentence before being welcomed into eternal life. It was, if you will, a "central heating system" in the afterlife. Then later another region was added, called limbo, that was reserved for unbaptized children and noble pagans who, undoubtedly to the Church fathers, stood outside the only sure savi ng faith tradition but who were clearly not deserving of being ultimately condemned by God. These ideas were reinforced by a host of "authorities." Dante wrote his "Divine Comedy" to frame these images and later John Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" to give vivid contrast to these ecclesiastical concepts. Life beyond this life was clearly assumed to be describable. These leaders, however, knew no more than we know today about this subject, which is absolutely nothing. So it was that when the age of faith, which had invested these images with authenticity, began to decline under the intellectual assault of such fathers of modernity as Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, these images began their inevitable decline, first into being ignored, then into being significantly doubted and finally into being generally abandoned. In this manner, the human conviction about the reality of life after death simply faded from view. Yes, I kno w that polls continue to show that a great majority of America's citizens still believe in heaven and a few less believe in hell. Polls, however, are so misleading. A closer analysis reveals that most people, unable to face the starkness of life's ever-looming mortality, are far better described as people who "believe in believing" in life after death rather than those who actually believe in it. Thousands of signs in contemporary life point to this truth. In order to write in a serious way on this subject, therefore, one discovers quickly the inability to counter this dying conviction by artificially resuscitating the corpse of yesterday's belief system. A new starting point must be found. As I developed the book that new starting point became quite clear. No belief in life after death will make any sense until life itself is understood. This was how life before death became my doorway into the subject of life after death. This trip was thus designed for me to stud y life in all its forms. I wanted to explore life's origins, its interdependence, its characteristics and ultimately its meaning. The only doorway into understanding life after death for me had to be the study of life itself. We headed, therefore, for the Galapagos with an introductory side trip through the as yet unspoiled rain forest of the Amazon River in South America. We were not disappointed!

For three days by canoe in the waterways and by hikes through the forest itself, we encountered the mystery of life in a thousand different ways. We found the forest filled with various forms of vegetation, but every single one of them was involved in a struggle to survive. We looked at the adaptations that many plants had made to allow them to shed excess water in the rain forest. We noted the larger leaves of the lower plants and the smaller leaves in the taller trees, each designed to capture the correct amount of life-giving sunshine. We found palm trees that sent out new roots from several feet up their trunks that were designed to move the palm tree more fully into the sun. We looked at plants that grew leaves out of only one side of the branch and spiraling upward so that the leaves on the higher circle did not cut off the sun from the leaves on the lower circle. We looked at something the native people called the "wooden vine" that sought out the shade because it seemed to know that shade meant the presence of tall trees and its best chance for survival was to climb the tallest tree to bask in the life-giving rays of the sun. It was as if the law of life itself was for each species of plants to survive for as long as possible. Survival appears to be the dominant motif of every living thing. There is no consciousness, no ability to make life decisions in a plant, so we have to conclude that the drive to survive, expressed in the incredible ability to adapt in order to live, appears to be written into the very DNA of all living matter.

A second thing also became obvious in the Amazon Rain Forest. The whole ecosystem of the rain forest, and indeed of all of the deeply interrelated forms of life on the planet Earth, seems to be part of a constant system of the renewal of life. Periodically a great tree in the forest will topple and fall. Perhaps it has been struck by lightning or the effect of constant rain has so loosened its roots that it is susceptible to the power of the wind. When it falls, however, it creates a crisis for all nearby living things. The vegetation that had prospered in and adapted to the shade that that tree provided was now subjected to direct sunlight for which it was not prepared and so it dies. Then vegetation known as "pioneer plants" like ferns move in and prosper in the daylight. Next taller plants move in and the ferns die, placing nutrients back in the soil. Then taller plants move in and in time they are dwarfed by even larger plants. Each in turn dies, enriching the s oil until it is ready once more to support the giant trees and the life of the forest is restored. Perhaps it takes a hundred years, but the forest displays powerful restorative activity. Living things like mushrooms and insects facilitate the decaying process as the life cycle of the forest is renewed again and again. The balance of nature is seen in both individual plants and in the ecosystem as a whole. The balance in favor of life is observable, definable and real. None of this is conscious. Plants do not make rational decisions. Palm trees do not consciously decide to grow a new root that will give the tree a better relationship with the sun. All of these things and millions more occur because survival, individually and ecosystemically, is a driving force in nature itself.

In the vegetative flora and fauna in the Amazon Rain Forest, and presumably replicated all over the earth, the drive to survive is a fact demonstrably present in the unconscious life of inanimate living things. We thus had succeeded in identifying one facet of what appears to be true about all life: It is programmed to survive. Will we see this same survival instinct as we move up the ladder of consciousness to insects, birds, fish and all the animate creatures of the world? What happens to this drive to survive when it enters a self-conscious human life? Those questions will be my focus next week as this study of life continues.

Dear David,

Morton Kelsey has departed this life. He had a ministry of great significance and it still lives through his published books, which, though out of print, can still be found in libraries. I was quite fond of him.

We found the same principle operating in every form of animate life from insects to animals in which consciousness has both appeared and developed. This survival instinct, as it might be called, is not the product of rational thinking. One does not attribute that quality to ants or to wasps, to spiders or to bees or even to the higher mammals, but it is present in all of these forms of life no matter where we looked.

