HardQuestions

June2013

How can a good God let bad things happen? - Chris Winward

Is religion to blame for the troubles of the world? - Rowena Rudkin

Is religion to blame for the troubles of the world? - Mark Lewis

Evolution and the Bible - Ian Tarrant

We asked church members to tell us what difficult questions their neighbours might ask them about their faith, so that our preachers could help them with answers. Three questions were tackled by four sermons in June; more in July

and August - see separate booklet.

9th June - How can a good God let bad things happen? Chris Winward

Romans 8:18-25, John 9:1-5

Christians believe that God is a good and loving God. There is no doubt that this is a really difficult question; it’s a hindrance to many people believing in God and a reason why some lose their faith in a loving God. Just think of the kind of events that have happened in our lifetime. A tornado carves its destructive path through a town in Oklahoma with ruthless indifference destroying much in its path, including a primary school with children at their studies. An earthquake below the sea causes a tsunami which leaves death and destruction in its wake, affecting innocent and not so innocent alike. Or,more individually,a young mother leaves her 2 year old child unattended in an upstairs bedroom while she answers the front door. The child climbs on to the window ledge and falls to the ground below. A young woman aged 22 is told that she has Hodgkins disease and asks her church pastor, ‘How can God let this happen to me? A young student sets off for college as usual and is knocked off her bike and killed by a lorry turning left in front of her.

So one might go on, and you could add to this list of bad things which happen in our world. Explaining why God appears to let them happen is a question that has arrested far greater minds than mine throughout the centuries and no one has ever been able to find a complete and satisfactory answer to it. But, as Christians, this should not prevent us from looking for answers so, let’s do just that for a short time.

First of all, I must state that no thoughtful Christian believes that it is God’s will that bad things should happen to us. The young woman who contracted Hodgkins disease described the experience of receiving a well-meaning visit from a deacon in her church who told her, ‘Claudia, something in your life must have displeased God - you must have stepped out of his will. What is God telling you in all this?’ And I expect you have heard the expression used by someone going through a bad time, ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ It’s the old idea of reward and punishment particularly prevalent in Jesus’ time. We heard in the gospel of Jesus healing the blind man, when he was asked

‘Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents?’ Jesus replies categorically ‘this man was not born blind because of his own sin or that of his parents’. Our faith in a loving God helps us to see that bad things do not happen to us as an act of God’s will.

As to the causes of illness and disability, I am not qualified to explore the reasons which are complex but it is, of course, a fact of life with which we are all familiar. We all know that none of us will live for ever in this world and, as we age, we accept the reality that our bodies will be more prone to degeneration and illness. What is hard to understand is illness and disability that happens to the younger generation. To obtain a Christian perspective on this I asked Professor David Hatch who spent his whole working life as a consultant at Gt Ormond St hospital. How had he coped with a good God letting illness and disability affect the lives of children? First and foremost he said that he did not believe that it was God’s will that children should suffer. But what had been a constant source of amazement and encouragement to him was to see so many positive results from negative situations, including the absolute devotion that had resulted from all concerned in the care and treatment of sick children. Not just professionally but from the families of the patients and the inspiration from the attitude of the young patients themselves. What qualities of character had been evoked: patience, understanding, fortitude and love.

But David said that, although great qualities of character can be a by-product of suffering with which we may all be familiar (what the poet Keats meant when he referred to the world as ‘a vale of soul making’), he reiterated his belief that it is not God’s wish that children should suffer, and although God does not appear to intervene dramatically in a physical way, he has empowered all those concerned with the care of the sick to vastly improve the treatment of their patients with wonderfully beneficial results in many cases.

But let me refer back to the bad things that seem to happen as the result of the regularities in nature. The chain of cause and consequence seem to be bound together in God’s ordering of the world and this regularity of creation can be the cause of some of the bad things that happen but - on the whole -

may be beneficial to us. In fact, most of the benefits in our lives come from the fact that the world is ordered and governed as we say by laws of nature. Eg, when the child fell out of the window the law of gravity was not suspended by the creator in the interests of that child. Would we like God to do that? Would we like him to keep interrupting the sequence of creation in order to save us from bad accidents? As one theologian put it, ‘if water were to freeze in summer; if the specific gravity of lead might turn to thistledown; if pigs might fly’ - then our human lives would become a nightmare. We couldn’t exist. We depend for our preservation on the regularities of nature and such tremendous benefits come to us from it that we ought to be thankful that God does not intervene.

