The creation stories of Genesis, as treated by modern biblical literalists, can give Christianity a bad name. As scientific fact, creation in six days, being thrown out of the garden of Eden and Noah’s flood defy everything I learned as a child and practised as a professional geologist. So I’ve had a lifetime of wondering about creation. Fortunately scripture has much more to say about creation than we find in Genesis, as today’s readings make clear. We are challenged, as every thinking person is challenged, to wonder at creation. ‘Does not wisdom call?’ asks the writer of Proverbs, ‘and does not understanding raise her voice’?
It is this sense of wonder at creation which unites scientists and religious believers in a common quest for truth and the meaning of our existence. St. Anselm, writing nearly a thousand years ago wrote of ‘faith seeking understanding’ as he tried to prove the existence of God. Today in this parish we have in the Faraday Institute based at St. Edmund’s College one of the foremost organisations in the world dedicated to this joint enterprise by scientists who are believers. ‘Faith seeking understanding’ will never go out of fashion.
The more we as scientists investigate creation, the more wonderful and mysterious it appears. Each question answered and each puzzle solved reveals another layer of questions, and possibilities.
Modern ideas about the age of the earth, and the evolution of life started to emerge in the 19th century, but the discoveries in my lifetime seem even greater. One of the most amazing must be the so-called ‘Goldilocks principle’ that everything which emerged from the big bang which began time and space happened to be just right, like Goldilocks’ porage.
Too big, and the universe flies apart and there will be no stars and galaxies. Too small, and after the bang everything collapses again in a big crunch. Mathematicians have calculated just how precarious ‘just right’ is in the ‘big bang’ which began time and space.
The mean density of matter in the universe at the big bang has to be within 1 part in 1060 of the so-called ‘critical density’. Either way you have a boring universe with no possibility of life. Just right – to an accuracy of 1 part in 1060 is that required to aim a gun at a coin 14 billion light years away at the opposite end of the universe and hit it! Do you think that happens by chance?
Secondly, it turns out that the universe needs to be the vast size it is in order for humans to exist. A universe with just one galaxy would have finished in a month. But our universe of millions of galaxies has lasted the 14,000 million years which it takes to evolve human beings.
Thirdly, there must be an incredibly precise amount of order at the Big Bang. Mathematicians have calculated that there aren’t enough atoms in the universe to equal the number of possibilities of getting this sum wrong. And physicists have been struck by these coincidences. As Freeman Dyson puts it: ‘The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.’ At the dawn of time and space, conditions were just right to allow the possibility of the evolution of life, and ultimately, us.
Now, to geology. The idea that things evolve by chance is not the whole story. The Cambridge professor of evolutionary biology, Simon Conway Morris has written a book entitled ‘Life’s solution: inevitable humans in a lonely universe.’ His argument is that once evolution starts, certain things are bound to evolve. It is easy to appreciate that being able to move is useful to animals, and if we move, then some means of knowing our way, sight, hearing, even echo-location might evolve to direct the movement. A circulatory system with red blood cells to bring oxygen to every part of the animal will increase efficiency. Breathing air and moving on land are obvious advantages which will arise through evolution. Then when you can move, a brain is needed to tell the organism which way to go.
Evolution is convergent, that is, the same things evolve again and again because they are valuable to survival. Similarly, creatures with some kind of social organisation will outperform individuals. Last week’s TV programme about big cats showed how the kings of the jungle, lions, had a superior blend of both intelligence and social organisation than other big cats. They kill giraffe, buffalo and even elephants by teamwork, not by simple strength. Ants and bees succeed by teamwork. Dolphins work together to harvest shoals of fish. And in the primates, the triumph of the human race has come about not through superior strength, speed or size, but through the evolution of greater social organisation and intellect. There is more to evolution than chance, says Conway Morris, it is inevitable the creatures will evolve that might ultimately question their own existence, and wonder how they came to be. But, he says ‘Inevitable humans in a lonely universe.’ He thinks we are unique.
So, if evolution is essential, then death, which is as old as life itself, is also essential. It is not a mistake, and death is not the result of some primordial catastrophe. It is not a punishment meted out by an angry deity because of human disobedience. Unless life dies, there can be no evolution of higher, more complex species. Death has been built in from the beginning of life. There is no original perfection, for it is only with the inaccurate replication of DNA, through what appear to be mistakes, that evolution proceeds, and these mistakes are essential.
It is only in the last generation that scientists have dared to investigate this area, which has seemed to be forbidden territory, and actually named this process of deliberate cell death (Apoptosis. For two speakers on life and death see presentations by John Wyatt and Andrew Wyllie at http://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Speakers.php ). But our bodies are constantly making new cells and breaking down old ones, and if there were no mechanism for destroying the cells which are faulty we should be overcome by diseases, by cancers, by poisons and all the rest. Old cells are put to death and their matter is re-used in every creature.
This is not a fallen world in contrast to some original perfection. This is the creation God made and nurtured over 14 thousand million years, to the point where creatures made in the very image of God might inevitably emerge and start to question.
Who made me?
Why do I exist?
Why do we die?
Is there a god?
What is God like?
Reading through ancient myths, both pagan and those within scripture, we find many mistakes on the journey. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ though beautiful, is based on a mistaken idea of what God and creation are like. But ultimately our claim is that the unseen creator of all that exists formed a plan before the dawn of time and space.
Wisdom says ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.’
St. John says ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being’.
And Paul, writing to the Colossians, says ‘Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created.’
At last the purpose of creation is revealed by the creator. ‘God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’
God loves his creation so much that the creatures made in his image, given an awareness of their creator, will not perish, but be raised like Christ to eternal life. As we celebrate the creation with the help of today’s readings, let us add one more element, the praise of Creation in St. Francis of Assisi’s ‘Hymn of the Sun’. In it we dare to sing
And thou most kind and gentle Death,
Waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise Him! Alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God,
And Christ our Lord the way hath trod.
O praise Him! Alleluia!
Amen!
The Bible readings for this are those for Principal Service at
http://almanac.oremus.org/2018-02-04