We saw many spider webs in the rain forest. They were spun in community, not by individual spiders, requiring great cooperation, and the food trapped therein was shared equally by the members of the spider community. A social contract was operating in the insect world. We also noted alliances formed between species in the insect world that help both species in the struggle to survive. It is a common observation in the rain forest, for example, that one variety of ants builds nests in the same trees where hives of wasps are located. This tactic serves both species. These ants serve to protect the wasps from another species of ants called "army ants" that are mortal enemies of the wasps. Army ants seek out and consume the larvae of the wasps while still in the hives. They are immune to the sting of the wasp and invade the hive easily, as they are quite adept at climbing even the tallest of trees. Army ants, however, will, not pass the nest of the other ants, which are always lower in the tree than the hives of the wasps. These ants frighten the army ants away with crunching sounds of marching insects, so with this help the wasp larvae are able to survive for another generation. The wasps, on the other hand, attack with stinging efficiency the principle enemy of these cooperative ants: the anteaters. The anteaters are able to climb the tree to feast on the ants' nests, but are driven off by the wasps, thus saving the ants. The alliance serves as a mutual survival technique. It is one more remarkable natural fact that reveals how deeply the drive to survive is in all life forms.

We saw another incredible adaptation tactic in the Amazon Rainforest in a bird called Hoatzin. This bird, a rarity of nature since it is a vegetarian, feeds only on the leaves of the forest. There are no worms or insects in the diet of this creature. To accommodate this vegetarian diet, the digestive system of the Hoatzin is dramatically different from the digestive system of all other birds. The stomach of the Hoatzin resembles the stomach of a cow, which is also a vegetarian. Both of their stomachs are divided into chambers that allow the eaten leaves to ferment and thus be changed into energy and nutrients for the sustenance of life. It seems that when other sources of food became unavailable for this unique bird, the drive to survive expressed itself in this unusual evolutionary development.

The most dramatic example of this survival adaptation in the Amazon Rainforest had to do with parrots and parakeets. Their source of food is tropical fruit, and most of the nutriments in these fruits derive from the seeds. In the plants' own drive to survive, however, the seeds are toxic to discourage their destruction by the parrots. If the parrots eat the nutritious seeds of these fruits, they die of the toxins. If they do not eat these toxic seeds, they will perish from insufficient food. It was not until the 1990's that a Peruvian scientist discovered the adaptation that these parrots and parakeets have made to overcome this serious problem. Throughout the Amazon Rainforest there are places now called "parrot clay licks." The parrots visit these spots by the thousands each day and lick the clay, which contains anti-toxins that enable them to eat the nutritious seeds of the fruit without ill effects. It is to the parrots like taking Alka Seltzer before one develop s indigestion. We went to one of the accessible clay licks near the water's edge of the Napo River, about a hundred yards' walk from our boat, and took our seats in an open shed where we could see the clay licks at the foot of a tree-covered hill without disturbing the parrots prior to their descent. The day unfolded like a liturgical dance. The forest was alive with the chatter of the parrots, but the clay lick was still empty of their presence. Sentry parrots flew above searching for predators and sending a warning if any appeared. Meanwhile, flocks of parrots slowly descended the hillside, coming ever closer to the empty clay lick. This ritual lasted for almost an hour as these birds dropped lower and lower in the trees and then flew away, only to return to a yet nearer position. Finally, one of these green-feathered creatures would break the barrier and land in the clay lick and begin to consume the anti-toxins in the clay. Slowly others would join until the clay lick was filled with hundreds of green parakeets demanding to eat their fill of anti-toxins. From time to time, a warning sound would come from the flying sentries and there would be a rapid and mass evacuation of these creatures, not just from the clay licks but also from every level of the forest by those waiting their turn at the clay lick. It was like watching the pilots of the RAF take off in their planes in wave after wave to confront the Nazi bombers during the World War II Battle of Britain. We watched on at least three occasions when literally thousands of parakeets took off to avoid danger. Then the "all clear" signal would come from the sentries and the parakeets would return, again filling the empty clay lick with a blanket of green until all the parakeets had consumed their daily requirement of anti-toxins and went off in search of the toxic seeds in the fruits that sustained their lives. The elaborate forms that the drive to survive seems to take in the w orld of nature is truly amazing. Deep in the heart of all living things, perhaps in the DNA of life itself, we discover that the drive to survive is present. This is true despite the fact that every living thing is actually in the food chain of every other living thing. Nature's clear message is that all living things are hard wired to survive.