We can see that some bad things happen naturally as a result of those same laws that give us life itself. So could tornadoes and earthquakes be natural disasters from God’s perspective in which man has tragically got in the way of? Or are they a result of man’s misuse of our planet e.g. the effects of deforestation and pollution. Or are they symptoms of a creation which is staggering in its ability to give us the constituents for life and yet, is not perfected yet?

One of the most tragic disasters that happened in my lifetime, which was a terrible accident, occurred in 1966 in the Welsh village of Aberfan when, after heavy rainfall, a slag heap of rock and shale slid down the hillside and buried the village school killing 116 children and 28 adults. The question asked by religious communities at the time was, ‘How could God allow this to happen?’ The fact was that man had unwittingly built the slag heap over many years but no sane man nor God caused it or allowed it to happen. It was a disastrous accident.

The student who was run over was the innocent victim of a bad thing - an accident. We all know that God had given her and us the freedom to lead our lives as we will and life to mean anything is bound to involve the risk that bad things can happen to us. We take this risk every time we get out of bed. If the regularity in creation is to be preserved aren’t accidents something that we should accept philosophically?

Thus far, I have referred to bad things that seem to happen naturally or by accident but there are bad things which are caused by man’s capacity to do wrong. And the examples are legion. Consider the so-called murderous ethnic-cleansing acts of the last century. The Holocaust, the massacres in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, and on a more individual level, on an off-duty soldier in Woolwich. Why does God permit such bad things to happen?

The prophet Habbakuk, referring to the terrible cruelty perpetrated on his people by the wicked Babylonians cries out to God, ‘Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look on wrong, why dost thou look on faithless men and art silent when the wicked swallow up the man more righteous than he? How can you stand these evil men?’

Does the answer lie in understanding that God’s purpose in creation, which we see poetically described in the Genesis story of the fall, is that mankind should have the freedom to do good or wrong? Imagine if God had created a Utopian world in which we were all perfect, all puppets - automatons -wouldn’t that be a valueless toy world? But the gift of freedom involves enormous risks. As Caliban said to Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it, is I know how to curse.’

We might say to God ‘you taught us how to build nuclear power stations or nuclear weapons. You taught us how to build aeroplanes to take people on holiday or to drop bombs from the sky. And so on. Man has been given the capacity to do good or evil - to love or to hate - to respond to God or ignore him. Therein lies the risk of God giving us freedom.

Well, in all this, a cynic might say that God appears to be a kind of clockmaker who has wound up the timepiece of creation and stepped back to see how it responds to Him - to be hands off in a way. But it’s essential to understand that he has not abandoned us to face bad things alone in this great drama.

Firstly, Christians believe that God has intervened when, in the form of Jesus, he entered the world and therefore understands our human sufferings. A little boy was staring at picture of the crucifixion. He turned the page to escape the terrible sight and said to his mother ‘If God had been there he

wouldn’t have allowed it to happen’. But, of course we believe that God was there. He knows what it’s like for bad things to happen. As Dorothy Sayers wrote,

‘For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience including the horrors of pain, humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When he was a man he played the man. He was born into poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile’.

The fact that Jesus (God incarnate) came to earth, and suffered and died, does not remove the possibility of bad things happening to us; but it shows us that God does not sit idly by and watch us suffer alone. He became one of us and in Jesus he gives us a personal look at his compassionate response in the face of human suffering. Does God care? Yes. Because of Jesus, God understands. Our tears become his tears.

In his book, ‘Love’s endeavour, love’s expense’, WH Vanstone recalls the tragedy of Aberfan. He writes ‘our preaching on the Sunday was not of a God who, from the top of the mountain caused or permitted its disruption or descent, but of one who received at the foot of the mountain its appalling impact and also in the extremity of endeavour will find new resource to restore and redeem.’

As Christians, we have been assured that God understands our sufferings and, in response to prayer, comforts through the power of his Holy Spirit which can work within healing and restoring the spirit and having a positive effect on our physical well-being. And that same Holy Spirit inspires his body now on earth, his church - you and me - to offer support and love to those who suffer bad things. There is another resource that our faith gives us, and that is hope - the hope that whatever bad things may happen, we believe that we are part of God’s purpose in a creation that is moving towards ultimate perfection. In his

letter to the Romans, St Paul applies the metaphor of the birthpangs of the expectant mother to the whole of nature - the whole creative process. Nature isn’t static-it isn’t still; the universe is still expanding - there’s a dynamic movement in all creation towards a goal and what we feel now when we experience suffering is not only the growing pains but actually the birth pangs of a new world order.

