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What?by F J Willett
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What?by F J Willett
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The other day I was talking to some minister and I asked him what he thought of the Genome Project. He said "What's that?" "You know," I said. "The project to map the human genome." "Can't say I've ever heard of it." he said. It wasn't his lack of knowledge that surprised me. It was his attitude. The lift of his shoulders, the dismissive tone of voice. "How can this be important." he seemed to be saying. This attitude is common. Most people, even if they've heard of the Project, are inclined to shrug their shoulders and say "So what?" Now the Genome Project itself is not the issue here. for those of you who want to know what the Genome Project is all about we will come back to this topic a bit later on). The fact is I could have used any one of a dozen other scientific developments currently in the pipeline to illustrate the point. The world is changing rapidly and permanently. We no longer do things the way our parents did. We are adrift in a sea of change and if we don't understand the forces operating on us and around us how are we to survive? Who or what will guide us? Before I proceed I should try to explain a little of who I am and what brought me to write this. After all if you are going to take this seriously you want to know a bit about the author, right? I was born into a good methodist family and grew up, as did most young men in the fifties, more interested in cars and football than the workings of the universe. For me church was something you went to on sundays if you couldn't wriggle out of it. Gradually, as I moved out of school and into the workforce and the social demands on my time grew apace, my attendance at church became erratic, then sporadic, then finally ceased altogether. Without realising it, without intending it, I had lapsed from the church. Now while I had ceased attending church I had not lost interest in matters theological. I recognised that I could not, in all conscience, continue to call myself a christian, but I did consider myself to be a seeker. A seeker after knowledge and a seeker after enlightenment. Don't get me wrong. There was nothing ordered in my search. There was no donning of a hair shirt and setting off to sit in some mountain fastness where I could contemplate the "oneness of all". I did not plunge into the libraries of the world avidly devouring each and every ancient text, seeking enlightenment through scholarship. Nor did I become a disciple of some self-styled omnipotent guru. Outwardly, in fact, I was, and remain incredibly ordinary. Every day I would go off to work. In time I married, happily, and raised two fine children. I did, and still do, all the ordinary things you might see almost anyone doing almost anywhere. If there is something different about me, it is that occasionally, amid the toing and froing of a busy life I find time to read. Find time to contemplate, and find time occasionally, to commit the results of my contemplations to paper. This, then is no more than the results of one mans (perhaps dubious) insights. If you find anything here unsettling or disturbing then you can safely ignore it. You can throw it away and write the time off to experience. Or you can read on. I do not promise you an easy journey. You may disagree violently with what I have to say. You may find my words provocative and challenging, but if you are honest with yourself you will find that at the end of our journey you will emerge with your faith and beliefs strengthened. For what I have to say is not aimed at converting you (or anyone else) to a particular point of view. Rather it is aimed at broadening your understanding of the world around you. How? By looking in God's Other Bible. God's Other Bible? What? What is God's Other Bible? Where is it? Can I get a copy? Well it's no real secret. God's Other Bible is all around you. God's Other Bible is God's creation. Life, the universe, and everything, to borrow a phrase. "Is that all," you might say. "I forked out good money just for this?" Well simple truths are often the hardest to grasp. So it is with the world around us. Every day, we get up, go to the shops, drive our cars, watch TV, sit on the grass, run in out of the rain and perform a million other prosaic actions and we do it all automatically. We move through the world without conscious effort. We think we know all about the world. Well we don't. |
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Now think for the moment of the very first sentence in the bible. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Another simple truth we tend to forget. But there it is in black and white. The very first words you read when you open your bible. "...God created the heavens and the earth." Have you ever thought of the implication of that? Really thought? Everything around us was created by God. The flowers, the trees, the ground. The clouds. The animals and birds. Us. Of course we all know that. We get taught it at sunday school. We soak it up all through our childhood. The idea of the creation is a part of our mental universe. We think we understand it. "..God created the heavens and the earth." "Yea, yea. I got that. What comes next." Because we've heard it so often we think we know what it means. But do we? And do we fully understand the implications of that verse. They are considerable. For example when we look at something, say a tree or flower, we are looking at God's creation. We are looking at something God made. Literally. If you believe in God, any sort of god, then when you open your eyes