This same principle is also seen in higher forms of life where consciousness is advanced. There is the herd instinct that enables the species to survive even if an individual member of the species is sacrificed. We are all familiar with the fight or flight syndrome in the animal kingdom. A predator appears. The herd flees. The predator cuts out his desired prey from the flock and their one-on-one flight takes place. When the intended victim can run no more, it turns to face its tormentor in one last stand at life. With whatever form resistance takes, from arched back to hissing sounds, from an attempt to delay the pounce with claws or hooves, the struggle for survival comes before the kill. When flight ends, fight begins. Meanwhile, with the sacrifice of this victim to feed the hunger of the predator, the flock ceases its flight and grazes peacefully nearby, knowing that the predator's hunger is satisfied for the immediate future. Recent zoological studies have ind icated that flocks are even organized in such a way as to place the older and therefore less productive members of the flock in the most vulnerable positions in the herd, making them the likely prey of the predator. Thus the older animals are sacrificed for the longevity of the species. Survival is a force in life that appears to drive all living things. So our search for the meaning of life arrives at its first conclusion. There is something about life in both its plant and animal forms that is driven by survival. It is not a conscious choice, for plants do not think or plan, and yet survival motivates all vegetative forms of life. It is not a rational thinking process for animals do not think abstractly or plan ahead for future contingencies. It is a natural response found in all living things. It is part of what it means to be alive.

To our knowledge only one living creature, the human being, is conscious of the fact of its inevitable death. In this single creature this universal drive to survive becomes self-conscious. This creature alone knows in advance that he or she is mortal and that no matter how deep in nature the drive to survive might be, only the human being is aware that he or she will lose the battle for life. How will that drive then express itself in the self-conscious creature? Is the human yearning for life after death, which appears to mark all human life from the earliest dawning of self-consciousness, anything more that a sign of this universal will to survive? On the other hand is the human discovery of the oneness and interdependence of all life, the dawning awareness that we are part of something not bound by our limitations, perhaps not even bound by our mortality? Is self-consciousness the doorway into God? Does this insight open us to the possibility that evolution is a j ourney not just into life and consciousness, but also into transcendence, oneness and even eternity? That is the pathway that I will explore in this book.

We moved next to the Galapagos Islands to follow Darwin's discovery of evolution. Before making that journey, however, we had a chance to meet and engage briefly with a shaman of one of the tribes indigenous to the rain forest. Because this was the first time I had ever had the opportunity to listen to a shaman's view of life, and because he offered me the opportunity to enter the religious world view of animism, it seems worth still following my thought about the evolution of religion in human society to share that story with you. To that I will turn next week.

Dear Donna,

There are several levels on which an answer to your question must be contemplated:

1. Did Jesus actually say these words? I doubt it. They appear in the Fourth Gospel, which was written 65-70 years after the death of Jesus. They are also part of a series of "I Am" sayings, which appear nowhere except in John and are regarded by most biblical scholars today as the words of the Christian community that have been placed onto the lips of Jesus. They are clearly not the words of the Jesus of history. The scholars in the Jesus Seminar regard nothing in the Fourth Gospel, not a single one of the sayings attributed to Jesus in that gospel, to be the authentic words of the Jesus of history.
2. Most of the Christians at the time that John's gospel was written were still Jews. The Jews who were the followers of Jesus had just been expelled from the Synagogue. The tensions between Revisionist Jews, who were also disciples of Jesus, and the Orthodox Jews who controlled the Temple are in the background of this gospel.
3. These words were certainly not meant to fuel an imperialistic missionary campaign to convert Jews and others as they were interpreted by later generations of Christians. The actual split between the Jews who were disciples of Jesus and the Orthodox Party of traditional Jews did not occur until almost 60 years after the crucifixion. That is, for the first 60 years of Christian history, Christianity was itself a Jewish movement within in the synagogue.
4. At this moment, I am reading Rudolf Bultmann's The Gospel of John: A Commentary. He argues, persuasively I believe, that John portrays Jesus as the logos enfleshed in human life, calling us all to a deeper sense of what it means to be whole and human. To come to the God present in Jesus for John was to discover the logos in each of us. That, argues Bultmann, is what Jesus represented to the people of his day. It was that discovery, not some form of doctrinal Christian belief or faith, that was for John the only doorway into the ultimate reality we call God. That is quite different from saying that only those that believe in what Christianity says about Jesus will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Recall that in Matthew's parable of the judgment (Mt. chapter 25), Jesus says the criterion for eternal life is not what you believe but how you respond to the presence of God in another human being, especially those regarded as the least of our brothers and sisters. In that parable neither the sheep nor the goats are ever asked what creed they say. They are asked "did you see and respond to the presence of God in another human being." It was the Epistle of John that states that if you cannot love your neighbor whom you have seen, how can you expect to love God whom you have not seen?

Those who quote John's gospel to validate their own exclusive religious prejudices simply have no idea what John's Gospel is about. This Gospel does not lend itself to proof texting. It is far too profound a work for that.

The Shaman's name was Domingo. That is all, simply Domingo. He was about 65, though he looked old for that age. He was a single man, having never married. Being single was not a requirement of the office, but it was encouraged by suggesting that sex was not appropriate while actually functioning as the Shaman. Domingo had served his people in this office for some 40 years. In true animistic fashion he viewed the world as "spirit-filled" and defined himself as a "spirit-filled man" or at least as one through whom the spirit flows. His role within the tribe is to be "the banisher of evil spirits," a not untraditional role for the designated "holy man." Both he and his tribe believe that he enhances the wellbeing of his people.