Paul writes, ‘you wait, just wait until you see the new kingdom - wait until you see the new creation and then you will know that all these sufferings that happen - terrible as they may seem at the time - are not worthy to be compared with what is to come.’

So, how can a good God let bad things happen? I don’tknow but they appear to be symptoms of the two general principles that God has built into creation. Firstly-a physical world that runs according to natural laws which are, on the whole, beneficial to us, but in which things can go wrong. And secondly, on the principle of human freedom and the risks that that entails. And by committing himself to those two principles God allowed for the possibility of their abuse and does not intervene physically, in order that man may be free to respond to him, which is what he desires more than anything else. But it is vital to state our Christian belief that, although God does not appear to intervene physically, he has not left us alone to face bad things - he does intervene spiritually and through the life of Jesus shows us that he understands our sufferings and identifies with us .Through the power of his Holy Spirit he sustains us spiritually and motivates us to show his care and compassion for those who suffer bad things. Lastly,we believe that, ultimately, he rules supreme over his creation and we have this great Christian hope that we are part of this ongoing process which is moving towards perfection in new life.

23rd June - Is religion to blame for the troubles of the world? Rowena Rudkin

Judges 4:14 – 5:3, Revelation 12:7-12, Luke 11:21-26

“All wars are caused by religion” is something I am sure you have often heard. A Christian friend and I hear it frequently from a lady at our aqua-aerobics class - although I think she now says it to wind us up - but it a common accusation.

The first thing to say is that it is NOT true. As I understand that this series of sermons has a dual purpose :-

1. To answer your own questions

2. To equip you to answer any questions put to you by others

I am able here to give you a piece of armour for the fight. In 2004 the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford made a study of 32 wars in the 20th century and concluded that only THREE were caused by religion1. Assuming that your enquirers are honest seekers after the truth, this should give them something to think about. Interestingly enough the Northern Irish question was not one of the three wars. A matter which has not gone unchallenged but I maintain the study is right. Since this is the conflict nearest to us and one likely to be quoted I shall give some time to it.

The Irish question had its roots in the Middle Ages long before the division of Catholics and Protestants came about and the religious element was superimposed on an existing conflict. I went to one lecture on the matter when the speaker said “It was a faithless wife”, somewhat overlooking the fact that there had been also a faithless husband involved. In the clan warfare of 12th century Ireland, Diarmard McMurrough invited Henry II to help him regain his lost Kingdom of Leinster. Clan warfare! Is not the basis of clan the family and do we not tend to consider the family a good thing?

Henry II was not only King of England but also Duke of Normandy. What did Normans do? They conquered islands. They had conquered England; they

1 The study was commissioned by the BBC and can be read at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/world/04/war_audit_pdf/pdf/war_audit.pdf

had conquered Sicily. Ireland was one more but, unfortunately, they did not conquer Ireland as thoroughly as they had conquered England and the trouble lasted through the ages. King John and Richard II were two of the medieval monarchs who went to Ireland and suffered for it. Indeed, it may have cost Richard his throne. So by the time of the Reformation, when the English and the Scots changed their religion but the Irish didn’t, there was already four centuries of warfare for the religious problem to be superimposed on. Indeed, Ireland had never been a famed for her devotion to Rome and some say the Irish never went to mass regularly until the English told them not to!