and look around you're looking at the work of your creator. Now the first, and most interesting implication of this is what it can tell us about the nature of God. Wander into any art gallery and look at the pictures on the wall. You'll see landscapes, portraits, still life, in fact the gamut of life will be there on display. But more than just the pictures themselves are revealed. The way the pictures are painted tells us a lot about the artist. The subjects he chooses, the texture of the paint, the lighting, the composition, the colour, all reveal something of the character of the artist. The picture is far from a complete record of the artist, of course. Looking at a Van Gough will tell us nothing of what he had for breakfast the day he painted the picture, nor how much he owed his landlord. But you can tell what he liked and what he thought was important. Do you see the point? The bible tells us about God. So does his creation. In fact it's amazing how much we can learn about God from the study of God's universe. If you believe in God you should read the bible, yes, but also study the works of His hand, and if lessons can be drawn from such study then they too are important. Today such study is the province of Science. I put the capital in Science deliberately. Science has become an enormous field of human endeavour in it's own right. There are scientists working away in laboratories all over the planet. Their collective outpourings of discoveries and inventions has transformed every corner of human life. Who in the western world hasn't driven in a car, watched television, or used a telephone. But the gadgets of the modern world are just the most obvious manifestations of Science's impact. There are other and deeper impacts. Science, for example has altered the way we view the earth itself. Once we viewed the earth as inexhaustible and almost infinite in it's resources and capacity. Today Science shows us that the world is finite. It's resources are not limitless and far from inexhaustible. Science has taught us environmental responsibility. For all the benefits that science has brought there are many christians who remain uncomfortable. Science is somehow unclean. Where religion concentrate on the spiritual and the uplifting, science gets down there in the dirt and grubs out diamonds. Science is unsettling. More than that, Science seems somehow to threaten the very essence of religion. If men can go through life living in comfort and peace without relying on the support of Jesus then there is something fishy going on. And the fact is more and more people these days see religion as something marginal to their lives. Church attendances are down and have been slowly declining for many years. People are drifting away from the churches, away from god, and towards materialism. A materialism underpinned by the knowledge and discoveries of Science. Of course the churches have fought back. In an attempt to stem the flow most of the major christian churches have at one time or another launched programs to "become more relevant", to "get back to fundamentals" and seek to build congregations. And there has been some success. Some fundamental churches thrive, and if some critics carp that their prosperity depends more on their showmanship and the personality of the person in the pulpit than on good sound doctrine, well at least they are getting church attendances up, and that can't be a bad thing can it? Well there has been a cost to the churches. Both the fundamentalist and charismatic movements have concentrated on the spirituality of Christ. The physical world, God's other bible, is by and large ignored. Without so much as a whimper the churches have conceded the domain of the physical world to an apparently unchristian Science. In the face of each new scientific marvel christians retreat further and further into their spiritual shell. Each success of Science becomes a triumph of the ungodly and a challenge to the Christian faith. The physical world means materialism and therefore the physical world must be denied. The world of Science must be denied. The deep schism between Science and Christianity, seems unbridgeable. |
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So what does the bible say about all this? Is Science really the enemy? Or have we lost the plot somewhere along the line? "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It's worth stating again because this one sentence right at the beginning of the bible puts the whole thing into perspective. "...the heavens and the earth". Isn't this the life of the spirit and the life of the world together side by side? Both equal, both vitally important, both indispensable to life. This seems reasonable. Lets move forward to the new testament and see what Jesus had to say about the relationship between the spiritual and the physical things in life. There is no doubt that the main thrust of Jesus' life and work on earth was to deliver a new spiritual message. But time and again he took the opportunity to stress what we must not forget the other side -- the physical side -- of life. This comes through most clearly in the parables Jesus tells. In the parable of the man who, traveling from Jerusalem to Jerico, was set upon by robbers and left for dead in a ditch, it is not the priest or the Levite whom Jesus considers worthy of God's grace. They keep their eyes firmly fixed on the path before their feet and pass by. It's the Samaritan who turns aside and helps the man in the ditch. The most obvious moral is, it is not just piety that is required of us in this life. You must also care for those around you. Jesus calls the man in the ditch the Samaritan's neighbour. We must all be each others