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.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
In George Herbert’s ‘The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life’ , first published in 1629, he gives some advice to his clerical readers on what to do should they ever have to visit an atheist. Firstly he cautions that arguing with an atheist is pointless, ‘for’, he writes, ‘disputation is no cure for atheism’ He does, however, suggest dropping certain ideas into the conversation. The first notion he suggests to drop in is this, to say‘...he sees not how a house could be either built without a builder, or kept in repair without a housekeeper.’ Implying that if a structure as relatively simple as a house could not come about without a builder, or be maintained without a handyman, then how could the intricately complex universe have come about and continued without a Creator God to initiate 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.”
Unfortunately, endowed with the ingenuity that God has bestowed upon all humanity, atheists are rather a resourceful lot. The Big Bang Theory and The Theory of Evolution provide perfectly serviceable explanations of how the material order of the universe and life on earth could come about without direction from a guiding hand. The Big Bang and Evolution are explanations of creation distinctly more plausible to most people today than the account given in Genesis.
Personally, I do believe the creation account given in Genesis to be true. I think it holds remarkable insights into the nature of the human condition. For instance, the insight that we ourselves are creators made in the image of our Creator God, and that we are asked to be stewards of His creation; or, the insight that disobedience to the word of God fractures our communion with the divine and with each other.
I do not however for one moment 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 composition 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, and criticising Genesis for not being scientific is like complaining that Adam couldn’t tell you the time of day if you asked him.
If Genesis is not a scientific account of Creation, then 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.
I sometimes wonder if those determined to take the poetry of the bible literally actually think that Solomon’s lover in the Song of Songs had two fawns stuffed up her shirt, chapter 7 verse three reads, ‘Your breasts are like two fawns, twin fawns of a gazelle.’ I would get that looked at if I were you love.
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 hidden meaning, the story may or may not in reality have happened, the point is in the meaning revealed, to fixate on the origin of the story is to miss the point. It’s a bit like hearing a joke and asking, ‘but where was this bar that the Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman walked into?’
Allegory was the dominant form of understanding in biblical times, in our own times the dominant form 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 erroneous; rather it is that we moderns have been stupid enough to think that the ancients took their mythology literally rather than symbolically.
So I believe in the creation account given in Genesis, that is 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 persuasive evidence of the existence of a builder. In the Big Bang Theory 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 also that atheists have sufficient faith to believe that houses do indeed build themselves, they argue that our existence here on this small blue-green planet is sufficient evidence that chance combinations of events, such as colliding particles or genes, can produce the intricate orderliness of the material world without the assistance of a master builder. For instance, Richard Dawkins, in his book, ‘The Blind Watchmaker’, argues that through random mutations natural selection can produce complex biological organisms without any help from a plan.
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 will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly hitting the keys. There may well be millennia of gobbledegook, but at some point, without intent, the monkeys will hit the correct combination of keys required and Romeo and Juliet and Othello and Iago and all the rest of Shakespeare’s characters will appear.
To be fair, it could indeed happen. The existence of the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’, as written by William Shakespeare, who himself was 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 phenomenally unlikely, actually the idea that a house or the Complete Works of Shakespeare could come about by pure luck is phenomenally 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 clearly don’t have sufficient faith to be an atheist.
A physicist called Gerald L Schroeder calculated just how unlikely it was that the Big Bang would work, he’s was not trying to disprove it, he’s was just trying to show how finely tuned it had to be to work. He argues that 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 then none of us would be here. To try to put a more understandable scale on that kind of level of unlikeliness, 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 we are talking about has one hundred and twenty noughts, it makes millions and trillions look insignificant. So that’s a one in one followed by one hundred and twenty noughts chance of the Big Bang going pop the right way for life to exist.
If you imagine a bucket full of sand, how many grains would there be? Nowhere near that number. What about all the grains of sand on Scarborough beach? Nowhere close. How about all the sand on all the beaches in this country? Still not close. How about all the sand on every planet in the universe? That is still insignificant. This number is so huge it is 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 up on the existential roulette wheel, is epically, cosmically, unimaginably unlikely. So unlikely most reasonable people would say it was impossible or a miracle. Either we got astronomically lucky, or the hand of God was at work in creation.
The evidence of creation doesn’t prove the existence of God, neither does the Big Bang theory and Evolution disprove the existence of God, but the evidence of the created order certainly suggests the existence of a supreme Creator. Creation is itself an allegory, a story that reveals a hidden meaning. If you focus solely on the mechanics of the story you are likely to miss the point, but if you allow the story of creation, as told in the bible and by science, to search within you, then you will begin to find that you are loved and accepted by the source of all life and being.
Is our being governed by mere chance? What a bleak vision! No, “God is love, so love forever o’er the universe must reign.”
Amen.