King John and Richard suffered from their disastrous visits to Ireland! Rightly or wrongly, in the past a king was expected to be a successful military leader like Henry V. It is difficult to fault historically Thucydides’ definition of peace as “an interval between wars” and in the last three generations, despite the 32 wars of the 20th century, we in the west have enjoyed a very long interval which has led us to think of a very exceptional era in history, an abnormal era, as the norm and to ask when war breaks out, “What went wrong?” Here I have to touch on the subject the Rector is going to address next week… evolution. I do not know what he will say but I am accepting evolution and point out that in this process animals, including humans, have strong aggressive instincts which have be important for protection of the young and survival of the species including our own. If anything these instincts, increase when we cease to be hunter gatherers and become farmers because we need land on which to grow crops and land has to be defended. Much of the warfare of the Old Testament is about this. Our former Archdeacon, on a visit here, described the book of Joshua as a “genocidal land grab”. In this genocidal land grab women can be as aggressive as men. In my youth the view was often expressed that if only the world were ruled by mothers there would be no wars; but Mrs Thatcher went to war, Mrs Ghandi went to war, and Mrs Golda Meir went to war. The song of our Old Testament reading is that of a woman Deborah, Judge of Israel who was rejoicing because another woman, Jael had lured the enemy commander into her tent and driven a nail through his temples giving the Israelites victory. Deborah is taking no prisoners. However, it is interesting to note that, in the story of evolution, compassion also grows; there are examples of it are found in the higher

animals, you probably recall the case where the gorilla protected the little boy who fell into the pit.2

If we get kinder and more loving through natural selection this is a reversal of what the ancient world believed. We can grow in goodness and can do so as individuals as well as a species, which is surely what we should all be trying to do. To be more Christ-like. Sadly, there are some people in the world who are afraid of goodness which was why they were afraid of Jesus as our New Testament reading reminds us.

However, I am going to assume that most of those who put these hard questions to you are people of good will who really want to know. In today’s world they will have a complete reversal of the thinking of Biblical times. The Jews had their story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall; the Greeks had a belief that there had been a Golden Age which was followed by a Silver Age, was followed by a Bronze Age which was followed by an age of lead. The golden age had been in the past whereas today, I think we believe the Golden Age is in the future and it is our duty to work for it; and in this is not religion, not least Christianity, one of the driving forces? Indeed many of our critics who will tell you that religion is the cause of so many of the problems of the world are taking their stand on Christian values, many found with difficulty through the centuries e.g. abolition of the slave trade, social justice. We and they must look at both sides of the issues.

There is considerable evidence that, if you want people to do evil you must persuade them it is in a good cause. Have there not been experiments where people were told to give others electric shocks in the public interest and most of them were willing to do so?3 In John le Carré’s novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the spymaster has quite a long monologue in which he describes the means used by the two sides in the Cold War as similar but justified by the ends. In those wars which HAVE been caused by religion such as the Crusades, the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, the leaders have been motivated by the strong conviction that they were doing the will of God, as were those who carried out the Inquisition, the persecution of 2 Jersey Zoo, 31st August, 1986; and another case at Brookfield Zoo, Illinois, 16th August 1996.

3 Research pioneered by the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984).

witches and other such events at which we raise our hands in horror and which, doubtless, led to this question being put. I am not trying to say religion causes no wars nor any problems but it is far from being the only cause.

Reformers of good will can bring problems which is what our New Testament reading illustrates…the man who cleared his house of a devil. Let me give a modern illustration. In the mid 20th century a group of well-meaning people decided that there was one aspect of education that had to be abolished at all costs, selection at the age of 11. I do not wish to enter here the argument as to whether this was a devil, but they thought it was. In succeeding in their aim they gave rise to an enormous number of unforeseen ensuing problems, the sort of thing we now call, “the law of unintended consequences” with which we have to contend, but that was NOT a problem caused by religion.

Having mentioned the Cold War, I have to remind you that our Marxist critics would argue that all wars are class warfare. Whatever you think you’re fighting about, you’re fighting about class.

The religion I have talked about most has for obvious reasons been Christianity but I want to quote to you something the present King of Jordan has said about Islam in his book, The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril.

“One of the things of the last two decades that has saddened me is the misinterpretation of a great faith as a result of the misguided actions of a few. Such people embrace a deviant form of Islam. They constitute a unrepresentative minority of the 1.57 billion Moslems in the world but have a disproportionate impact on how the faith is perceived… turning their backs on over a thousand Quranic scholars in the name of what they presume to be 7th century Arabia”.

This is the nub of the problem addressed by your hard question, isn’t it? An unrepresentative minority in all faiths have a disproportionate impact on how faith is perceived, they probably are turning their backs on much of the history and wisdom of their faith, laying at the door of religion all the problems of the world. They influence the honest enquirer… and they must not be allowed to go unchallenged.

Amen.

