March 09

God, me and Darwin

There’s been a lot of coverage on TV about the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the impact of Origin of Species. The arguments still rage, and they seem particularly polarised in America where opposing camps have pushed each other into either Creationism – God created the world literally in 6 days – or secular Evolutionism – there is no God, what we have it what evolved. There was no creator’s mind behind it.

I’m not happy with either. One seems to close its eyes to the evidence Science provides, and the other shuts out all possibility of a God.

What’s my starting point? The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), himself a Christian, once said “The finger of God and the tongue of God cannot clash” – which makes sense to me. If there is a God, then what he says (in Scripture) and what he does (in natural history) should be reconcilable. If they don’t, then my understanding of either science or the Bible needs looking at again.

As an Evangelical, my tendency is always to take the bible at face value if at all possible. I have no trouble accepting that the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection, the miracles of the Old Testament prophets etc. happened just like the bible says they did.

But I’m just as sure that not every single bit of the Bible was MEANT to be taken as literally true. I start with Jesus. He taught a lot of truth, but in parables. There really was a road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and no doubt travellers got mugged on it from time to time. But there’s no need to assume Jesus had a specific incident in mind when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. It works perfectly well as a story that opens our minds up to an important truth.

And that’s how I approach those early chapters of Genesis, and the creation stories especially. The Bible is not an encyclopedia. It does not seek to answer every question. Its focus is fairly narrow – it tells one big story about God’s relationship with the human race and how he keeps coming back to restore that relationship. The major difference between the Bible and a scientific textbook is that the Bible asks WHY? and the science book askes HOW? I have trouble labelling the creation stories as mere “myth” because that feels too much like putting them in the same category as Robin Hood and King Arthur, but calling them “parable” works for me. I’m free to see truth in them - a creator’s hand, will and purpose – and look to science to show how He did it.

I’m even free to see echoes of fact in the parable. You can find places in the Euphrates valley where three metres or so of flood-deposited mud lies on top of earlier human settlement. There may well have been catastrophic flooding that lodged in the collective mind of the peoples of that region for many generations after. And later, God calls to Abram, and it swims into focus as believable history.

Am I here by accident? No, I’m here by a purposeful process, with a specific goal in mind. I’m much more than a thinking bag of chemicals. I matter to God. And He hopes that he matters to me.

Simon

All Saints’ Higher Walton

March 09