EIN HARGLWYDDES SEREN Y MôR –
OUR LADY STAR OF THE SEA – LLANDUDNO
Fr Jones’s Newsletter - Sunday 15 February 2009
Dear Parishioner,
Have you seen any of those fascinating programmes on the television recently about the life and work of Darwin? It is the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, hence all the fuss. I hope you have seen some of them and have been able to watch them without any religious twinge, fearing that this great scientist was the beginning of the proof that God doesn’t exist, that every living and non-living thing is the result of pure chance, and that the Bible stories are a load of old rubbish. Quite the opposite: Darwin gives us a more wonderful understanding of God than even the sacred writer of Genesis could manage to do.
The first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, tells the story of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh. This is in clear contradiction to the findings of Darwin and the scientists who followed him. So the Bible is obviously wrong, and if it can be wrong on its very first page, it is probably wrong throughout. The foundation of the Jewish/Christian faith is therefore batted out into the long grass.
So, why did I enjoy so much these programmes on Darwin’s discoveries? Shouldn’t I have been shaking in my boots, as the foundation stone on which I have based my life and which I have preached to others is discredited?
To understand why I was not, let us look closely at the Book of Genesis itself. For starters, it is not a single book written by a single author. It is a very ancient collection of bits and pieces: bits of stories and pieces of factual history. The sacred editor of Genesis collected all these and set them out in a chronological sequence.
He started off by collecting the ancient stories that were first told around the camp fires of Israel.
If someone asked you, What is a Story?, what would you answer? Think of the stories we tell our children, like Red Ridinghood and Goldilocks. What would you think of a person who might interrupt a young mother telling her baby one of these stories by saying, “Don’t tell your baby lies”? Is the mother telling her baby lies when she tells her a story about Goldilocks, when Goldilocks never existed? Of course she’s not. She’s telling a story, not relating a piece of history, not reporting on what happened yesterday. She’s not telling lies because the story is true even though Goldilocks never existed. The truth of a story (unlike history) is in its meaning. And the moral of Goldilocks is that it is not safe for little girls to go down into the woods all by themselves.
The story of God creating the world in six days is just the same. It was never meant to be taken literally. The message of the story is that 1) God created everything (how he created it is not said); 2) that Man, created on the final day, is the climax of creation, God’s masterpiece, and 3)that it is important to worship God on the Sabbath, for God himself, according to the story, rested on that day. To see anything more in this scripture story is to go way off the mark. Fundamentalist Christians who try to interpret the story to fit the facts discovered by Darwin are making fools of themselves and revealing that they do not understand the way the Scriptures were formed nor how God uses them for our benefit.
God inspired the Sacred Editor of Genesis to put this story first so that we could understand the three most essential facts about ourselves: that God alone created us; that God created us as supreme among the life-forms, for we are created in his image and likeness, animated as we are with a spiritual soul; and that the worship of God is not an optional extra we can equate with other forms of recreation, but an essential element of our humanity, something that is creative and makes us truly human.
So you can sit back in peace and enjoy these wonderful programmes on the discoveries of Darwin and his successors. Wonder at the way in which God has created his Universe; not with the click of a divine finger, but with a divine hand stretched out over creation through millions and millions of years, causing it to develop by natural selection, growing, maturing and progressing entirely in accordance with his Divine Mind.
Scientists can get back to within a fraction of a second of the Big Bang. But it is a scientific fact that they cannot get beyond it. Beyond it there is nothing, but God himself, Father Son and Holy Spirit, existing as a Divine Community in perfect bliss. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. The great Christian revelation is that this God is Love itself. Because love always wants to share, “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness’...So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God He created them, male and female he created them.” And he did this not in six days but over billions of providentially controlled years.
God bless you,
FrAntony Jones