30th June - Is religion to blame for the troubles of the world? Mark Lewis

Ezekiel 34:1-10, 1 Peter 2:9-17

When a question with a negative emphasis is posed (and it is generally the case that ‘hard questions’ have a negative slant) it is easy to become overly defensive. Typically a reactive response is to behave like the opposition in government - called to take a critical stance and impose their own partisan thinking even though their opposite numbers may have a very good point. So we should not be squeamish about addressing questions like this. Only an uninformed fool would say – in the light of the evidence past and present – that religion per se, has not caused some of the major problems in the world. But religion cannot be held responsible for all of them.

So the issue needs to be unpacked and we need to confront some uncomfortable home truths. First let’s begin at the beginning – how religion came to be important in human social and cultural development. This helps to give a better understanding of why it sometimes goes awry. In the earliest times, as people began to sensitise themselves to the world as they became self-aware, religion began as a response to the dilemmas that self-awareness created. It developed to provide people with a framework of meaning offering hope, belonging and security (and in essence it performs this function now). Rituals help to bond community and give outward form and meaning to the key moments in life.

However, in a pre-scientific era (notably the axial era) it offered explanations for some things that in a more enlightened age we might explain differently. This is particularly the case for so-called ‘natural evil’. However, most of us would not now explain violent storms such as the devastating Oklahoma hurricane or virulent diseases such as AIDS, for example, as judgements from God. But evil that has been instigated by human hands in the name of religion is another matter. The problem is that most religions start with a positive communal agenda and then – in the hands of some individuals or communities - have had a habit of becoming poisonous and hateful – a means by which its adherents end up reinforcing human differences rather than

trying to overcome them. Religion can easily become a stick to beat people who do not agree with the party line. This has been true of many world faith traditions. The dark side of religion is never more apparent than when it relies on central authority, claiming to be universally true and demanding to be believed. But history has shown (and contemporary life continues to demonstrate), that you cannot coerce people into a framework of religious belief without dire consequences. Another home truth – the Bible itself is rightly a source of contention among religious critics.

The Bible has been used to justify misogynistic attitudes to women which still continue in the present. It has caused much anger and misery over same-sex relationships. Scripture has also been used to defend anti-semitism. One of the more contentious Biblical issues is that of slavery. Owning slaves was the norm during the period covered by the scriptures and it is not condemned by Jesus or by St Paul. It was accepted as a social and cultural norm. This fact has of course, been used uncritically and without compunction, to justify the hideous practice of slavery in our own recent history.

If we look to the Bible we cannot ignore the many atrocities in the Old Testament! Critics of religion are eager to point to these. We have to accept that there are many violent acts to be found in these scriptures that we would never countenance in our time. Such murderous acts in the modern world would be condemned vociferously.

There are some arguably bad things in the Good Book. Bishop John Spong has remarked that religious people have a curious blind spot about this - a strange ability not to see the negative side of our religious symbols and stories. This is apparent in wider Christian culture, for if we look around the world, we can see that many Christian nations (or at least those with a high population of Christians) over the last 200 years have demonstrated a poor track record in their application of the Gospels; we have seen wars, racism (South Africa and Apartheid), genocide (as in Rwanda), tribalism and its consequent murderous outcomes (as in Northern Ireland and elsewhere). It is hard to believe that committed Christians can commit such evil acts. What is particularly disturbing to comprehend is that so many evil deeds have been performed by

people of faith, who believe that they are doing it in God’s name and are certain of their salvation.

So why has this happened? The short answer must be – the impact of human nature and of course, our unbridled will to power. People in positions of authority – political leaders who wield power over their dominion (especially in the past) have appropriated divine power to justify their own oppressive human power structures. Religion at its worst has been a cruel instrument of control and manipulation. So it is not difficult to see why people may have a negative view of religion and its impact on the world. When religion does evil things or is taken to justify immoral acts it is inauthentic religion. It is not the tenets of a religion that are at fault but the ways in which they are interpreted and applied – and the most literal interpretations often lead to some of the most appalling human misery, guilt and fear. In the 21st Century, our world view is different, because we now know more about ourselves and the laws of our universe. We know that spiritually, we are all interconnected at the profoundest level and science has supported faith in making us realise – not least through concerns over climate change and other ecological challenges - that we have a greater responsibility to each other.

