Preaching in the Context of Science

The challenge of preaching the Gospel in a Secular World

My God and King In All Things Scientific
Preaching the Gospel in the Context of Science

“What do you make of it?” I could have ducked the conversation, it was my day off and I was after all enjoying a browse in the Cheltenham Science Festival bookshop. I had enjoyed two of his other books, but had no inclination to buy this one. I had seen the TV programme and could tell from the blurb and a glance through the contents that it would irritate me immensely.

In that instant I decided not to duck the conversation but in Peter’s words to give an account of the hope that is in me.

The book in question, The Good Delusion. The author who would be along later to do his book signing Richard Dawkins.

Twenty minutes later I emerged from an exhilarating but draining conversation about faith and the God I believe in.

When I preach I do not think of myself as preaching ‘to’ the church where I am called to a preaching and teaching and pastoral ministry. I think of myself as one of the members gathered together that day who needs that preaching as much as any other. In my preaching I seek by prayerful and careful study of the Scriptures to listen out for what God is saying to all of us in that place at that time.

Preaching for the most part twice a Sunday in my own church, I get to know the context of the people I share that experience with. I am more and more conscious that we all of us live in a secular world. In the last ten years or so against the backdrop of the rise in fundamentalisms and in war and tensions in the middle east fuelled by fundamentalisms in so many religions, there has been an upsurge in strident atheism fuelled by science writers like Richard Dawkins.
There’s the 95 year old who is deeply troubled in the wake of the Japanese earthquake and all that is happening because her daughter is quite adamant that that demonstrates there can be no God. She asks me how she can respond to such atheism.

A sprightly grandmother, for such I now recognise there can be!, is deeply troubled because her grand daughter sitting a GCSE RE exam can’t be bothered to work at it because religion doesn’t matter and isn’t true. How does she respond to such atheism?

If we in the church are to be ready to make our defence to anyone who demands from us an account of the hope that is in us, our preaching needs to take into account four key things.

First, preachers must seek an understanding of science from scientists and those who popularise science from within the world of science so that when in our preaching we allude to the world of science we do so in a properly informed way.

Second, preachers must have an understanding of the relationship between science and religion so that their preaching is done in the context of science and not in conflict with science

Third, preachers must share their understanding of faith with those in the world of science whose misunderstandings fuel the false perception of conflict between science and religion

Fourth, preachers must declare their understanding of what is at the heart of their preaching so that what they preach in a secular age shaped by science is indeed Gospel, Good News.

First, preachers must seek an understanding of science from scientists and those who popularise science from within the world of science so that when in our preaching we allude to the world of science we do so in a properly informed way and demonstrate that we share their sense of wonder and awe at the world we live in.

One of our organists, who spent a life-time working for GCHQ in the field of computer science has introduced me to popular science writing and got me hooked … quite an achievement for one who went to a grammar school where I opted for arts and not science at the age of 12.

Simon Winchester’s account of William Smith and the first Geological Map of England and Wales in The Map that Changed the World, led me on to Peter Toghill’s Geology of Britain, to Richard Fortey’s The Earth, an Intimate History and on to regional geology guides.

I have an overwhelming sense of awe at the sheer scale of geological time. I stand on the Cotswold Escarpment above Cheltenham and look over what is a failed rift valley towards all that remains of a line of volcanoes in the Malvern Hills and I look back 650 million years. It is this very sense of awe and wonder I feel when I read Psalm 121 and lift up my eyes to hills.

And then I move on to Richard Fortey’s Trilobites, and the writings of Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and I look down at my feet on that escarpment, pick up some of that limestone rock and it comes apart in my hands to reveal a mass of sea shells no human has ever seen. And my mind goes back to that first occasion way beyond the Malverns on the West Coast of Wales at Clarach Bay when I split open a piece of shale to uncover the fragment of a trilobite. And I wonder in all that immensity at the way these individual creatures left such a mark long ago that I can discover them – and my thoughts go to Matthew 6, Jesus and the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.

I turn to cosmologists and read Bang! The Complete History of the Universe by Brian May, Patrick Moore, and Chris Lintott and I marvel at the sheer scale of the universe. I watch and then read Brian Cox on the Wonders of the Solar System and then the Wonders of the Universe and I marvel at the stars and their beauty – and I think of Job being forced to contemplate the immensity of the world as he is questioned by God. The fascination of light and dark, sun and moon and stars from Genesis 1 through to the Psalms is a fascination I share as I look at Orion and see in the Orion Nebula stars being born, and then the contrasting blue of Rigel, bottom right and of the Red Giant Betelgeuse, top left and I marvel at the speed of light, and then I notice in Ian Ridpath and Wil Tirion’s Collins Guide, Stars and Planets that the star on the right of Orion’s belt is 2,000 light years away. And I think that the light that is entering my eye was actually generated at around the time of Christ’s birth – that is mind-blowing and fills me with the very awe and wonder I guess the Magi had in the ancient world as they observed the heavens above. I notice Brian Cox speaking of the nature of light and my mind goes to that verse in 1 John 4 God is light and in him is no darkness at all … and I read it in a new light:

This first light is called the cosmic microwave background or CMB. This first light, this CMB … fills every part of the universe. Every second light from the beginning of time is raining down on the surface of the earth in a ceaseless torrent. If my eyes could only see it then the sky would be ablaze with this primordial light … both day and night.

