Using Our Brains in God's Continuing Creation

Here's an excerpt from an essay from August 2005 by the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, Episcopal Bishop of Nevada and nominee for Presiding Bishop:

... We believe that revelation continues, that God continues to be active in creation, and that all of the many ways of knowing -- including geology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and arts such as opera, punk rock or painting -- can be vehicles through which God and human beings partner in continuing creation.

Given this worldview, we are compelled to use the resources God has given us. Not to use our brains in understanding the world around us seems a cardinal sin.

As a scientist and an Episcopalian, I cherish the prayer that follows a baptism, that the newly baptized may receive "the gift of joy and wonder in all God's works." I spent the early years of my adulthood as an oceanographer, studying squid and octopuses, including their evolutionary relationships. I have always found that God's creation is "strange and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139).

*  *  *

The vast preponderance of scientific evidence, including geology, paleontology, archaeology, genetics and natural history, indicates that Darwin was in large part correct in his original hypothesis.

I simply find it a rejection of the goodness of God's gifts to say that all of this evidence is to be refused because it does not seem to accord with a literal reading of one of the stories in Genesis. Making any kind of faith decision is based on accumulating the best evidence one can find -- what one's senses and reason indicate, what the rest of the community has believed over time, and what the community judges most accurate today.

That is not to say that the tradition or community understanding is always correct, as we might note in the aftermath of Galileo's discoveries. When the various sources of authority seem to be in tension, we must use all our rational and spiritual faculties to discern the direction in which a preponderance of the evidence points. To do otherwise is to repudiate the very gifts God has given us.

From NPR : The Origins of Life: An Episcopal View (hat tip:  Witness magazine, via  Father Jake)