Unfortunately, so much criticism of religion dwells on history – past misdemeanours, errors and atrocities, and of course our global-media machine spotlights all too easily the religious horrors of the present wherever they occur. But all this can skew our understanding of religious value and purpose. It has to be said of course, that this vast media enterprise that we have developed over the last few decades has done a great deal to distort people’s wider understanding of what religion achieves for the good in the world. We all know that most journalism focuses on the negative side of life because bad news sells newspapers and increases media ratings (Cynical but true!). Rarely do good works get much coverage.

The full picture however, is far from negative. The world needs to be reminded that religiosity at its best builds up fellowship, community hope and belonging. It is about people and service. Its culture of ritual, supported by music and all the arts serves to elevate the human spirit. The best of

Christianity shows us how to expand consciousness and follow the genuine path of Jesus into greater inner development. But it does all this to point us to something ultimately real and something higher than ourselves. This is authentic religion.

So in the final analysis, no, I do not think religion can be held to account for most of the problems in the world. Unfortunately, religion all too often is a victim of the ‘halo effect’ – where one bad thing is acknowledged, which then influences people’s perception of the whole enterprise and they regard it all as evil. Sadly, this frequently seems to be the tenet of much populist thinking. Given that our contemporary world is substantially driven by secular values, a great many misdemeanours and immoral acts cannot be attributed to religious motivations. (On a positive note, some would argue that secularism has even moderated some of the excesses of our religious past). The greed of bankers, sex crimes and child abuse, organised drug crimes, gangsterism, etc. have significantly evolved in a secular culture. Religion surely cannot be seen as their motivating force.

So we must encourage others to look to the best that religion can offer and show that “As servants of God, (we) live as a free people, yet do not use (our) freedom as a pretext for evil” (1 Pet 2:16). This means that in our own faith, we must be sensitive to show that Biblical authority is to be applied with care and discernment if it is to address the challenges of our age. Authentic religion must be allowed to flourish and show the world it is life-giving and relevant. As Christian writer John Hunt has remarked: “Religion can support you when you have nothing and can give you something to reach for when you have everything”.4

4 John Hunt, Bringing God Back to Earth – Confessions of a Christian Publisher, O Books, 2004

30th June - Evolution and the Bible Ian Tarrant

Genesis 2:4-9, Ps 8, Colossians 1:13-20, John 1:1-9

Imagine that you are leaning over the garden fence chatting with a neighbour about lawnmowers and lettuces, and suddenly the neighbour says something like ‘you go to church, don’t you - what about evolution and the Bible?’ Or your six-year-old daughter comes home from school and says, “The Bible is wrong mummy: God didn’t make people, evolution did!” How are you going to give an answer that makes sense, before your neighbour runs indoors to escape a cloudburst, or your six-year-old gets lost in CBeebies? Before we get to the answers, we need to do some thinking about both evolution and the Bible… and how we handle both as Christians. Evolution The theory of evolution, as we understand it today, is a way of understanding the development of life on this planet. It says that over hundreds, thousands, millions of years, successive generations of plants and animals have diversified and become more complex, as a result of two processes working hand in hand. One process is the random mutation of species, so that a new generation has a characteristic that the previous generation did not have. The second process is so-called natural selection, or survival of the fittest. If the variation in the offspring makes it more likely to survive, and to have children of its own, passing on the new characteristic to following generations, then an evolutionary step has taken place. The whole process takes a very long time, because it takes many small changes over hundreds of generations to bring about significant change; and it is extravagantly wasteful, in that most mutations don’t give an advantage in survival; and are simply lost to the future. Millions of years and millions of failures! This theory has been used to explain the enormous range of different living things on our planet, and that includes the ones alive today, and the ones known to us only through history books and fossils.

The theory of evolution is a theory that explains the facts that we can observe pretty well, in a way that no alternative theory has matched. And now that scientists understand genes and DNA, we have a much better understanding of how it works than when Charles Darwin wrote his famous book, On the Origin of Species, 150 years ago. There are gaps in the theory, unanswered questions, but each time that I read up on it, the gaps seem smaller; and I see these as things to marvel at, rather than weaknesses in the theory. The questions still open in my mind relate to: • the way in which DNA relates to the size, shape and structure of a living

thing • some of the great jumps in complexity and ability that seem to have taken

place in the fossil record • how is it that human beings are so different in their abilities from other

animals? As Chesterton put it in 19255, how is it that our remote ancestors could paint reindeer on the walls of their caves thousands of years ago; but no reindeer has ever painted a picture of a human being?

