Sermon Archive
Creationism
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Evensong on 17 March 2002
'Creationism versus Darwinism' was the subject of much political and media debate last week. A conservative evangelical school in the north of England was said to be 'undermining the scientific teaching of biology' by questioning the Darwinian theory of evolution. So-called 'faith schools' were already politically controversial. Now fuel was added to the fire, and a stick offered with which to beat not only the Prime Minister but also Ofsted, each of whom had spoken approvingly of the school in question.
Politics aside, this debate shows how far popular views of evolution have changed since the 19th century, when Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley the Darwinian scientist pitched in pugnaciously against one another on the subject. Last week, by contrast, Professor Richard Dawkins, one of the country's leading atheists, and the current Bishop of Durham, a much more conservative theologian than his predecessor, appeared to be on the same side in criticising creationists. Many leading scientists moreover, were quick to state that science and religion are not incompatible. As Sir Gabriel Horn, head of Zoology at Cambridge University put it, "Scientists seek to understand the universe... through observation and experiment. Science is an empirical discipline. So far as I am aware, no empirical tests have been devised that provide compelling evidence to refute the existence of a God." And Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, pointed out that "even the Catholic Church now officially endorses Darwinism". "Among the scientists I know," he said, "there are firm adherents of many faiths, as well as many agnostics and some atheists. Science need not conflict with religious attitudes and practices, which are also a proper part of education."
But, Sir Martin added, "There is overwhelming scientific evidence against simplistic creationism." By 'simplistic creationism', I take it, he means the view that the biblical account of creation in Genesis is literally or historically true. If this is what creationists believe, and at least some of them seem to, then why, one wonders, do they continue to defend this apparently lost cause? One reason perhaps, is out of frustration with the apparently inexorable advance, not of science, but of 'scientism' - the view that what can be discovered by scientific methods is all that there is, and all we need, to know about ourselves, the world and everything. Creationists, quite rightly, reject this view. But where they are wrong, I suggest, is in allowing their frustration with widespread unthinking acceptance of this simplistic view, to rush them into making an equally simplistic response.
This simplistic response, I believe, is misguided; and there are at least two reasons for saying this. The first is historical. Religion, long predating the rise of science, is concerned less with establishing facts than with establishing relationships. It is concerned with how to live in relation to God, other people and the whole created order. Our readings tonight illustrate this. What matters to Isaiah is Israel's relationship with God the Creator. In Luke's story of the seventy disciples, what matters is their hearers' relationship with the Kingdom of God, which has 'come near' them. In both cases, the relationship is not with an object, the 'molten' or 'graven' images to which some people say "you are our gods". It is a relationship with another subject, who not only cannot be reduced to an object in wood or stone, but also cannot be reduced to an object of our understanding. This is not just because God transcends our understanding. It is because the reality of God, like the reality of another person, can be known only personally. That is not, of course, to say that God is a person, since defining God as a person again is trying to objectify God. To say that God can only be known personally, rather, is to say that God can only be known as we open and offer ourselves up to what is beyond the horizon of our understanding, in many ways just as we would to another trusted and loved person.
This aspect of religion, however, was difficult if not impossible to fit into the view of the world which science needed to adopt in order to make progress. Because God can only be known personally, when people try to talk about this knowledge, either they have to use very abstract terms such as those I have just used, or, much more commonly, they simply talk in terms of their own experiences. This means that religious language about God is almost always local and particular. Science, by contrast, needs a universal and general language, and above all it needs to objectify. It cannot talk about God therefore, unless it reduces God to an objectified idea - in other words to an intellectual version of Isaiah's 'graven images' - and when it tries to do this, of course, it not unnaturally finds that it has 'no need for the hypothesis' of such an objectified, and thereby impoverished idea of God.
Now it is in reaction to this, I think, that creationists make their first mistake. For the creationist reaction is to try to take science on, on its own scientific ground, by saying "Oh yes, you do need the hypothesis of a God", and then to try to prove this, either by defending some version of the Genesis account of creation in scientific terms, or by looking for loopholes in Darwinian theories. No doubt such loopholes exist. But this approach has little hope of success except among already convinced creationists. In defending this lost cause moreover, creationist, and indeed most fundamentalist attempts to prove that the Bible is historically or literally true, have already sold the pass. For in trying to defend the biblical account, they have abandoned the Bible's own mythological and personal criteria of truth, in favour of the objective and impersonal criteria of modern science.
But while creationists have dug themselves ever deeper into this ideological hole, something else has been going on. It is no criticism of science, only of scientism, to say that a scientific view of the world is peculiarly inhospitable to the search for a meaningful human existence. For scientific purposes, the purpose of human life is reduced to survival and perhaps the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. In practical terms, of course, the often-expressed aim of early modern science was to conquer nature in order to make it work for human happiness. But the achievement of human happiness, like a scientific theory of everything, is forever being indefinitely postponed; and insofar as we rely, for happiness, on science and technology, we are always looking, unsatisfied, for more.
Against this background, an increasing number of people, while not rejecting science as a method, have realised that science alone cannot provide the metaphysical and moral insights we need, not only to live by, but also to guide the choices we must make about future directions in science itself. In many different fields, from cloning and stem-cell therapy to energy policy and global warming, we are faced with choices whose consequences for humanity and the planet are momentous. The question is no longer, as it was in the heady days of early modern science, how to conquer nature. It is rather how to cooperate with nature and, perhaps even more difficult, how to cooperate with one another. How we answer that question moreover, depends on how far we can agree on an even deeper one - the question of what, beyond survival and the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure, life - my life, your life and our life - is for.
The second mistake of creationists then, is to overlook the contemporary significance of this modern or post-modern quest for meaning. It means, clearly, that the advance of scientism is no longer as inexorable as it once seemed. In this respect, creationists are fighting yesterday's battles. This modern quest for meaning, of course, is commonly expressed less in religious terms, than in terms of a more individualistic 'spirituality'. But perhaps if you have no first-hand knowledge of religion, and know Christianity only through vague ideas of crusaders and creationists, thinking of meaning in terms of individual spirituality may seem safer and more sincere than thinking in terms of religion.
Whether today's individualistic spirituality is enough to get most people through life meaningfully, or whether more communal religious forms again will be needed, we cannot tell. But perhaps the future of religious organisations is not the main issue for the future of humanity, our planet, and our deepest selves. What matters more is whether we, individually or collectively, can remain open to the reality of what is other than ourselves. Whether or not we will make the best available choices in the 21st century, pretty clearly will depend on whether or not we are open to the reality of other people, other species, the environment, and the nature of the vast universe that science has revealed to us. But it will also depend, I believe, on whether we close ourselves off from, or open and offer ourselves up to, the ultimate reality beyond the horizon of our understanding.
That ultimate reality, Christians name and know, in our local and particular language, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; and we have no other myths or metaphors with which more appropriately to speak of this Creator who, we believe, made us for a meaningful existence. But God is not limited to our ideas of God; and in the end, the deepest test of our openness to God is not in our ideas about God. The deepest test is whether we recognise, and respond to, the One who says: "Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of my brethren, ye do it unto me."
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