Domingo was introduced to us by our guide in the Amazon. It was a regular feature offered on the tour, a unique way to open Westerners to the culture of the area. While pleased with this opportunity, I discovered in this meeting what the barriers to real communication were. The Shaman spoke no language other than his tribal dialect. There are perhaps six different tribal groups in the rainforest, most of whom cannot even communicate with each other, to say nothing of with the outside world. It slowly dawned on me that because of this language barrier, this Shaman had never read anything unless it had been translated into his native dialect. He had not heard of Galileo and had no concept of space as we know it. He had not heard of Darwin and had no sense of evolution. He knew nothing of Pasteur and had no awareness of the causes of sickness other than "evil spirits." He had only the vaguest sense of the world beyond the rainforest. Places like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan an d North Korea had no content in his mind. In order for us to talk with the Shaman we spoke to our guide, who translated our English into the Spanish of our native expert, who in turn translated the Spanish into the native dialect of the Shaman. The Shaman responded and his words made the reverse journey. One never knew how our questions were interpreted or what was lost in translation.

We wanted to know how he became the Shaman, what the selection process involved? He answered that he was "chosen by the spirit of the forest" and that it was the responsibility of the Shaman to reflect the "unity of the forest." We asked how the "spirit of the forest" made the selection. He said that a young man or woman (yes, in rare instances women could be Shamans in this tribe) would go into the forest and have some kind of transcendent experience, perhaps losing consciousness and even staying in the forest under the forest's protection for a number of days. When regaining consciousness, the candidate would seek out known hallucinogenic leaves in the forest in order to test the vision. The three major hallucinogenic leaves available and used for this purpose were ayawaska, the most potent of the three; wanto, also called "angel's trumpet;" and tobacco. All have known hallucinogenic properties. Domingo favored tobacco, hand rolled, but he also used wanto. He tended to avoid ayawaska. In this drug-induced state of euphoria, Domingo said he saw visions and perceived things that others could not see. Among them were the causes of sickness and the harm that evil spirits did to people. He used these powers in the practice of his healing art. When the people of the tribe heard about these experiences upon his safe return from the forest, they acclaimed him chosen by the "Spirit of the Forest" to be the next Shaman. He was then apprenticed to a Shaman nearing the end of his life and career from whom he learned the rituals and the words to use in fulfilling his calling.

People came to Domingo to escape perils like the evil eye, a spirit of weakness, or in an attempt to contact the dead in time of grief. His treatment included the use of hallucinogenic leaves so that the boundary between this world and the Spirit world might be breached, fear banished and the comfort of seeing a deceased loved one happy or at peace could be known.

Domingo indicated a willingness to perform one of his ritual practices on a member of our group. A volunteer quickly raised her hand and was invited to sit on a stool in front of him. She closed her eyes and the rest of us were told to be silent and to enter as deeply as we could into the meaning of this experience. We did. The ritual began. Domingo carried a leaf fan, gray in color, that rustled audibly when he shook it or gave it a whip-like stroke into the air, which we were told meant that he had cleansed the troubling spirits from the victim. He moved the leaf fan up and down the woman's body, not touching her with anything but the breeze of the leaves, while he chanted words that we could not understand. They did, however, seem repetitive as many religious chants are. Periodically, he would face away from his "patient" and flick his leaf fan vigorously toward the woods. After this had gone on for some five minutes, he began to make guttural sounds, as if to clear his throat of a lingering phlegm, then circled his "patient's" head with his hand and began to blow on her head. This, we were told, was his attempt to pour a new and positive spirit into her. In about ten minutes the ritual was ended.

Was this Voodoo? I do not think so. It would be easy from our perspective to be critical and to see this as some primitive act that more developed cultures have discarded. But is it? In the Christian baptismal service, we pour water on the child's head and pray that all evil spirits will be banished from the child's life as the child renounces "the world, the flesh and the devil." Is that really very different? Are not both experiences attempts to bring life into harmony with what we perceive to be infinitely real?

Can modern people make contact with the religious and health practices of a tribe of people who live isolated in the Amazon Rainforest? I think we can, but only if we make a crucial distinction. All human experience is the same. It is the way that we interpret that experience that is so different. All human beings live with forces we cannot control. To help us cope with that world and our powerlessness we all design cultural rituals to bring help from beyond ourselves. It is also the fate of self-conscious beings to feel alone, separated from the world of nature, and so every religion develops a method of achieving atonement which, we assert, is ultimate. Thus the thing we have in common with the people of the Amazon Rainforest is that we share the anxiety of what it means to be human, which includes the knowledge that we are mortal and on a one way path toward death. This human experience is universal.

When any one begins to explain or interpret that experience, each of us does so in terms of the way each perceives the nature of life and the nature of the universe. Here the explanations vary widely as the perceptions of the universe are based on the knowledge available to us, the time and place we live in history, the nature of our education, the values handed down for many generations and many other factors. Are our modern explanations better than those of a people who inhabit the Amazon Rainforest? We do see through a wider lens. We have lived through changes in the perception of reality that have been given to us by the intellectual giants of our cultural past. We know things about the universe, about the laws of cause and effect, about our evolutionary history and about germs and viruses as the causes of sickness that they do not know. We can minimize the effect of epilepsy with drugs while earlier, even in Jesus' time, he sought to banish the demons that had app arently possessed the victim. We treat pneumonia with penicillin, leukemia with chemotherapy and remove tumors surgically. None of these things are available in the world of Domingo, the Shaman. The explanation of why things are as they are will always vary widely based upon the knowledge available to the one explaining. No human explanation, however, is ever final and thus no human explanation can ever be literalized. Every explanation is always an expression of cultural knowledge, but no explanation can ever be substituted for the human experience, which is common, universal and real.

