Sermon for Sunday 21st June 2009

May I speak in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

When I started to think about preparing this sermon I looked at the various set readings from the Bible for today, and thought about whether I could talk about any of the themes in those readings. In our lesson from the Old Testament today from Job, we have a Creation story.

Everybody thinks about Genesis when we talk about creation and creationism and so on, but there are other places in the Bible where God's work in creation is celebrated, and this, in the book of Job, is one of them. But I didn't get very far with my thought, because I quickly stumbled across the fact that today is Fathers' Day.

I'm not quite sure where Fathers' Day comes from. It doesn't seem to be a particularly religious festival, although I was intrigued to see that on the Church of England website, the Bishop of Worcester has produced a service for Fathers' Day and some special prayers.

I think probably that Father's Day is one of those mysterious things like this season's shade of green for your summer dress or the precise shade of white which Dulux will produce for the redecoration of your kitchen. Is it Barley White or Pearl White? It changes every year, I think.

I suspect that there's a secret conclave of style gurus who meet periodically in some tasteful location like Davos or Portofino, and they specify what is to be fashionable that year, which they then communicate to all the leading journalists and broadcasters, so that all of a sudden you realise that if you're going to be with it, you can't live without a green dress and you must celebrate Fathers' Day.

So today we are celebrating Fathers' Day. One alternative version of the Creed, in Common Worship, begins, 'We believe in God the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.' Although this – it comes from Ephesians 3 - is a literal translation of what St Paul said in the Greek, it's an instance where a literal translation doesn't actually express the true meaning. Clearly we are not all called by the divine name. I think that the nearest I can get to it is to say that what St Paul meant was that the Father, God, is the archetype of all fathers, fathers of all the families in heaven and on earth.

So that brings me back to my original focus, which is that God is the ultimate father. The passage in Job is a triumphant

assertion by God that He is the creator and the ultimate designer of our world. 'Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements...? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?'

It's very beautiful poetry, as well as making a very solid bid for God as the creator and designer of our world. But I just wonder whether this passage is a bit like the thing about the Father's name that I discussed a minute ago. In other words, secretly, we think of it as being rather far-fetched and difficult to make sense of, and so we either gloss over it or we say comfortable things like, 'It's just a metaphor, of course'. If we do that, how much do we really believe?

The whole relationship between our religious belief and what science teaches us is something which has been a controversial issue for Christianity almost from the earliest times. Can you really be a scientist and a Christian at the same time?

Recently we've been celebrating the Darwin 250th anniversary, and that has put into sharper focus the arguments which people have made against Christianity on the basis of Darwin's discovery of the theory of evolution. Some people have claimed that Darwin stopped being a Christian, but recent studies into his life seem to suggest that's not the case. He was a regular supporter of his local parish church and indeed gave them quite large sums of money right up until his death, although perhaps he wasn't a particularly regular attender at services.

Ever since the time of Galileo there has been an idea that in some way, scientific knowledge and religious belief contradict each other. You will remember that Galileo was ordered by the Pope to suppress his view that the earth went round the sun. This was all because the church clearly felt threatened. All through the time of the Renaissance and then into the era of Darwin, there really was a fear that the more the scientists found out, the less we would need God to explain anything, or to be a creator and sustainer.

In the sixteenth century there was a theologian called Paley who saw God as the 'cosmic watchmaker', and from that came the theory of so-called 'intelligent design' which is a pretty good way of summing up the message from the lesson in Job today. 'Who determined its measurements? Who stretched the line?' You know, God is there with a tape measure and a plumb line, making sure the building is four-square on its foundations.

But by the time we get to this century Paley's divine watchmaker has turned into Richard Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker. Richard Dawkins thinks that, because we know so much about how the world works and how creation functions, we have, in effect, pushed God out. We don't need Him any more, and in fact the way that creation works is by a series of accidents. It's not intelligent design but a blind watchmaker. If you put 1,000 monkeys to work typing, they will eventually type out the works of Shakespeare. Or so they say.

Perhaps another way of expressing the challenge comes from the famous neurosurgeon Henry Marsh who works at the Atkinson Morley Hospital near here and whom some of you may have seen on TV. He's a wonderful brain surgeon, and he's also a very generous and humane man who divides his time between his work in London and the Ukraine, where he goes off and operates in Kiev, doing the same operations he does in London, but this time for free. Henry Marsh has always been very impressed by the rather ghastly story of a man called Phineas Gage who was a navvy building the early railway lines in the United States in the 1860s. There was a terrible accident where gunpowder which they were using to blast the permanent way through a cutting blew up and a track spike was blown into Gage's forehead. Miraculously he didn't die. In fact he lived to a ripe old age when the spike had been taken out of his head. But as a result of the damage to his brain, his personality completely changed, and whereas before he'd been a nice man, friendly and generous, he became argumentative and bitter and mean. Henry Marsh argues from that, and from what he sees in his own operations, that actually all our emotions, and he says, all our perception of God, comes from within our own brains, and if you take away the right bit of the human brain you also take away our ability to believe in God and all our various religious thoughts such as worship and prayer. It's the same sort of thing: the more you know about the way the mechanism works, the less you need to believe in God.

It seems to me that there are in fact very good answers to this whole train of thought, and that it is definitely quite possible to be a very decent scientist and still to be a Christian. One of our leading theologians today, Professor Alister McGrath, started life as a physicist, as indeed did Professor John Polkinghorne, another leading theologian. From my own college, Oriel, the renowned philosopher of religion, Richard Swinburne, also started as a scientist. There are learned scientists among you in this congregation here.

One thing that all these people, who are able to reconcile being scientists with being Christians, perceive, is that just because we know how a mechanism works, we still haven't explained the fact that it works at all. Whether you think of the idea of an unmoved mover or a cosmic watchmaker, there's absolutely no doubt that whatever the machinery, somebody had to start it. There's a great deal of difficulty in the whole idea of creation from nothing. If you think of it in numbers, if you think of a series of numbers going backwards and backwards and backwards in an infinite regression, or if you think of something always being smaller than the previous thing, it's impossible to set a limit. There could always be another number, and we could never know what it was. And that is where, in one sense, you may find God.

You will realise that this is just act one of the divine opera. God created the machine: but then what? Pascal criticised Descartes by saying, 'I cannot forgive Descartes: in his whole philosophy he would like to do without God: but he could not help allowing him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion; ....'

'A flick of the fingers to set the world in motion.' But we believe that God didn't just start the world and then walk away. He sent Jesus, and the Holy Spirit – but that's for my next thrilling instalment!

Amen.

©Hugh Bryant June 2009