Sermon of the Month - September 2008
Creation 1: Creator?
Introduction to Series
Does it make sense to believe in God? Or is it, as Richard Dawkins that apostle of atheism says, a terrible delusion, a mindless madness, only unrecognised because it is so common? Is it, then, a good idea to believe in God, the God of the Bible, the God who the Bible tells us created the heavens and the earth? That’s the question we will take on, today.
According to the Bible, God says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. Alpha and Omega are the beginning and end of the Greek alphabet; he is the A and Z, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
Those words come from the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, and which has as a main theme the ultimate and final future. It is the Omega, the Z of our Bibles. Tonight we start a new series looking at a small part of that picture – the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3.
But this morning we start a new series returning to Alpha – not the Alpha Course, the ABC of the Christian faith. If you’re interested in that, or you have friends who might want to join, you’d better sign up, as the new course starts later on this month. But the Alpha, the A of the Bible is the book of Genesis, a word that means ‘beginning’, and we are going to spend some time looking at some of these major issues raises by this fantastic, foundational, and challenging book.
It’s challenging because a lot of the big issues come up here. Who is God? Can we believe in him? What sort of a God is God? Does believing in God mean that you have to reject science – sciences like astronomy, biology and geology – evolution and all that? What should we make of creation – the creation of man and woman? And what about the fall – that picture of a broken, alienated humanity in Genesis 3, and later chapters. What about sin, crime, murder? Where do they come from? What about morality? Why are we humans creatures who know the difference between right and wrong, and so often act against what we know to be right? Why is moral breakdown so devious, so violent, so widespread, so varied? What should we make of the sexual behaviour that comes up in some of these passages – like bigamy in Genesis 4, or homosexuality, first implied in Genesis 9? As for Genesis 6, what on earth is going on in its talk of sexual relations between the daughters of men and the sons of God? And what about the flood?
That’s a few big, challenging and controversial issues, isn’t it?
It’s not hard to see that whatever I say, there are bound to be some people who won’t agree with everything I say! Indeed I think it would be remarkable and a bit scary if we all agreed with everyone about every one of these big and challenging issues. But we haven’t come here to have our prejudices confirmed. We have come here to meet with God, to engage with him, to find the resources to worship him, and in that engagement to receive what we need for the living of our lives as believers in God and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But if it’s controversial, shouldn’t we just avoid them and stick with safe questions? That’s not my take! Bland Christianity? I don’t think we escape the problems of life by burying our heads in the sand, like the proverbial ostrich. In real life, Christians can’t escape the awkward questions and issues of life. Church should be a place where we take on the real issues, and try to listen to what the Scriptures are saying with integrity and honesty and determination to work it out as best as we can. But that means we must be honest and open. So if you don’t agree with something I say, that’s fine. But listen to the Scriptures carefully and ask the questions again. Then whatever the issue, your faith should be deepened and strengthened.
1. Believing in God?
Well I said a few moments ago that people have come here to meet with God, that we are believers in God and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. But we shouldn’t presume that. “Who is God? And what does it mean to believe in him?” There are likely to be some people here who have real questions about that. Some people might struggle to say they believe in God. Church is an open place, and we invite people in because we want all people to have the opportunity to find God, and to be found by God. And that means the church should have people here who are searching and asking the big questions. You may be one of those people. You haven’t made up your mind about God? But you’re here. Who is God? And what does it mean to believe in him? Why believe in him?
Christians also ask questions! We should. God has given us minds, and he wants us to use them. And in any case, even if we try not to, the fact is that we do ask questions. And if we don’t ask them and try to make sense of our faith in the normal times, then the tough questions have a knack of tripping us up when life’s problems hit us.
It may be that some Christians are struggling. Why believe in God? Why go on believing in God? There’s a new challenge to belief in God today. Since 2005 there’s been a flurry of books by atheists preaching their message that religion is rubbish. These new books have been appearing, as Radio 4’s John Humphrys put it, “like Spitfires leaving the assembly lines in 1939”. Read one of them, like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, or Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and you find a no holes barred aggressive attack against all belief in God and all religions. This is influencing people in our world as the writers intended. People discussing religion and faith on television are more likely to be hostile than they were ten years ago. Some of the people we will meet will be influenced by all this. A few will be influenced directly. They will have read one of these books, or seen one of Richard Dawkins’ TV programmes, and been directly influenced by what he said. They will believe that all faith in any God is mad and dangerous, or at least they will assume what he says, that all scientists and intelligent people agree with him. A lot more people will have picked up the same beliefs indirectly.
Christians do of course believe in God. The Bible begins with these majestic and famous words, In the beginning God...
2. Is Belief Reasonable?
But is it reasonable to believe in God? Everyone who studies the philosophy of religion studies the traditional proofs of God. Many of our sixth formers will study philosophy and ethics, and be introduced to them. But in the real world, people believe in God not because they have been convinced by proofs, but because of their personal experience. The formal proofs of God go back to the Middle Ages. Some of these argue that God must exist by definition, because God is the greatest reality imaginable, and it’s greater to be real than made up. It’s a clever piece of logic, but most people recognise this doesn’t help, because it assumes that saying something exists adds to its description. But the word “is” is a verb, not a noun or adjective.
Some people see that everything has a cause, and ask about the first cause of everything. If you believe there is a first cause of everything, then that’s God.