I do not judge the work of Domingo the Shaman. I seek to appreciate it. He works within his animistic world view to make sense out of life. I work within my Western mechanistic world to make sense out of life. The goal of us both is to create human wholeness, to introduce us to transcendent dimensions of reality that our experience tells us must either be real or be delusional. Both Domingo and I are convinced that we are in touch with reality. I am glad I had the experience of entering, if but for only a few moments, into the worldview of a culture vastly different from my own and was able to see a oneness in the humanity we share.

Dear Gary,

What do you say to people who maintain that the earth is flat or that the moon is made of cheese? Ignorance abounds in our world and the statement you quote is profoundly ignorant. There is not a shred of medical or scientific evidence that sexual orientation, which is clearly one of life's givens, is capable of being changed. For clergy persons or anyone else to allow their prejudices to blind them to reality means that they are simply out-of-touch, religious bigots. Perhaps a lawsuit by a victim of such "pastoral counseling" would be in order, to warn clergy and anyone else functioning as a counselor that, prior to dispensing medical advice, they need to be medically trained and certified by some appropriate federal or state agency. No one in our society has the right to practice medicine without a license, not even in the name of religion.

It is worth noting that those organizations that claim to be able to change homosexuals into heterosexuals are all identified with right-wing religious movements. They also refuse to let their data be analyzed and they have a dreadful track record for failure. More importantly they victimize those who become their "patients" for their own financial gain, since they normally collect fees for their services, which are, of course, paid by their victims. This is little more than racketeering under the protection of religion. Racketeering and fraud are crimes that need to be exposed wherever they appear. Trying to cure people of homosexuality is both homophobic ignorance and fraud. I hope you and others will expose these practices for what they are.

These islands are a series of land masses, created by volcanic eruptions in what is called the "hot spot" of the Galapagos. The oldest island in this chain is 6.5 million years old, while the youngest is no more than 300,000 years old. These islands drift to the east as if on a slow-moving conveyor belt at the rate of about three inches a year. Given their ages, that can constitute significant distances. The oldest island, for example, has drifted 378 miles from its place of birth, while the youngest has moved only 21 miles. So the further east-southeast the islands of this chain are, the older they are. The effects of their volcanic birth are everywhere, with black ash and rolls of spewing lava, now hardened but quite visible. Each island's vegetation reflects its age. The earliest form of vegetation is normally the volcanic cactus. That is followed by more sustainable vegetation as hundreds of thousands of years pass. The animate life native here is limited to sea b irds and various reptiles, the best known of which are the giant tortoises and the iguanas. Mammals, which are by nature late developing, are indigenous to this land only in the form of sea lions and bats. The Galapagos' sea lions have been traced to the sea lions of California, while bats have amazingly long navigational abilities and can come from almost anywhere. The scarcity of fresh water makes other forms of mammalian life all but impossible.

These islands were first discovered by fishermen in the 16th century and were later used by pirates, lying in wait for galleons loaded with Inca gold and other prizes of the new world. The pirates introduced other forms of life here, such as goats, so that they would have a fresh supply of meat waiting for them on future voyages. Remarkably, these goats proved to be sufficiently hardy to survive on the slight moisture they found in plants and the occasional rainfall, while at the same time they demonstrated one of Darwin's principles by adapting their bodies to the ability to drink brackish salt water that was available in great supply.

A stop here in 1835 by the HMS Beagle, captained by Robert Fitzroy and having on board serving as the "naturalist" a young man in his mid-twenties named Charles Robert Darwin, brought change not just to the Galapagos, but to the face of human history. The voyage of the Beagle lasted five years, from 1831 to1836, but the only time spent in the Galapagos was between September 5 and October 7 of the year 1835. Of that five-week time span Darwin actually spent only 19 days on land.

In that limited time, however, Darwin visited every island on which he could get ashore and immediately became aware of their relatively recent origins and even of the gaps of time between each island, small by geological standards but significant in terms of the development of life forms. Everywhere he went, he collected specimens for his study. The differences among the same species of the finch provided Darwin with what was to be an invaluable clue that would underlie his theory, namely that various forms of life were not immutable, but were in fact always changing. Indeed these changes could be so total, he found, that given the necessary time, new species could actually develop. Just as the various islands of the Galapagos chain floated eastward over time, so the life forms on each island were distinct as they adapted to the different environment and resources available on each island. Darwin thus broke two "established" conclusions present in the religious world vi ew of his day. One was that the age of this planet Earth was far older than the 6000 or so years postulated by Irish Bishop James Ussher who, from his biblical sources dated the birth of this Earth in 4004 BCE. The second was the idea firmly stated in the creation story that God created each species "after its kind" and that there was therefore no changing or evolving after the creation.

Darwin himself did not yet embrace the real dimensions of time in the Earth's history, which we now count at 4.7 billion years. If he had, his work would have been much easier. Nor did he embrace the possibility, now well established, that our separated continents were once a contiguous land mass. This would have explained, for example, both the similarities and the differences in vegetative and animal life in Africa and South America. Yet even without these two dimensions of knowledge that were to come much later, his thesis was remarkably accurate.

