Gimme that Deep-Time Religion!
An Interview with Michael Dowd
The Reverend Michael Dowd, author of the book Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World , has spent the past twenty years in a passionate attempt to recontextualize the clash between Bible-believing creationists and spiritless evolutionists into an expanded vision of a sacred universe that embraces a multibillion-year story of evolutionary emergence. With his wife, the science educator and blogger Connie Barlow, he travels the country—he will be appearing at San Diego's VISION Center on June 14—telling the story of his own journey from fundamentalist literalism to a profound appreciation of the revelatory nature of scientific truth.
The Light Connection: You are truly a 21st version of an itinerant preacher. What led you to take up life on the road in the way that you do it?
Michael Dowd: A couple things. One was the fact that my wife and I came from such radically different backgrounds, and yet we shared the same sacred evolutionary worldview. She had traditionally come from the sciences; she wrote four science books, had called herself an atheist, a humanist, religious naturalist. I came from theology and ministry and spirituality and personal growth, much more progressive and spiritual kind of stuff, and yet we both shared the same essential worldview. So we realized if we could reconcile this in ourselves, maybe we could take this to the larger world and do some reconciliation work, helping people to cooperate—because, in our view, if we don't find ways of cooperating across ethnic and religious differences in the next fifty years, we are in serious trouble as a species. We all, consciously and unconsciously, carry a cosmology, a worldview, a basic sense of how we got here, why we're here, where the whole thing's going and how we fit in. We felt that taking this science-based story and communicating it in the most sacred, meaningful, inspiring ways possible—and in ways that don't require people to leave their religious traditions but allow them to actually go deeper into those traditions—was a really useful thing.
So part of it came from our own passion to take this message to as many people as possible, part of it came from the urgency of this time in human history. When we asked ourselves where we could make the biggest difference for the planet in our lifetime, this is what came up: to take this educational teaching ministry on the road. We speak to more than three or four hundred groups a year, Religious Science churches, Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, college and university groups, Quaker meeting houses, Mennonite churches, Buddhist meditation centers, really quite the gamut of religious and nonreligious settings. We've found that there's a hunger for a bridge-building, inspiring perspective that's grounded in our best understanding of the nature of reality.
And you, yourself, began as a fundamentalist Christian who thought that evolution was from the Devil, right? What was your own evolution like in this regard?
Exactly. I was raised as a Roman Catholic, so I sort of accepted an evolutionary perspective but never really studied it much. It wasn't until a born-again experience in my teenage years, when I was struggling a lot with drugs and alcohol and sexual issues and the only people who were throwing me a lifeline were the fundamentalists, that I became a very antievolutionary fundamentalist for several years and actively opposed people who taught evolution, so I had my own Road to Damascus experience on evolution.
What do you mean by Evolutionary Evangelism?
What I mean by being an Evolutionary Evangelist is that I share the evolutionary story of the universe as Good News. I'm evangelical about it; I'm sharing it as inspiring good news, as saving good news: The history of the universe; the evolutionary history of cosmos, earth, life and humanity; our best scientific understanding of how everything and everyone came to be, using Chemistry and Astronomy and Astrophysics and Geology and Biology and Anthropology and a dozen other disciplines. We tell that story in a mythic way, in a sacred way, in a religiously nourishing way, and we believe it's good news because at this time in history, nothing matters more than coming into integrity. What I mean by coming into integrity is being in right relationship with Reality, as it really is, not just as you wish it were, but as Reality, capital-R, really is. What religious people mean when they say getting right with God. What I'm suggesting in my book Thank God for Evolution is we can't even know what integrity is, much less know how to come into it and stay in it, without an evolutionary understanding of how we got here and without an understanding of the evolutionary trajectory we're on—how complexity has gone through a sequence of transformations over time. In our history, we've had seven or eight major breakthroughs in complexity, and the way in which each breakthrough occurred gives us tremendous guidance for the challenges and the chaos that we are dealing with now. So it almost becomes a no-brainer in terms of how to move forward into a just, happy, sustainably life-giving future.
