Welcome Page
Forward in Faith
Our Services
History
How To Find Our Church
Clergy and Wardens
Diary of Events
Outreach
Church Groups
    Choir
    Emmaus
    Healing Prayer Group
    Mothers Union
    Servers Guild
    Sunday School
Church Hall
    Facilities and How To Book
    Deux Chats Pre-School
    Parent and Toddler Group
    Kaizen Karate Academy

St. AUGUSTINE'S CHURCH NEWSLETTER Spring 2009 No 73

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth or did he?  Many of our questions about life focus on asking where we are going; the recent celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin reminds us that we sometimes feel the need to ask where we come from!  Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of the Species’ certainly challenges us to do so!

Many people still think that Christians believe that creation happened just like it is described in the book of Genesis – that God created the whole lot, including Adam and Eve in seven days, roughly 4,000 years ago!   Most Christians know that Genesis creation story is just that, a story or myth that describes a religious truth, that God created the world we live in and created each and every one of us too!

Some Christians don’t want to believe Darwin or any other scientist, they don’t believe in dinosaurs or anything else; in short they deny any natural theory of evolution, and especially the theory that our ancestors may have been more closely related to the apes than they like to admit!  Instead they believe in ‘intelligent design’, the theory that each creature appeared with all the distinctive features we recognise, fish with fins, birds with feathers and so on, all created by an intelligent agent of sorts, by which they mean God.

As for me, I believe that God did indeed create the universe, and in his marvellous work of creation I can see signs of his intelligent design everywhere, including the giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, I believe in an intelligent design that incorporates the ‘big bang’ and black holes and can cope with our scientific understanding of evolution as well.  Call me simple, but I don’t see science and scientific theory as the enemy of Christian faith, rather science helps us understand the extraordinary dynamic reality that is the universe we live in, and all the wonder that this universe contains.  Towards the end of his life Darwin wrote ‘it seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist (believer in God) and an evolutionist.’

Genesis is not a scientific textbook but it does remind us, as does Darwin, that creation, evolution is not just about survival of the fittest.  For the Christian it reminds us that there is an eternal destiny in which human kind plays a central role in influencing the future.  There have been some incredible scientific advances in recent years – as well as bringing great benefits they have also alerted us to possible dangers too.  Science can be an instrument of destruction and oppression.  At the heart of the Genesis story is a choice, a choice we humans continually have to make between good and evil, a choice for the scientist as much as for the person of religious faith.  The process of creation is ongoing, the book of Ecclesiates tells us the future is God’s gift and we can never fully understand it!  However for the Christian we do know that Jesus Christ is not only the Alpha, the beginning, he is also the Omega, the end.  Lift is an evolutionary adventure and as we approach the Easter mystery we see before us the one not only in whose image we are made, but the one in whom we are also completed.  Science and religion can be friends, there are always new truths for all of us to discover – whether science or faith, we all live in a very exciting world!

Your friend and priest

Father Keith