neighbours. That is His message. More than this we must find the proper balance between the demands of the spiritual and the physical world in our life. The priest and the Levite in the parable are castigated for putting too much emphasis on the spiritual. They are not prepared to break their journey down the road (i.e. through life) to help out a fellow human being in trouble. Their worth - for all their piety - is the less in the eyes of Jesus for that. It really is a question of balance between "heaven and earth". The spiritual and the physical sides of life. Let's remember that Jesus' prime aim was to tell us a spiritual message. He said that a rich man has as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. He wasn't saying you shouldn't be rich. Just that a man who is ONLY rich is incomplete. Again it's a question of balance. Christians have generally placed too much emphasis on the spiritual side of Jesus' message. We quite often talk about this need for balance, but in practise the physical world is ignored. Religion has become one sided. For the churches the balance has been lost. Meanwhile for many people the message of the bible has become irrelevant. They see the world as a rational, materialistic, Science guided place where the only morality is the economic imperative. The only ethic is that enforced by law. Without a solid moral or ethical foundation, without a spiritual dimension here, too, balance has been lost. One of my main reasons for writing these pamphlets is that I believe this sense of balance is missing from the world today. These pamphlets are intended to try and restore some of that balance. Ironically to restore the correct balance to a set of scales that are out of kilter you have to put all the weight on one end. So these pamphlets are going to be largely one sided. I will concentrate on drawing out the messages God gives us through his other bible. I rely on your own reading of the bible to maintain the proper balance. |
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What can we learn from God's Other Bible? First of all we must learn not to belittle god's creation. We are all too fond of dismissing the laws of God's creation as "nature's laws" as if somehow God wasn't responsible for them. As if somehow "mother nature" was a lesser diety looking after lesser laws. And there can be no doubt about it. God's laws work. Step off the top of a ten story building and see how you get on. There's no gentle wafting down to the ground. You plummet. Straight down. God's laws are immutable. God's laws are tough. But they are not arbitrary. Try this experiment. Hold a stone in your hand and drop it. The stone falls to the ground. Pick it up and do it again. Same result. You can repeat this experiment as many times as you like. The stone always behaves in the same way. There are not hidden catches. There is no small print waiting to trip you up. God's physical laws work consistently. Doesn't this tell us something about God? He doesn't cheat us. Everything is right out there in the open. The laws he has set to control his universe are essentially simple. Even when we get into some of the areas of modern physics where things start to look very hairy indeed we will find that there is still this underlying simplicity. There is another lesson we can draw from our simple rock experiment. If God's physical laws work all the time might we not expect God's other laws to work all the time. The ten commandments, for example. How many people only keep them on sundays thinking God won't notice. Or blithely sin thinking them easily forgiven. Perhaps we should all observe how easily rocks fall. O.K. Let's try another experiment. This time throw the rock into the air. (You really ought to go outside for this bit). Now throw the rock around the yard. You will see that no matter how hard you throw the rock it's going to come down again somewhere. While God's laws restrict us in some ways they also allow us quite a lot of flexibility in others. Alright, you can't get the rock to stay off the ground by itself, but you can move it around where you like. And while you can't get down from the top of a ten story building by jumping there is no law to stop you walking down the stairs ot taking the lift, or parachuting, hang gliding or absailing. God's laws are strict, but not restrictive. (Government laws are another matter). As we leave our pet rock and our ten story building I ought to explain that I don't intend to let my expositions of God's world become too complicated. Finding out God's laws of nature is often a very difficult task. The proofs can be horrendously complicated, and usually are. As laymen and women we do not need to go into the proofs. We can, and will, skip over the tough bits. After all the tough bits are what scientists get payed to sort out. I will, however refer you to books where these issues are discussed in more detail. If you come across anything you want to follow up then these references are a good place to start. Our little exploration of ten story buildings and falling stones is all very well, but this is only the beginning of the truths we can uncover in God's other bible.While Christians have been studying the bible scientists around the world have been studying God's other bible. Isaac Azimov, in the foreword to his Biographical Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology notes that in 1975 (the date that book was published) 95 percent of all the scientists who had ever lived were still alive. I guess this is just another way of saying that our knowledge of the world has grown explosively in the last hundred years. This knowledge is not just quasars and quarks, dinosaurs and galaxies, genes and computers and space shuttles. This knowledge is about God's creation in quite fundamental ways. Knowledge Christians should have. It's time to bring together these, the two main streams of our culture, Science and Christianity. There is much that we can (and must) learn from each other. If Christians are to take their place in the debates that will shape our world into the twenty-first century then they must learn from Science the laws of nature. After all these are God's laws as much as any other. So to Science must learn the responsibilities and wisdom inherent in the Christian faith and ethic. If we can achieve this synthesis of the Christianity with Science we will emerge at the end of the process with a deeper and richer faith than can be gleaned from any one source alone. |