We get that guidance not from ancient religious texts or from Philosophy, from thinking about the nature of the universe, but through empirical evidence. We get it through what our best science is telling us about how these breakthroughs have occurred—so it's seeing science as revelatory. It's seeing the history of the universe as sacred scripture, to use that religious language, that that's where we go to for Divine guidance on how to move forward in a healthy way; and it's also seeing that science and religion can be mutually enriching, that our best scientific understanding of the nature of Reality can give us tools for how to live religiously nourishing, thriving, satisfying, deeply fulfilling lives.
You say in the book, “Facts are God's native tongue.”
Yes, exactly. So often when you ask the average person, “How does God speak?” most people think about the past and they think about ancient books, or God speaking in our visions or dreams, or speaking to shepherds or goat herders in the past. What I'm trying to say as prophetically and as powerfully and as inspiringly as possible is: “It's more than that!” I mean God, Reality, is communicating through every fact discovered by Science; this evidence is how God speaks. Reality, God, the universe communicates to us as individuals through the facts of our experience, through the facts of our feelings, our circumstances and our relationships, but how God communicates to us as a species, how God is communicating to us collectively, is through evidence, is through facts, and so every scientific discovery is God revealing truth. That gives us a more powerful, present real understanding of God, and it also lifts up Science, the whole scientific endeavor, on par with how the Divine was being revealed two thousand, three thousand years ago; it doesn't put ancient books above what God is doing and revealing today.
It also speaks to the issue of why an omnipotent God would put Divine revelation in something as fallible as a single language…
Exactly, I mean if Science is anything, it's a worldwide, self-correcting exercise in collective intelligence; that is, our species is becoming more collectively intelligent. As a species we are more intelligent today than we were fifty years ago or five hundred years ago or five thousand years ago. That collective intelligence is God-revealing truth; it's the Divine revealing the nature of Reality. I say scientists are empirical theologians and Science is empirical theology. Now obviously that is not the way most scientists see their work—but I think it's at that scale of reverence, of valuing the scientific endeavor and what it's up to, and that it can be done in such a way that validates and helps us further ancient religious insights and intuitions.
Is that the way that you understand human beings and human culture as part of what you call “the trajectory of evolution?”
Absolutely. At one time, we humans only cooperated at the scale of a family or a clan, and all the other families and clans were threat. Then challenges occurred. There were difficulties that needed to be overcome, and we realized that we could cooperate together as a bunch of families and clans; we could enter a new level of complexity, so we started cooperating at the level of tribe. Language, symbolic language, was what helped facilitate that. Then we started interacting as tribes and all other tribes were the threat.
Then some more chaos, some more challenges and we began to realize that if a whole bunch of tribes got together, we could cooperate at the scale of a kingdom. We keeping finding ways of cooperating at larger and wider scales, in other words we keep entering into larger, interdependent, cooperative organizations, and now we're at this new growing edge where the chaos and the challenges of our time are going to force us to cooperate at the scale of a species, at the scale of a planet. Our impact on the natural world has got to be a mutually enriching one; we can't have healthy humans in a sick and dying world—so we have to be concerned first and foremost with the health and the well-being of the life, air, water and soil of our planet. We need to cooperate across ethnic and religious differences, and we've always needed some kind of a sacred story, some kind of a holy narrative that has helped us see ourselves as one people. And now it's only the history of the universe told in a mythic, meaningful way that gives us this sacred story that helps us see that all humans are part of a larger body of life, part of a larger family of humanity. That story holds in a larger sacred context all our other religious stories that used to divide and separate us.
I know part of the work you did in the 90s was finding ways to encourage behavioral change in relation to sustainability. Is that one of the things that has fed your sense of urgency in making the macro-story support that as well?
