GOD THE CREATOR

(Preached on Sunday, January 8, 2006)

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.                                      -Genesis 1:1-2

 

In the small town of Alachua, Florida lives a married couple for whom the evolution debate has transcended the merely distressing and become overtly hostile.  The wife is a science teacher in a local high school.  Word got out that she was teaching evolution, and, next thing you know, her husband had lost his golf partners.  They confronted him on the golf course about what his wife was teaching.  Now he golfs alone.

 

This sad story is representative of the pain that grips much of our nation in the debate over what our science teachers teach in our public high school classrooms.  Most Americans believe the debate stems from the teachings of Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species by natural selection, developed and published in 1859 and brought into sharp focus in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in the 1920s.  In truth it is a much older debate.

From the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers and scientists contemplating origins have recognized two alternatives: Either the various species were specially created in some way, or they evolved from pre-existing species.  With the rise of Christianity in Europe, the view of special creation dominated science until Darwin provided a logical explanation for how species evolved.  Darwin’s theory is good and while it does not answer all the questions involved in origins of life, it answers many, and many scientists would insist it answers most.

Unfortunately, Darwin had become an atheist, angry with God over the tragic loss of a daughter, and so he suggested in his writings that his theory did not require the presence or activity of God.

 

This continues to be what frightens many Christians about the theory of evolution, for while most scientists do not agree with Darwin’s theological conclusions, there are scientists who do and who, like Darwin grasp this scientific theory and use it as theology.

Richard Dawkins, a British zoologist and popular science writer currently leads the pack and has clearly set out to attack Christianity and support his own belief in atheism.

Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schonborn states it well when he argues that a scientist who uses evolution as the grounds for atheism is speaking as an amateur theologian, not as a professional scientist.

And the National Academy of Sciences, a self-selected body of the nation’s premier scientists, has asserted that “Science is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes.  Science can say nothing about the supernatural.  Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.”

 

One can be a good scientist and be a person of faith.

And one can be a person of faith and practice good science.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are separate disciplines and they do have points of contact.

Scientists are not theologians.  And theologians are not scientists.

But theologians and scientists can work together in understanding and explaining the universe.

 

Part of the struggle with science for Christians is actually an internal Christian struggle over how one reads the Bible.  Those Christians who promote pseudo-scientific theories for classroom use, such as “scientific creationism” and “intelligent design” want to read the bible literally.

They read the beautifully poetic statement of faith in Genesis 1 as a literal, scientific explanation for the creation of the world.

Like the debate over evolution, this debate about how scripture is read is as old as Christianity itself.  In the third century the great biblical scholar Origen raised substantial doubts about whether a literal reading of the story made good theological sense.

In his view, the Bible includes stories that are both true and factual, such as the crucifixion of Jesus, and those that are true but not factual, like the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.  Was there actually a good Samaritan who helped a wounded Jew, or a son who wasted his father’s substance in riotous living?  Who knows, and even more important, who ultimately cares?  The power of the stories is independent of the question of whether they actually happened in space and time.

 

For Origen, the same is true for the account of creation. 

For from his “scientific” perspective there were “absurdities” in the account, like the idea of light and darkness existing before there were sun, moon and stars.  Origen believed that these were hints from God that the account was not to be read as history, but as truth in the “semblance of history.”  Nevertheless, it is still God’s truth and no one has an excuse not to pay attention to it.

The truth of this story in Genesis 1 is the teaching that God is the ultimate source of everything that exists.

It is a statement of faith in God, the Creator.

Belief in a Creator was therefore for Origen a conclusion of faith grounded in a proper reading of scripture.  It was intelligible, even rationally persuasive to believers, but did not rest on reason alone.

 

Intelligent design is the theory that the universe is too complex a place to be accounted for by an appeal to natural selection and the random processes of evolution.  Some kind of overarching intellect must have been at work in the design of the natural order.

The advocates of intelligent design present it as religion-neutral: the intelligent designer is not named and no claim is made that the designer is the Christian God.

In truth, all Christians believe in intelligent design, for as we have already demonstrated we believe in God, the Creator.  But that is an affirmation of faith, not a conclusion based on scientific inquiry.

The truth is, any person of faith will look for, and find, evidence in the natural world for the presence and activity of God.

That is what the biblical writers did and bear witness to over and over again.  But without that stance of faith, as scientists like Dawkins have demonstrated, one does not automatically sense the hand of God at work in the world.  Nor does one arrive at a belief in the God of Jesus, or of Moses, or of Muhammed, for these three faith systems are based on special revelation, not natural revelation.

 

From a faith perspective, the better science becomes, the more science discovers about the workings of the universe, the stronger ones faith becomes, not weaker.

But it is because of our faith, and the interpretation that we bring to the knowledge and discoveries of science, that we see more and more evidence for the presence and activity of God, not vice versa.

 

For instance, currently scientists have come to understand that the universe seems to be “fine-tuned” to produce human life.  That is, tiny changes in the power of gravity, or in the weight of neutrons would have rendered life impossible.  From a faith perspective, that certainly indicates the active presence of a loving Creator bringing us to life.

But there are also other theories developing in physics.

One such theory is that there are actually multiple universes in existence where those fundamental constants are different.  This is one approach to explaining what happened at the birth of the universe, the Big Bang.  This theory believes that our universe formed somewhat like a big bubble out of a vast array of big bubbles.  Eventually, the theory goes, there would have been one or more universes in this array of universes with the right numbers for life.