CREATION AND EVOLUTION
It comes as quite a surprise to hear that Gospel this morning! We so much think of it as the Christmas Gospel. But of course those opening verses of St John are so rich that they can be read on many other occasions too. Among other things, they speak to us of God’s work in creation:
In the beginning was the Word...all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.
And that’s why we read them today, because - as you have certainly noticed - the theme of all today’s readings and hymns is just that: creation.
Now, interestingly enough, this “creation Sunday” in our church calendar coincides with an important anniversary which is being celebrated in Britain particularly, but also in the scientific world more generally: 12 February 2009 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the father of modern biology.
Moreover, 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of the publication, in 1859, of The Origin of Species, Darwin’s great book on evolution and natural selection. It is no exaggeration to say that that book changed for ever the way we think about life on earth, and how it came to be as it is.
At the time, however, Darwin’s book was not well received by many people in the church, and particularly by leading bishops of the Church of England, who denounced it as a threat to belief in God as creator.
Bur gradually Darwin’s theory came to be accepted not only throughout the scientific world but also by all but the most conservative of Christians. Apart from a few extremists in the remoter corners of the American bible belt, one would have said that the great debate about Darwin was over.
However, in recent years, conservative Christian opposition to Darwin has come to the fore again, and we seem to be having to fight again battles which we thought were over. In a number of places in the USA, but also here and there in the UK and elsewhere, fundamentalists - both Christian and, by the way, Muslim – are demanding that schools teach both evolution and what they call “creationism” as alternative theories of our biological origins.
Now, not being a scientist myself, and knowing that some of you are, I hesitate to plunge into this debate, but I feel it’s important to try and say something, so I will just ask the indulgence of those who are more expert than I – and do please feel free to tell me where I might have got the science a bit wrong.
Basically, what I want to say is this:
The theory of evolution as understood by Darwin, and developed by those who have come after him, is in no way a threat to Christian belief in God as Creator. Certainly evolution has changed the way we think of creation, but in a way which can in fact enrich our understanding of God’s creative work and deepen our wonder.
So what did Darwin say, and why did it so upset religious believers? During the first half of the nineteenth century, geologists and biologists were beginning to realise that the earth must be very much older than had been thought, and that over millions and millions of years different species of plants and animals seemed to have evolved from one another. What Darwin did was to make this idea of evolution explicit, and above all to provide a mechanism for it: to explain how evolution had come about.
The mechanism was what we call natural selection, often summed up as “the survival of the fittest”. In other words, in the competition for survival in a world of limited resources, those individuals with characteristics best adapted to survival in their environment would breed successfully and so their characteristics would be handed down so as to shape the further evolution of the species.
So why did this idea upset Christians so much?
First, many people were horrified by Darwin’s assertion that human beings had evolved from the apes (and ultimately from much simpler organisms). This seemed to blur the boundaries between humans and other animals; it seemed to undermine man’s “specialness” as the crown of God’s creation; it detracted from human dignity.
I think we can dismiss this objection rather quickly because really it’s mainly an emotional reaction rather than an intellectual one. On the one hand it’s obvious, despite our origins as apes, that human beings are very different from the rest of the animals. And on the other hand, in a world that has suffered so much from man’s lording himself over his environment, Darwin’s reminder that we are actually part and parcel of nature is absolutely vital for our survival.
Secondly, Darwin seemed to contradict the biblical account of creation. The Book of Genesis knows nothing of gradual evolution: the different species were all created fully made, just like that, and God did it all in just six days – and probably only about 6000 years ago.
Well, in my view, Darwin does not at all undermine the truth of the Bible, but he has made us read the Bible differently. He has made us realise that the Bible is not a scientific textbook. We see clearly now that religious truth and scientific truth are, as it were, different animals, different species we might almost say. But they are not in competition with one another; they are complementary.
Thus, the Book of Genesis is not a work of science. The early chapters of Genesis are not to be taken as history. But what matters is that the faith expressed in the Book of Genesis, its religious message about God as Creator, this has not changed, and is as true as it always was.
And the message is this:
that everything that is has its origin in God;
that everything that is is held in being by God
and that everything God has made is good (which is incidentally the true basis for our belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, and it should also give us a reverence for the whole of the natural world).
Certainly evolution has changed the way we think about God’s creation. We can no longer think of it as a one-off event that happened at a particular point in time. Rather, we have to think of God’s creation as a continuing, ongoing process, a permanent part of God’s activity rather than something he did once and that was that. I think that makes God’s creation seem more rather than less wonderful.
We can now think of God’s creation, the natural world, the universe, as something that is in a constant process of development, in constant “evolution” indeed; as something which goes on growing and goes on surpassing itself. And we can think of God as the origin, the sustainer and the goal of the whole process.
Maybe – and here, I would have to admit, I am moving more into the realm of speculation – but maybe we can think of God as being somehow “behind” or “inside” the processes of evolution, giving direction to them. Perhaps evolution is not just “blind”. Perhaps it is led forward by a divine purpose. Perhaps the emergence of beings who are capable of entering into a loving relationship with God is not just a happy accident. Perhaps it is the reason why, or one of the reasons why, God started the whole process in the first place.
And, finally, isn’t that exactly what today’s Bible readings are saying?
In St John’s Gospel, the way in which God expresses himself, his Word, is behind the whole creative process:
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
Which is exactly the same as Paul is saying in our reading from Colossians:
Through Christ all things came to be...in him all things hold together.
And if all this sounds a bit abstract and heavily theological, let’s turn to that wonderful poem that we read from the Book of Proverbs, where the author speaks of the creative Wisdom of God, and expresses a belief that God enjoys his creation:
When he marked out the foundations of the earth,
There was I beside him like a master builder;
And I was daily his delight,
Rejoicing before him always,
Rejoicing in his inhabited world
And delighting in the human race.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
2nd Sunday before Lent, Year B, 15 February 2009 (“Evolution Sunday”)
Prov 8.1, 22-31; Col 1.15-20; John 1.1-14.