What, he wondered, brought about the observable changes in the various forms of life from island to island? It was in answer to that question that Darwin's real contribution came. His answer to that question would also prove to be most controversial in religious circles, for it shattered the primary concept by which human beings conceived of God. For Darwin, biological change was accomplished by natural selection. There was no place in his thinking for a divine intelligence directing the process.

The clue for this truth for Darwin was seen in the wide variety in the shape of the beaks of the finches from island to island. Since the food supply was different on each island because of its age, the finches that survived in each location had to have beaks that were well adapted to the local food supply. Over multiple generations the finches with the fittest beaks for the environment in which they lived were naturally selected for survival.

That same principle is still observable today among the sea lions of the Galapagos. The dominant male of the sea lion colony patrols a limited stretch of the beach, preventing other male challengers to his kingdom, and thus he impregnates all of the female sea lions in that area. Regularly, the dominant sea lion fights off male challengers to maintain his position until finally a stronger one than he prevails and takes over. In this way, the strongest characteristics are continually bred into the offspring. Natural selection works to foster survival adaptations.

When Darwin left the Galapagos after this short visit, he discovered that his record-keeping was quite happenstance. Only later, by use of the notes kept by Captain Fitzroy, was Darwin able to organize each of his specimens by the island and the date on which it was obtained. Only then, when the differences on each island became visible to him, did the theory of evolution begin to take shape, since it alone made sense of the now apparent data. Natural selection emerged as the key to the theory.

Darwin himself was shocked by his own conclusions. It was such a revolutionary way to view life from anything supposed before. He sat on this knowledge, seeking to be certain, while constantly testing his thesis from 1836 to 1859. When he finally published his findings, he was quite aware of the challenge his ideas would bring. This had been made clear to him from two primary sources. First, there was the vigorous opposition to his conclusions on biblical grounds that came from Captain Robert Fitzroy. Second, his wife, a devoted member of the Anglican Church, made him aware of her fears. With the negativity destined to be so high, he wanted to be sure that he stood on solid ground before he put his conclusions into irrevocable print. Twenty-four years after the voyage of the Beagle and under pressure from another scientist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who was working in the same area and who might have become the one with whom evolution was identified if he had publis hed first, Darwin finally released his book to the public in 1859 just 150 years ago and in the 50th year of his life. When this book hit the streets of London, it sold out on the first day of publication. The world would never be the same.

Within a few weeks Darwin's theory was the subject of the historic debate between Thomas Huxley, representing Darwin, and the voice of the threatened religious establishment, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. This debate took place before the members of the British scientific world at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Though Wilberforce was, by popular acclaim, the winner of this debate, history has not treated the good bishop kindly. He is viewed today more as a buffoon than as a serious critic. When Wilberforce tried ridicule by asking Huxley whether it was on his mother's or father's side that he had descended from apes, he had stooped to the oldest trick that losers regularly employ in a debate: "If you can't deal with the message, attack the messenger." The chief result of this debate was that press coverage guaranteed that Darwin's ideas quickly entered the public's awareness and began that inevitable process of seeping into universal consciousness. Today the discovery of DNA and the subsequent recognition of the interrelatedness of all living things has fairly well clinched the argument in Darwin's favor. There is universal acceptance of his theory in intellectual circles. Medical science is organized on the basis of evolution. The study of genetics assumes it. The fields of biochemistry and biophysics have it as their prerequisite. Evolution has in fact won the day. Religious opposition is now little more than a minor skirmish fought on the battlefield along the major retreat routes of religious thinking. Darwin had signaled the fact that religion would have to change dramatically, perhaps even die, before human beings would understand the very meaning of life. This last possibility finally became clear to me in the writing of my new book. I discovered that I had to walk beyond religion in order to discover the meaning of life here or the hope of life hereafter. Before I could find a doorway into an understan ding of life after death, I had to find my way into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "Religionless Christianity." I will seek to reveal the process this book took in next week's column.

Dear George,

If you look at Mark, chapter 6, verse 3, you will discover that the author says, quoting a member of the crowd speaking of Jesus: "Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses, Simon and Judas, and are not his sisters here with us?" and they took offence at him.

I submit that to call Jesus "the son of Mary" is to assert that he is the son of a woman. That is, incidentally, the only time in the first gospel that the mother of Jesus is called "Mary." It is also in the first-century Jewish world an insult to refer to a grown man as the son of a woman. As a matter of fact there is no hint in Mark that the mother of Jesus was a virgin. Indeed in Mark 3:21 and 31-35, she is portrayed as thinking Jesus is "beside himself" and goes to take him away. The story of the virgin Mary is a ninth-decade addition to the Christian story introduced by Matthew, retold by Luke and then denied by John, who calls Jesus the "son of Joseph" on two occasions.
 

As I embraced these conclusions, I also understood just why Darwinism and traditional religion were such mortal enemies. If Darwin was right, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was wrong on almost every level. In this column I want to look briefly at the content of that struggle. To move beyond it I must understand it.