• and the way in which so many creatures are so much more clever or beautiful than they need to be. The sheer abundance of life - or the sheer abundant fullness of life!

• how is that the chemistry and physics of the universe make this abundant life possible? (If you have ever been to LegoLand you will have been amazed at what can be constructed with such simple building blocks - the basic building blocks of the universe are fewer in type than Lego bricks - and not only is everything made from them, the blocks have put themselves together!

• and how did that process of self-assembly begin?

Bible Let’s now turn our attention to the Bible, and what it says about the history of life on earth. It is widely accepted that in the book of Genesis we have two stories of creation, perhaps initially from two different storytellers, each with their own axe to grind. Just as two different newspapers will tell the story of yesterday’s tennis in quite different ways. Yet we could accept both stories as ‘true’ accounts.

5 G. K. Chesterton The Everlasting Man, 1925

The first story, in Genesis 1, is the one we know best, partly because it is written like a beautiful poem, and partly because it comes first, and when we get to the second one we skip over it because we think of it as a repetition of the first one. If you compare the two stories, you will see that there are two different sequences: Gen 1: plants, animals, people as the climax Gen 2: people as the priority, plants, animals. And there are other surprising differences that I haven’t time to explore now. Two different stories then, with two key messages: that God is the creator of everything; and that human beings have a special place within the creation. Of course, we also have a New Testament story of creation, which we read today. John uses the Greek word Logos, a word from we get our English word logic, but which all English Bibles translate as Word. The Greek word embraces rationality, order, communication, and defies the English language to come up with an exact equivalent. John is trying to say that there was an intelligence, a rationality, a logic, which was eternally part of God before the creation, and which was active in the creation, so that every created thing was influenced by this Logos. Of course John then goes on to claim that the Logos of God became a human being in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us dwell on the idea of the whole creation being touched by the divine logic. Every particle, every wave. Every molecule, every pattern. Every virus, every cell. All the plants and animals that have come into being. All these were influenced by the rationality of God. The message of this creation story in John, is that God’s hand, his rationality, his planning even, is behind it all. Neither John nor the authors of Genesis had the language or the mathematics to present what we think of as a scientific account of creation - but each of them has a point to make. Bringing Bible and science together Let’s bring each of these creation stories into conversation with the story of evolution. Some Christians take the easy way out, and say that God created a world that looks very old, in just six days, with fossils in the rocks, and the light from distant stars already on its way to us. I have no doubt that almighty God could have done that if he had wanted to. But it seems a rather deceptive way to create the universe. I believe that the truth is more amazing, and more subtle with the world developing from a beginning point

and becoming more complex because of the building blocks that God created at the beginning. What would the author of John’s gospel want to say about evolution? That it was God’s way of populating the planet that he had made - it might be wasteful, but it has an elegant beauty. Mutation and natural selection are God’s servants obeying God’s Logos to build the plant and animal kingdoms. Until such time as the Logos became flesh to preach the kingdom of God - and invite human beings to become children of God. What of the two stories in Genesis? Both declare the importance of human beings in God’s plan. We are more in God’s eyes than viruses or moulds, more than vegetables or mammals. If all is random and pointless - what value has human life? But if humanity was God’s target from the beginning, then we should lift up our heads in wonder, in pride, and also in humility. Conclusion So how do we answer the neighbour or the schoolgirl? I would first want to say that evolution is not a problem for us Christians. Evolution was God’s way of creating human beings. Although we say that Christopher Wren built St Paul’s cathedral, that is only shorthand: the chances are that he didn’t lift a single brick - he got others to do it for him. But that doesn’t take away from the brilliance of Wren as an architect and engineer. When we say that God made man that is shorthand too: he got mutation and natural selection to do it for him. The more we learn about it, the more evolution shows how clever God was in inventing it. The basic consistent behaviour of waves and particles builds up to make something amazingly complex. I would want to add a third point, for both the neighbour and six-year-old. Millions of years of work have gone into making each one of us: that makes each one of us very valuable in God’s eyes: we are his treasure, and Jesus came to tell us so. Three short soundbite answers then:

Evolution was God’s way of making us. Evolution reflects the amazing wisdom of God. Evolution tells us how valuable we are to God.

Thanks be to God!

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