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The Genome project (I told you we'd get back to it) involves one of these fundamental areas of knowledge about God's creation Christian need to understand. The Genome Project is a program to map all the instruction in the human cell. The complete plans on how to build a human being. The project will just gather knowledge. There is no intention (yet) to do anything specific with this knowledge. This is considered "pure science". Knowledge for it's own sake. The implication is that this knowledge will be used. But how? In principle it may become possible to diagnose the sorts of medical problems an infant will have twenty years in the future by examining his genetic code today. Is that a good thing? If you can predict that a person will contract cancer in fifteen years you can be ready with treatment at the right time. But suppose you diagnose your baby will be born with Down's Syndrome? Would you have an abortion? In fact this decision already has to be faced by many people today. If there is any history of Down's syndrome in a family doctor's will recommend that tests be made for the condition early in the pregnancy. If the tests prove positive (and the tests are quite conclusive) then doctors will usually recommend abortion. Today this a problem faced by very few people. Down's syndrome is a relatively rare condition as are the other genetic disorders that can be diagnosed by this method. It's therefore easy to take the high moral ground with very little risk that you are going to have to face the problem yourself. Now imagine a time when almost every part of the human body can be adjusted by genetic engineering. It may be possible to select among the genes in the sperm and ova of the parents so that even before conception the best possible child of those parents is produced. These are complex and divisive issues. A child produced by genetic engineering would inevitably be different to the child that might have been. Do we have the right to "improve" people the way we might design a new model car? It would be easy to give a resounding "No" if it weren't for the fact that we extensively modify ourselves already. From the new set of dentures I aquired last week to the new hip joint implanted in my uncle last year. Modern medicine enacts these and even greater miracles every day. But the person is different. Modified. Changed by the Science of medicine. We have interfered with the person God created. Now if we really believe this world is God's, created by God, and we accept that as part of the world we are God's creations, then how can we dare to tamper with HIs creation. How can we dare to alter one of God's children. If a child is born deformed isn't that the way God wanted it? Who are we to interfere? Well you could look at things that way. I don't. To me it's the story of the talents all over again. God has given us talents to use. Not to sit on. The parables Jesus told tell us over and over again "Get out there and do things". It's what seperates Christianity from all other religions. It's that attitude of "roll up your sleeves and get stuck into it" that is uniquely Christian. And when you see how lives of deformity and despair can be turned around by the work of doctors in the Adelaide Cranio-facial unit (to take just one example) who can doubt that this is indeed the right attitude. But what is possible (and an undoubted good) today will be small beer tomorrow. The promise of genetic engineering looms over us more like a cloud of doom than anything else. It doesn't have to turn out that way, of course. It's up to us. We have to be ready to face up to these issues as they arise. Just to take one of the potential problems that the Genome Project may present us with: The Genome Project will eventually present us with the complete knowledge on how to design and assemble the perfect human being. A man and woman immune to all known disease. A man and woman with vastly increased physical and mental capacity. A man and woman who may be the Adam and Eve of a new species of human. Should we then build those super humans? Or is this sacrilege? I'd be very tempted to answer yes this is sacrilege if it weren't for an uneasy conviction that I would then be behaving like the third servant (Mathew 25-14) who buried his coin in the ground in fear, ultimately, of the responsibility with which he had been entrusted. For man is ultimately the responsible animal. The only creature on the face of the earth who can see the consequences of his actions and therefore bear the responsibility for them. That is why man is the chosen of God. That is why man seeks to know and understand so much of the world around him. It is our world. God has made us responsible for it. It's time Christians stopped leaving, what is really their responsibility, to Science. And there is much to study. |
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