I marvel with Martin Rees in his book Just Six Numbers that the whole universe can be described in a surprisingly small number of equations … and what’s more they are beautiful equations. I read John Polkinghorne and he reflects on how remarkable it is that the whole universe can be described using the language of Mathematics, a language the human mind is capable of understanding. This accords with the conviction in Genesis 1 that humanity is made in the image of God, it accords with the Quaker thinking that there is that of God in everyone. We bear the imprint of the mind of God … and that is what enables us to understand the workings of God’s creation.

The world of science is full of a sense of wonder and awe at the world we live in that is the very wonder and awe that people of faith from the writers of Genesis, the Psalms, the book of Job and indeed Jesus have passed on down through the ages to me.

Second, preachers must have an understanding of the relationship between science and religion so that their preaching is done in the context of science and not in conflict with science.

I have never sensed a conflict between science and religion. Stephen Jay Gould articulates the gut feeling I have in a set of essays he has brought together in a little book called Rocks of Ages..

He advocates the NOMA principle. Non-overlapping magisteria.

A magisterium is a field of study. The field of study of science has to do with questions like how? What? When? Religion addresses a different set of questions around the question ‘Why? Stephen Jay Gould suggests that scientists and people of faith should respect those different sets of questions and acknowledge they are at work in quite separate, non-overlapping magisteria or areas of study.

In the Epilogue to Bang! The Complete History of the Universe. Brian May, Patrick Moore, and Chris Lintott are very clear:

“We the authors, … feel that if the workings of the Universe, in all their beauty, are properly appreciated, there is no conflict between Science and Religion; they merely deal with different areas.”

There are places where the two magisteria touch – there are moments when people of faith have the same awe as people of science and there is a moment of accord. How science is put to use is an area where again one’s faith or world-view will have a bearing.

The preacher needs to be clear about these different realms of study. Where they touch in wonder and awe that can be celebrated, where the world-view of a person of faith impacts on the use science is put to that can be challenged. But in our secular world that must be in an informed way.

Third, preachers must share their understanding of faith with those in the world of science whose misunderstandings fuel the false perception of conflict between science and religion.

Science writers who are vehemently atheist often impose on us who have faith their perception of what we believe in. We must correct their false perceptions of our faith.

In arguing against ‘creationism’ they imply that it is impossible to believe in ‘creation’

We must refuse to accept that view and be clear in our use of terms.

‘Creationist’ applies to those Christian thinkers who maintain that certain passages of the Bible, most notably Genesis 1-11, are written as a scientific account of the creation of the world in six days 6,000 years ago and what happened immediately afterwards.

Creationism is a view that has emerged since the enlightenment and the advent of modern science and fails to do justice to the text..

Preaching in this secular world has to be clear about the nature of |Genesis 1-11 and what kind of writing is contained there. The rhythms of the writing and its poetry, indicate that these are larger than life stories about the beginnings of things that communicate truth to every generation. This is not scientific writing about the beginnings of things but insightful writing that communicates truth and fills us with wonder at the world as it is.

In the preface to the Wonders of the Universe Brian Cox notices that the very first astronauts who circled Planet earth read from Genesis 1 as the emerged from the dark side of the planet into the sunlight once more, because its poetry evoked the wonder they felt, in a way no scientific explanation could. Likewise he put his carefully prepared script describing the science of the Aurora Borealis to one side as he spoke to camera on witnessing the dancing Northern Lights and recounted an ancient Scandinavian story about their origins simply again because it evoked a sense of wonder and awe.

A second false perception atheistic science writers have about us who are of faith is that we subscribe to a set of clear unchanging propositions that define our faith. Scientists, on the other hand, are always open to the possibility that a new way of thinking may emerge that will force them to completely re-think their views.

The process of theological thinking is much closer to scientific thinking than those atheistic scientists allow.

For the scientist ‘the universe’ is the given and scientists seek an understanding of that universe that is always liable to be challenged and to have to be re-worked in the light of discoveries.

For the Christian preacher the given is the universe as the creation of the God who is revealed in Christ and in the Christian Scriptures.

Discoveries not least in the world of science prompt Christian thinkers to think differently about the world of God’s creation.

The historic creeds of the church have to be understood against the backdrop of the world of Greek and western thought in which they emerged.

In response to Newtonian physics William Paley developed a deistic theology that sees God as the watchmaker, the original designer. That’s the theology Darwin reacts against.

