Sermon for Tixover Harvest: Creation.

Psalm 65

1Praise awaits b you, our God, in Zion;

to you our vows will be fulfilled.

2You who answer prayer,

to you all people will come.

3When we were overwhelmed by sins,

you forgave c our transgressions.

4Blessed are those you choose

and bring near to live in your courts!

We are filled with the good things of your house,

of your holy temple.

5You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds,

God our Saviour,

the hope of all the ends of the earth

and of the farthest seas,

6who formed the mountains by your power,

having armed yourself with strength,

7who stilled the roaring of the seas,

the roaring of their waves,

and the turmoil of the nations.

8The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;

where morning dawns, where evening fades,

you call forth songs of joy.

9You care for the land and water it;

you enrich it abundantly.

The streams of God are filled with water

to provide the people with grain,

for so you have ordained it. d

10You drench its furrows and level its ridges;

you soften it with showers and bless its crops.

11You crown the year with your bounty,

and your carts overflow with abundance.

12The grasslands of the wilderness overflow;

the hills are clothed with gladness.

13The meadows are covered with flocks

and the valleys are mantled with grain;

they shout for joy and sing.

Genesis 1 

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day

In George Herbert’s book, ‘The Country Parson’, first published in 1629, he gives some advice to Parsons on what they should do if they ever have to visit an atheist (apparently they had them back then too). He cautions that arguing with an atheist is pointless, ‘for’, he writes, ‘disputation is no cure for atheism.’ However, he does, suggest dropping certain ideas into the conversation, one of which is to say ‘...he sees not how a house could be either built without a builder, or kept in repair without a housekeeper.’ The point being that if a structure as comparatively straight forward as a house could not come about without a builder, or be maintained without a handyman, then how could the fabulously intricate and complex universe have come about, and be continued, without God to create and sustain it?

It reminds me of a story told by the comedian Frank Skinner, he relates how “this bloke invited me back to his flat for a cup of tea. We walked in, he put the kettle on, we sat down, and immediately he started haranguing me for being a Catholic, ‘There is no God’, he said, ‘There was no intention behind creation. It was just an accidental big bang. Planets, people...they just happened. No mastermind, it was just a fluke... Anyway’, he says, getting up from the table, ‘that tea won’t make itself.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.”

For many people the Big Bang Theory and The Theory of Evolution provide serviceable explanations of how the material order of the universe, and life on earth came about, the tea did make itself, as did the universe.

Personally, I believe Genesis to be true. Genesis explains that we ourselves are creators because we are made in the image of our Creator God, and we are asked to be stewards of His creation. There is also the great truth that following our own way, like Adam and Eve, rather than the way of God, breaks our relationship with God and with each other.

However, I do not think the creation story in Genesis is a scientific account of how things came to be, how could it be? Human history had thousands of years to wait following the writing of Genesis before the notion of ‘science’ even came about. Expecting Genesis to be a scientific account of creation is like expecting Adam to own a wrist watch. Criticising Genesis for not being scientific is like complaining Adam couldn’t tell you how many minutes past the hour it was.

If Genesis is not a scientific account of Creation, what it is? It is certainly a beautiful account, it is a poetic account – it is actually written in the form of a poem, and it is a theological account – it tells us about our relationship to God.

Paul writing in Galatians 4 refers to the story of Abraham’s sons in Genesis as ‘allegory’. An allegory is a story that reveals a meaning, the story may or may not in reality have happened, the truth is in the meaning revealed.

In biblical times allegory was a common way of understanding the world, in our times the dominant way is science, which is why we are so often at cross purposes with the ancients. It is not that we moderns have been clever enough to expose the stories of the ancients as wrong; rather it is that we moderns have been stupid enough to think that the ancients understood all their mythology literally rather than symbolically.

So I believe in the creation account given in Genesis, I am someone who thinks that God created you, me and the universe, but I am not a Creationist, that is someone who thinks that the account of creation given in Genesis is an alternative to a valid scientific approach to discovering the origins of life and the universe.

In other words, I am as likely to dispute with an atheist as with a Creationist.

To return to Herbert’s conversation piece, the existence of a house being excellent evidence of the existence of a builder. In the Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution we may have discovered the tools used to build the house, but it by no means follows that we can reject the idea of a builder. Houses do not build themselves, and the discovery of a builder’s yard full of pallet loads of bricks and a cement mixer does not change this.

As Herbert noted, atheists can be given to disputation, but it seems atheists do have sufficient faith to believe that houses build themselves, they believe that chance chaotic combinations of events, such as colliding particles, can produce the intricate orderliness of the material world without the assistance of a master builder.

There is even a modern parable to help us understand this; it is the ‘Complete Monkey Works of Shakespeare’ theory. The argument runs that given an infinite amount of time a troupe of monkeys sitting at typewriters would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly hitting the keys. It may take millennia of gobbledegook, but at some point, without intent, the monkeys would hit the correct combination of keys and Romeo and Juliet, and Othello and Desdemona, and all the rest of Shakespeare’s characters would appear.

To be fair, it could indeed happen. The existence of the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’, as written by William Shakespeare, who himself was descended from the common ancestor of an ape, could be sighted as supporting evidence, if your logic was sufficiently circular.

Given enough time, a builder’s yard, by random combinations of chance events over an infinite period of time could produce a house in which George Herbert could happily sit and dispute with an atheist.

It just doesn’t seem very likely.

It seems to me the balance of probability is with God, not with the monkey typing pool.

That creation could come about by luck is astronomically unlikely, actually the idea a house or the Complete Works of Shakespeare could come about by luck is astronomically unlikely, the idea that the whole created order could come about by luck is indescribably unlikely. It takes incredible faith to believe that on the existential roulette wheel our number just happened to come up. I don’t have sufficient faith to be an atheist.

The physicist, Gerald L Schroeder, calculated how likely it was that the Big Bang would work, he was trying to show how finely tuned it must have been. He argued if the forces propelling the Big Bang were just a fraction out then there would be no life in the universe. The fine tuning required was such that if there was a change of 1 part in 10 to the power of 120 none of us would be here. To try to put a more understandable scale, people talk about a one in a million chance, or even a one in a trillion chance, well a million has six noughts, a trillion has twelve noughts, this number he is talking about has one hundred and twenty noughts - it makes millions and trillions look like nursery school numbers.

If you imagine a bucket full of sand, how many grains would there be? It would be nowhere near 10 to the power of 120. What about all the grains of sand on Skegness beach? Not even close. How about all the sand on all the beaches in all the world? Still not close. How about all the sand on every planet in the universe? That's still not there. This number is so huge it's nearly double the amount of particles (not atoms but sub atomic particles) estimated to be in the entire universe. The likelihood of the Big Bang producing life on earth, of our number coming, is epically, cosmically, unimaginably, phenomenally unlikely. So unlikely most reasonable people would say it was either impossible, or a miracle. Either we got lucky beyond belief, or the hand of God was at work.

Is our existence governed by mere chance?

Do we come from nothing, and, after a meaningless life, return to nothing?

What a bleak vision!

The truth is, “God is love, so love forever o’er the universe must reign.”

Amen.