Others look at the wonderful nature of design in the Universe. It can’t all be chance, so it must be designed, and that designer is God.
Now all these arguments were forgotten for about 200 years except as challenge for philosophy students. But it’s that last idea that has reappeared. And it’s scientists who have brought it back. It’s physicists, cosmologists, astrophysicists. They look at the way the Universe works, and ask the questions about how it all fits together and how it’s got going in the way that leads in the end to creatures like you and me existing and asking, Why are we here? That in technical language is called the ‘anthropic principle’.
The most significant philosophical British atheist in the generation after Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer was Antony Flew, and he has shocked the philosophical world by changing his disbelief in God because of this new evidence from physics. About three years ago, he explained why. The evidence from physics now made it more likely that the Universe could and should be explained by God creating it, than by assuming it could have developed without God.
Meanwhile, prominent biologists like Richard Dawkins and Lewis Wolpert remain convinced of the atheist answer. There is a reason for this. They are biologists, and they are strongly convinced that the picture of evolutionary development worked out by Charles Darwin makes best sense of design among life-forms, and they guess that a similar process explains all the rest. It’s a belief, not science. Richard Dawkins makes it clear that, rather than believing in God, he would prefer to believe that there are trillions of universes, all completely unknowable to us, and completely unprovable, and that these universes either vie with each other in a sort of cosmic ‘natural selection’, with our Universe alone succeeding, or else that all the other universes collapse or dissipate uselessly. Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science has helped scientists to see that “a theory that is unfalsiable is to that extent a weak one” [quoted by Hitchens, God Is Not Great, p.81]. Professor Dawkins should leave such wild speculation, which belongs more in science fiction than philosophy or reasoned debate, let alone science.
The atheists have not answered the question about design. It’s still a live question.
As for the question about the first cause, I must confess I was really surprised when I read Richard Dawkins’ chapter entitled “Why there almost certainly is no God”. Right, I thought, this will be it! What new and devastating idea, insight or observation has he brought that is so catastrophically destructive to belief? I must admit, I was astonished to read it. Professor Dawkins asks “Who designed the designer? (The God Delusion [Black Swan edition, 2007], p.188). Biologist Lewis Wolpert is just as impressed by the same argument. He asks, “If God created the universe, what created God?” (Quoted in John Humphrys, In God We Doubt [Hodder 2007, ppbk 2008], p.88.) Christopher Hitchens the journalist (and brother of very different journalist Peter Hitchens) asks the same question, “who designed the designer or created the creator. Religion and theology” he says, “have consistently failed to overcome this objection” (Hitchens, God Is Not Great, p.71).
If you’ve ever taught in Sunday School or youth groups or Brigades, you may recognise this. It’s a common enough question by children: “You say God made everything, but who made God?” Many of today’s atheists are impressed by this basic argument. They say it’s unanswerable. There is a reason for that. It’s meaningless nonsense. It’s like saying, “You say that infinity is the number that goes on for ever and ever, but what’s the number after infinity? Hey, you can’t answer that, can you?” No; the mathemaitician can’t tell you the number after infinity, because there can’t be one. It’s a meaningless question, which shows that the questioner doesn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘infinity’. God goes on for ever and ever, and it’s just as meaningless to ask what comes after God, or what comes before him. If you’re an atheist, just say you don’t believe in God. But don’t bother with this, the silliest of all arguments. The song we sang earlier, Our God is a great big God is probably one of the most childish songs we sing. But it’s more grown-up than this argument. It says of God, “he’s wider the Universe”. Yes he’s bigger, greater. That’s what belief in God means. He’s not part of the Universe, a very complex part, as Richard Dawkins seems to think belief in God means (p.185). If he was just a complex creature, then of course you could ask, “Who made this God?” But the God Christians believe in, is no complex creature, but the Creator of everything: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That’s foundational for us. There’s nothing in the physical world, and nothing even in the spiritual dimenion of reality that precedes God. That’s also the meaning of the poetic development in verse two – which we will come back to in a fortnight – Now the earth [and that really means the whole material Universe here, as well as planet earth] was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The Universe had no form, no structure. Today we would say, no laws of physics. And it was empty; the Universe had no content. No matter, no shape. No laws to guide matter, no matter to be guided.
It’s a very poetic and awesome way of describing reality before there is any reality. Physicists today cannot speak of what happened before the Big Bang. In fact they have difficulties speaking about the first nanosecond after the Big Bang, because the laws of physics can’t be known in that first trilli-trilli-trilli-milli-second. God is no creature, however complex. He is the Creator. He is eternity. He is God. He is beyond our imagining. He is awesome.
3. Why believe?
But finally and very briefly, why believe? It actually nothing to do with all these arguments. It has to do with the fact this same God who made all reality has chosen to make himself known. But he has done so in a discreet way. He does not blind us with his presence, but gently reminds us, so that all who want to find the truth of life may. That’s how Jesus put it: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks the door will be opened. (Matt.7:7-8; Luke 11:9-10.)
Do you want to hide from God, and live your life without him? He has made that possible. Do you want to find God, and find how to live life with him, through him and for him? He has made that possible, too. Ask him. Seek him. Knock on that door, the door to God, by praying to him, and asking to know him, and that door will be opened to you.