Intelligent Design And Servant-Leadership.

All the news about the legality of the Dover Area School District decision to promote Intelligent Design has got me thinking about how the creation of the universe relates to servant-leadership. I have been reading Don Frick’s biography of Robert K. Greenleaf and was somewhat amazed to learn that Greenleaf’s degrees were in mathematics and astronomy. At one point in the book, Don wrote about Greenleaf’s experience of looking through a telescope at a great nebulae. Greenleaf described the experience as follows, “What a sight! I shook with awe and wonder at the majesty of all creation. This primitive unstructured feeling, the powerful sense of awe and wonder, is to me the source of religious feeling at its greatest depth.”

What struck me about Greenleaf was that the “religious” experience did not compel him to lead a life of trying to force his experience or his belief on others, but instead led him to understand that that religious and scientific experience needed to be understood and accepted by the individual on their own terms. Based on Greenleaf’s servant-leadership practices, it seems to me that he would have agreed with another student of the stars, Albert Einstein, who’s quote adorns his monument in Washington D.C. “Joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of the world of which man can form just a faint notion”.

It seems to me that what is important in life is not so much that we know how the universe came about, but that we appreciate the great mystery behind it all. It is that mystery that really gives meaning to life, not answers.