Why would anyone make this up?

Carol Service, Christ Church,

23^rd December 2001

There are two Christmas stories we love, and in many ways they seem to be competing more and more. But I thought we could try and look at them a little scientifically tonight. Firstly, Father Christmas. How does he do his job? Well, there are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million, that's 91.8 million homes. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. To pull this we need 214,200 reindeer which increases the payload to 353,430 tons.

353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft's re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second.

Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be valorised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.

A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force. It seems improbable. But why would anyone make up a story like that?

Here’s another interesting fact. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York, the Daily Telegraph reported that: ‘Bible sales have risen in most of the high street booksellers’. Ottakers reported a 25% increase in Bible sales in September (2001), Borders and Books reported a three-to-fourfold rise in the five weeks after September 11^th, and WH Smith signalled a ‘significant increase’. In difficult times especially, we get spiritually hungry.

But is it all wish fulfilment? Is it a crazy story we make up to keep ourselves happy, to keep ourselves childlike even? Something that if we really thought about it, couldn’t actually hang together? Here are some more interesting facts. I’m no scientific expert, but what I’ve read is that when everything began there was a balancing act that needed to happen in the first few seconds. If the cosmos had expanded too quickly, then it would have spread out too thinly for life to exist anywhere. If it had expanded too slowly, then the force of its own gravity would have made things just implode. The chances of it having the balance it does is in fact 1 in 10 with sixty noughts after it. That’s quite a slim chance. A professor who doesn’t believe in God called Paul Davies, says this. The chance of life existing as it actually does is as small as if you took a ten pence piece, placed it at the end of the observable universe, which is 20 thousand million light years away, fired something at it and hit the mark. The fact that we are here at all is miraculous. Why would anyone make up a story like that?

OK. So God sounds a little likely. But what about Jesus? Nice story, romantic, imaginative, dramatic. But likely? Could it actually happen like that? Does it fit together? Well, here are some interesting facts about Jesus. People have written books on the fact that there are hundreds of prophecies in the Old Testament, in books that were written hundreds and thousands of years before Jesus, that actually refer directly to his life. Things like where he would be born, what he would do, how he would die. In his book, Science Speaks, Peter Stoner applies the modern science of probability to just eight prophecies regarding Christ. He says, "The chance that any man might have ...fulfilled all eight prophecies is one in 10 to the 17th. That would be 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000." (one hundred quadrillion) Stoner suggests that "we take 10 to the 17th silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state 2 feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly... Blindfold a man and tell him he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up [that one marked silver dollar.] What chance would he have of getting the right one?" Stoner concludes, "Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing those eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man.”

Why would anyone make this up? Unlike other Christmas stories, facts like these make it difficult to treat with a pinch of salt. One writer wrote this: The story of Jesus is either of absolutely no importance at all, and should be thrown out, or it is of ultimate importance for everyone. The one thing it cannot be is only moderately important.

Why would anyone make up a story about Jesus? We are hungry for meaning, yes. We like stories as well. Some stories are more likely than others, even at Christmas. Some stories entertain us, distract us, teach us. But the story of Jesus does more than that – it comes up to us, stares us straight in the face and tells us that not only is this a story about God, it’s also a story about us. It’s about who we are, what our problem is, what God does about it, and where any answers can be found.

In troubled times we need to get serious, we need to know what’s going on. How are we going to respond? One British psychologist, commented on this when he said, "When people run up against life and find it too much for them, one swears, one gets a headache, one gets drunk and one prays." The question is, which response gives us real hope? And which Christmas story points the way?

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