The first flash point in the conflict between Darwin and Christianity was centered on the authority of scripture. Evolution did not jibe in any detail with the biblical story of creation. The time line in the Bible was quite different from the time line that Darwin was utilizing. This was so even though Darwin was not yet aware of the actual age of the Earth at 4.7 billion years or the age of life at 3.8 billion years. Second, the Bible attributed the varieties of species to the divine initiative; Darwin to natural selection. Third, the Bible saw human life as a special creation, not related to anything else, while Darwin saw it as evolving out of other forms of life.

The scripture part of the debate was not as strong in intellectual Christian circles as the traditionalists thought, because a critical study of the Bible had been initiated inside the Church, primarily in Germany, some 50 years prior to Darwin' writings. In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss had published his monumental work, Leben Jesu, which had been translated into English in 1846 under the title The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by George Eliot, the author of Silas Marner and the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. For traditional Christians, Strauss' work was a deeply disturbing book, since it revealed not only the contradictions in the gospel tradition but the very human way in which the gospels had been written. It was clear to Strauss and his colleagues that no angel had guided Matthew's hand in writing his gospel, as the popular art of the day portrayed. Matthew had rather copied about 90% of Mark into his text. In the process he had added to, delet ed from and even changed some of Mark's ideas. In the non-academic ranks, however, the Bible-based condemnation of Darwin had much longer to run, even after someone suggested that each day in the Genesis creation story "might have been a billion years."

By 1910, a group of Presbyterian divines centered around Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey decided to mount a counterattack against Darwin in the name of defending "traditional Bible-based Christianity." A series of pamphlets, about 500,000 per printing, were published on a regular basis over a five-year period and distributed to Christian leaders around the world. The pamphlets, financed by the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) in the first known instance of an alliance between the oil industry and right-wing religion, were called "The Fundamentals" and through them, the words "fundamentalist" and "fundamentalism" entered our vocabulary. As a direct result of these pamphlets, all of America's mainline churches began to show a split between their fundamentalist members and those who came to be called "modernists." While the pamphlets polarized the churches, they did little to push back the Darwinian tide.

The next public battlefield between Darwin and traditional religion took place in the unlikely spot of Clayton, Tennessee, in the year 1925, when a young science teacher named John Scopes was recruited by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge openly a state law in Tennessee forbidding the teaching of anything in the public schools of Tennessee that was contrary to "the word of God found in the Holy Scriptures." That trial captured the attention of the nation since it was covered by every major newspaper in America, to say nothing of the fledgling and still somewhat static-filled radio industry. John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The fine was never paid. The effect of the trial, however, was once again to bring the insights of Charles Darwin into the awareness of the general public in a massive way. It also served to begin the split in this nation on social issues that was destined to pit the urban Northeast and West coast of America against the heart land of the South and the Midwest, the precursor of the blue states versus the red states of the George W. Bush era. Truth, however, is never really stopped because it is threatening or inconvenient to a previous way of thinking.

Next, from embattled religious leaders came the "Creation Science Movement," reaching its high-water mark in 1970 when it bought pressure on Washington's Smithsonian Institution to close an exhibition on "The Dynamics of Evolution." Failing that, they wanted a countering exhibition on creation science to be presented so that "truth could be balanced." That too failed, and ultimately the Supreme Court dismissed creation science as unconstitutional under the separation of church and state provision of the constitution. Still not willing to accept defeat, critics of evolution repackaged creation science under the new banner of "Intelligent Design," only to have that ploy also dismissed by the courts. Darwinism was clearly here to stay.

With the literal Bible no longer at the heart of the conflict, it slowly began to dawn on the wider Christian consciousness that a much deeper threat to traditional religion had now been loosed upon them. If Darwin was correct then the basic Christian myth had made assumptions that were no longer true. There was no "perfect creation" from which human life could fall into original sin. If there had been no fall, there was no need for a divine rescue operation carried out by Jesus on the cross. Salvation could no longer mean being restored to a status that human life had never possessed. Instead of being "fallen sinners" we were incomplete human beings. We did not need to be redeemed, we needed to be called and empowered to become more deeply and fully human. Pioneering Christian theologians began to wrestle with these ideas, but whenever these ideas achieved public notice the status quo ecclesiastical authorities attacked them vigorously. In the early years of the 20th century thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead sought to redefine God more as "a process than as a being." A Roman Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, became the first religious figure to seek to reconcile God and evolution in his book The Phenomenon of Man. The Vatican responded by indexing his works. Reformed theologian Paul Tillich, writing in the 1940's and 1950's, built on these ideas by suggesting that there was a "God beyond the Gods of men and women" and he began to refer to God not as "a being" but as "the Ground of Being." Next came the "God is Dead" theologians in the 1960's as the supernatural, theistic concept of God became less and less believable. They were followed by the work of two Anglican bishops, John A. T. Robinson in Great Britain and James A. Pike in America. For their efforts both were marginalized and finally squeezed out by their respective churches. The external, supernatural and invasive God, however, was seen to be in inevitab le collapse.

We live today in the midst of this transition. Those who cannot see the problem and who seem to think that all one has to do is to recite the old formulas loudly and they will be believable have become the fundamentalists. They come in both a Catholic and a Protestant form. Those who do see the problem are now convinced that religion is dying or has already died. They become the secularists who get on with the task of living creatively in a godless world. Most of them have been drawn from the "main line" churches, which are all in a statistical freefall.

