Parish of Llandudno North Wales, Rector's letter October 2008

October 2008

I’m typing this on an exciting day – the day that the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva was switched on. This is the vast machine which will send beams of particles hurtling around a 27 km circuit at almost the speed of light. By inducing collisions between these incredibly tiny objects scientists hope to reproduce the conditions just after the ‘Big Bang’ at the very beginning of the Universe. They hope that this will enable them to answer fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the origins of the universe.

As a nonscientist much of all this is a mystery to me, but I still find it fascinating and exciting. It’s a fundamental part of our human nature to want to understand the universe in which we live and of which we are part. Christians should not shy away from these developments but take a keen interest in them; after all it is God’s creation we are seeking to understand.

Although there are scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, who wish to rule out the existence of God, many others find that their work increases a sense of wonder and awe and strengthens their religious faith, or at the very least opens for them the possibility of the Divine. So there should be no real conflict between science and religion.

It’s a cause of great sadness to me that there are many Christians who turn away from certain aspects of science, and in particular from the theory of evolution. They want to make science conform to a literalist reading of the creation stories in the book of Genesis and so they advocate a pseudo science called ‘creationism’. This asserts (without any scientific evidence) that the creation of humanity came about by a special intervention of God rather than by a process of evolution from ‘lower’ forms of life.

Of course anyone who wishes to assert that God did intervene in this way is perfectly entitled to do so. But they have no right to pretend that what they are advocating is a respectable form of science to be taught in schools alongside the theory of evolution. Although evolution remains a theory which can’t be proved absolutely, my understanding is that the evidence for it is overwhelming. To my mind, the theory of evolution does not in any way conflict with our Christian faith and problems only arise for those who believe that the Genesis accounts of creation have to be understood as actual history rather than as poetry. Those who do understand them literally have to face the uncomfortable fact that Genesis actually gives us two very different creation stories one after the other which sit very uncomfortably together if you insist on reading them as actual history. To see this for yourself read Genesis Chapters one and two.

Christians should surely embrace science rather than seeing it as a threat to faith. We need to have the humility to accept that our understanding of God’s relationship with the universe may have to change as scientific understanding progresses and we must never try to manipulate science to fit a literalist understanding of scripture.

This month we will be celebrating our Harvest Festival which as well as being a thanksgiving for our food and drink is also an opportunity to celebrate the whole of God’s creation. Perhaps in the year of the Large Hadron Collider we ought also to give especial thanks to God for the work of science and all that it is revealing to us of the wonder of His creation.

Fr John

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Previous letters:

January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007