Many Christian thinkers were with Darwin and against Paley. We can be too.

Christian preachers who seek to accept evolution as an explanation of the mechanism of creation must be careful to move away from the non-biblical, Paley-esque language of ‘design’.

I would point to other more helpful ‘theologies’ that we might explore as we seek an understanding of God.

Against the vastness of geological time and cosmic space maybe it’s useful to return to Anselm and the ontological argument and think of God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”

In the randomness of evolution that might go in one way or in another way, we might return to George Herbert, translator of Francis Bacon, and his poem The Elixir. There he displays a fascination with alchemy and the beginnings of Chemistry and with the newly invented telescope or ‘glass’ and sees God not so much as ‘the designer’ as the one who is ‘in all things’

Teach me, my God and King in all things thee to see.

In the counter-intuitive thinking of Einstein and quantum mechanics we might turn again to theologians influenced by the Process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead seeing the world and God as continually in a process of becoming.

There may be a new attractiveness about Tillich’s view of God as Being, Being Itself and the Ground of all being.

Interestingly, John Polkinghorne in his recent book, Theology in the Context of Science, seems to combine those two ways of thinking as he proposes thinking of God as ‘One who is the ground of the fruitful order that makes any process possible at all.”

Atheistic science writers seem to want to tell us where we must begin to give an account of our faith. If we are to preach the gospel in the context of the world of science we must not allow them to set the agenda.

In very recent years David Attenborough has entered into the fray more openly. His objection to faith is one shared by many an atheist in the context of science. It is the objection to faith that so worried the elderly person in my church in the wake of the Japanese earthquake.

How can a God who is supposed to be all powerful and all loving allow an insect in the jungles of Africa to destroy the insides of a baby, or an earthquake to destroy so much human life?

That brings me to the fourth and most important observations I want to make.

Fourth, preachers must declare their understanding of what is at the heart of their preaching so that what they preach in a secular age shaped by science is indeed Gospel, Good News.

In our preaching we must not allow atheistic science writers to tell us where to start in talking about God.

They start from first principles God is all powerful, God is all knowing, God is all Loving and ask the impossible question, how can such a God allow such things to happen?

That is not the starting point for our faith as people called to preach the Gospel in a secular world.

In the wake of the Japanese earthquake I found myself revisiting Shusako Endo, a Japanese novelist I read about ten years ago. I found it quaint then that so many of his novels spoke of volcanoes and earthquakes, and that so much Japanese art has at its centre a volcano. Now I realise that Japanese people live constantly with the threat of the destruction of the volcano and the earthquake.

Born in 1923 Shusako Endo became a Christian in his teens, studied in Paris and returned to Japan disturbed by the way the triumphalist image of Christ as Pantocrator espoused by the missionaries to Japan had failed to catch the people’s imagination.

In his novel, Volcano, he tells of an encounter between thr religion of a de-frocked priest and the science of a seismologist. In his preface, Richard A Schuchert, comments that for Endo “the quintessence of Christianity lies in God’s loving compassion for his wretched children, His willingness to share with us in our suffering. The Japanese heart and mind seek a merciful mother-image of God, rather than the stern, demanding, threatening father-image which (in Endo’s opinion) has been unduly emphasised by the missionaries and which accounts in great part for the failure of Christianity to strike deep roots in the ‘swampland’ of Japanese culture and religion. Endo is attracted to Jesus the suffering companion of all men and women, more than to Jesus the wonder-worker; he is obsessed with Jesus the human reject eventually crucified, rather than with Jesus the glorious pantocrator.”

That’s it. That’s the heart of the gospel we have to preach in a secular age.

We do not start from the first principles identified by those atheistic science writers. As Christians we start with Jesus Christ. His teaching maps out a way of love for neighbour and for enemy too that can make a world of difference in our secular world. Where he encounters hurt he seeks to bring healing. That is our task too. As he goes to the cross he opens up for us an insight into God as the God who is alongside us in a suffering world, sharing the pain of those who suffer in that world, and opening up a way into a relationship with the God who is with us through the valley of the shadow of death and shares with us life in all its fullness.

To preach the Gospel in a secular world we must start with Jesus, the Suffering Servant, who introduces us to the God who shares in our suffering so that we may share in the fullness of life that is not bounded by death. Preaching that is focused on this Jesus Christ will use the kind of observational, analytical skills scientists can teach us to explore the Jesus of History and the impact this God has made on people just like us whose story is told in the pages of the Christian Scriptures.

As we seek an understanding of science, have a clear understanding of the relationship between science and religion, share our understanding of faith with those in the world of science, and declare our understanding of what is at the heart of our Christian faith, Jesus Christ and him crucified, we shall rise to the challenge of preaching the Gospel in a secular world. We as preachers and those who share with us in that preaching experience will be better able make our defence to anyone who demands from us an account of the hope that is in us.