Darwin removed God from the day-to-day workings of our world. He redefined human life biologically as one species of the animal kingdom, finite creatures destined for a fate no different from the sheep of New Zealand or the iguanas of the Galapagos. If that proved to be an accurate definition then traditional religion with its theistic concept of God could not survive. No artificial respiration will resuscitate a concept that is not in touch with established knowledge. Either we have reached the end of religion as a human enterprise or we have to find a new way to approach both human life and whatever we mean by transcendence. A record-keeping theistic deity, who metes out reward and punishment in order to control behavior, is simply no longer viable. This is not an insignificant crisis. No, I am not prepared to reject Christianity, but I am prepared to rethink its meaning in a radical way, so radical that traditional Christians may feel that all that they once believed was holy is now being taken away from them.

To analyze the possibilities for a new Christianity designed to live without apology in this new world will be my task in the column next week.

You touch a string deep within me. For years I have questioned the path Christianity has taken — a path that leads nowhere. While "everybody" sees it, they keep these things to themselves, not daring to speak up. The clergy look elsewhere — towards scripture and the "immortal" dogmas. They flee a situation because they don't want to get involved in it. Instead their stubborn attitude just reinforces a situation that gives no answers to the ever-increasing gap between knowledge and religious dogmas.

We see signs of Christian fundamentalism in certain circles in the United States, where a movement presented by Philip Johnson has launched the "wedge of truth" strategy, a wedge that is supposed to be forced through all new discoveries in evolution or in astronomy. This wedge is supposed to break up our acceptance to new findings by pointing to the ever-important Bible. This is no less than religious despotism! By cutting out humanity's quest for knowledge, we cut out what it means to be human beings. Evolution will never end. Humankind will develop further into something we don't see today. And we shall all disappear someday — either self-conflicted or through earthly conditions being too harsh on us.

Christian dogmas have historically limited the human quest. No better can we witness this by studying the enlightenment that followed the middle ages. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — they all went forward against the oppression from the Church, facing grave consequences. For Kepler this meant he had to abandon his astronomical studies, having been ordered to return to the university in T bingen to lecture on mathematics. This was for him, being a very religious man, the biggest disappointment of his life.

The Church turned its back on this new science while it had a golden opportunity to fathom the new human quests and accept new knowledge as a way to widen our perspective towards new insight. To open up for another and much wider concept of God. A God beyond our wildest imagination — a Ground of all Being, as you say.

The Church should endeavor to create humility and open our eyes towards a new understanding. While closing in on the universe, our minds should be adjusted to accept our real place in cosmos — to let us grasp the unbelievable greatness while seeing that life on this tiny speck of a planet has a meaning after all. Comprehension — Gnosis — is mankind's real task, its function in life. By that we become co-workers in the natural revelation. This open involvement will have great influence on personal morale.

And now to the big question: How do we get the clergy to open up to these new perspectives? How will they react to such heretical thoughts? What revolution must Christianity go through to grasp fully our real purpose as humans? All I can say is: I believe it will be a tough fight! Don't you ever quit your important work!

Dear Hans,

Thank you for your letter and your enthusiasm for my work. I was recently in Stockholm addressing a conference on "Rethinking the Christian Faith" attended by people from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. I mention this so that you will know that you are not alone and that there are some in the church who wrestle with the things that you describe. Among the senior leaders at this conference were two Norwegian pastors, both from Oslo, Grete Haugen and Helge Hognestad. You might want to be in touch with them. Both are wonderful people.

We need to understand the role organized religion plays in the lives of most people. It is part of the human security system. Most people seek security, not truth, in their religious pilgrimage. The trouble with security is that it never lasts. In the words of the poet James Russell Lowell, "Time makes ancient good uncouth." Yet we continue to make idols out of yesterday's consensus. This is true in science, as Niels Bohr discovered when Albert Einstein could not embrace quantum weirdness. It is true in politics and was quite visible when both the Roosevelt revolution on the left and the Reagan revolution on the right disturbed the status quo. It is also true in religion when we constantly define religious truth as unchanging, infallible, inerrant or external. It is the nature of self-conscious human life to be insecure. Religion, when it seeks security or peace of mind, is actually violating our humanity. So religion and religious leaders will always be conservat ive, resistant to change and highly critical of those who have new insights or who walk to the beat of a different drummer.

There will, however, also always be those in the church who see a bit further. They will be an uncomfortable presence. People will call them heretics and their thought revolutionary, but if it is true it cannot be denied. The history of the Church reveals that yesterday's heresy is tomorrow's orthodoxy. The Vatican admitted in 1991 that Galileo was right. The Church is still making peace with Darwin and Freud. We have not yet begun to wrestle with Einstein and Hawking, but we will.

In such a church I believe people like you have a great role to play. You need to challenge regularly the idea that truth can ever be captured in a Bible, a creed, a doctrine or a dogma. You need to support those people in the Church who press the edges, create the controversy and think outside the traditional boxes. Above all, you must never abandon this institution to the small minds that content themselves with the task of preserving the dated truth of yesterday as if God could ever be captured in human words.

Such a vocation will not win you popularity, but about 25 years after you have died, appreciation for you will begin to grow. If you have any doubts about the truth of which I speak ask Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John A. T. Robinson or even Jesus of Nazareth.

I hope our paths cross some day.