Absolutely. I mean I was into this macro-story since 1988 so it informed all the environmental and peace and justice work that I've done over the years and especially all the community organizing that I did in the mid- to late-90s. I got 210 eco-teams started, 150 of them in Portland, Oregon, and another 60 in Rockland County, New York; these were teams of five to eight households at a time that met together for four to six months and supported each other using The EcoTeam Workbook and basically helped each other make lifestyle habit changes, so they were habitually using less water, driving less, composting, recycling, everything necessary to living a more sustainable, stewardship-based lifestyle. They were really building healthier, friendlier, safer neighborhoods with much more of a sense of trust and community, because many of these people had never even met their neighbors before—while also changing their habits. So yes, I very much brought this big picture, sacred evolutionary, what we call Great Story perspective into that work. One of the things that motivates me to share this epic of evolution is that, in my experience, it inspires people to make behavioral changes, to make habit changes, to be concerned and committed to things like a sustainable future for all of us—not just my religious group or people who look like me and think like me—but for the whole.
Does this also have relevance to the ways you're thinking now about the economic dilemma that we're in and what you've called the Global Integrity Crisis?
Yes, this goes back to what I was starting to say before that we can't even know what integrity is, much less how to live in it, without a Deep Time worldview, without an evolutionary worldview, because we are not going to be able to be “in integrity,” that is aligned with Reality as Reality really is, if we think that the universe has only been around for six thousand years. It's not a surprise that America is not leading the world with regards to our response to climate change or Global Warming because one in three Americans believes these are the End Times anyway, so why bother? I did a program at the United Nations recently focusing on Evolution and the Global Integrity Crisis.
What I'm claiming—and I think it can be strongly supported—is that we are in the mess we are now because we lack an evolutionary worldview and that the political, the economic, the environmental and the social breakdowns we've been experiencing are caused by our being out of alignment with this reality. For example, we've been using the air, the water and the soil as a garbage can for our waste. We now realize we can't do that! That's not sustainable. So what I'm looking at is how the lack of an evolutionary worldview made the current crisis inevitable and how a Deep Time view of human nature, values and social systems provides a clear and inspiring way forward.
It's kind of like that old Biblical phrase, “Without a vision, the people perish.” We need to have some vision that lights us up and inspires us, that wakes us up fired up and turned on—something other than just doing less bad. If our vision of the future is just getting people to do less bad, that's not really all that inspiring. That's why the question I tend to ask is “Are there ways of understanding the past that allow us to be present to the challenges that we have to deal with now, so that we can truly work together and co-create a healthy future for the planet and as many other species as possible?”
Are there websites people can go to that present your ideas?
Our two main websites are thankgodforevolution.com and thegreatstory.org and a new one we've just put up that's like a monthly E-zine called evolutionarytimes.org. Our schedules are there and clips that people can read or watch or listen to that help them go deeper into these ideas. There is also my book Thank God for Evolution , which has been endorsed by five Nobel Prize winners and lots of other scientists as well as a whole gamut of religious and theological leaders, I think because it does a good job of building bridges between a lot of different perspectives. Anyone who's interested can download the first fifty pages as a free PDF at thankgodforevolution.com.
Anything else you'd like to leave us with?
Just that an evolutionary worldview gives so much more of a magnificent and undeniably real sense of God—that God isn't just a being up there, out there somewhere like some sort of a supreme landlord residing off the planet and outside the universe that one may or may not believe in, but God is no less than a sacred personification of what is ultimately and undeniably real. God has never been less than that. When we see God as sacred proper name or a personification for ultimate Reality, then we can start using God language and communing with God in much more intimate, realistic ways.
We can see that Science is a gift. We can see that prayer isn't just praying to a remote being but is like a cell in the body in communion with the very body of which it is a part. This is what I call the REALizing of Religion. I think that's what a sacred evolutionary worldview offers.
For more information on Michael Dowd's June 14 talks at the VISION Center for Spiritual Living at 11260 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, call (619) 303-6609, or visit http://VisionCSL.com/ ; and see the month's calendar section.
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