“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
“Marley was dead to begin with..”
“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do“
“It was the best of times it was the worst of times”
All of these openers draw you into the plot. Whether you are Tolstoy, Lewis Carol or Charles Dickens or a Gospel writer you want to draw attention by your words to what you are going to say.
Words can sometimes inspire. Anyone who has read a bit, or been read to, probably has a favourite passage of literature, perhaps a few lines of poetry, something in short that stirs us.
There are some works in English, too, that by the excellence of their translation have themselves become classics in their own right, even if they are not very exact by pedantic scholarly standards. Here’s Edward Fitzgerald from the Persian:
“And that inverted bowl we call The Sky / Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die; / Lift not thy hands to it for help – for it rolls impotently on as Thou or I “
How arresting is Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam – a truly marvellous piece of English literature in its own right, from a man remembered to-day only for that huge, unique, flowering of literary inspiration.
Our second lesson to-day, those 14 verses of the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, are probably along with 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, or the first few verses of Genesis, among the best known, and most stirring, of all Biblical passages. I wonder however how much of that popularity rests on the matchless translation, which incidentally the committee drawing up the Authorised Version at King James I behest cribbed wholesale and without acknowledgement from William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1534.
Tyndale wanted his translation to be available as he put it to a boy that drives the plough. Imagine what it must have been like if you had never heard the Bible in English until Tyndale’s translation. The effect of that opening passage of St. John’s Gospel read on this very spot to, for example, ploughboys from Nortoft in the sixteenth century must have been, as it is still, pretty electrifying.
In those 14 verses St. John sets out the nature of Jesus Christ’s involvement with God and the world, the creator of all things. He touches on the world’s rejection of him and it ends by asserting his divinity And in setting out the origins of the world in this way he is of course, harking back to Genesis 1. In the beginning God created Heaven & earth. It was easy, succinct, way for people to explain the otherwise inexplicable Or it was until the D word came along: D for Darwin D for Decent of Man.
In these last few weeks as we have celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth we have been confronted again with the so called “conflict” between the Biblical explanation of the Creation and Darwin’s And even before that we have had plenty of people wanting to attack belief in God on TV, on the sides of buses all around us. Take the academic Richard Dawkins for example
"I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in God, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it."
I find that assertion pretty arrogant. This is not the place to debate with Richard Dawkins at long distance. But what is psychologically fascinating about the mindset of Dawkins and his supporters is their inability to recognise just how much they do not know. As someone observed in an article that I read recently,
“the greatest obstacle to scientific progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. Blinkered in their vision, armoured in the certainty that they have all the answers when they so obviously do not, neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins rest their beliefs just as much on an unscientific leap of faith as the “Creationists” they so fanatically affect to despise.“
In recent years we have seen some amazing advances in science, such as the unravelling of the human genetic code. As I understand it, we are genetically almost identical to monkeys, sea urchins and the octopus. But what, one has to ask, is the impulse that makes us different from them? The workings of our brains are now better understood than ever before, thanks to people like Susan Greenfield whom I first came across via her Faraday lecture “ A Journey to the Centre of the Brain”
But there is still an enormous amount, she says, that we do not understand. about its working physically, let alone how the non material concept of “mind “ works which brings us to what we in this church to-day are individually, all unique beings, with unique never to be repeated DNA,
I am not a Creationist. Genesis Chapter 1 is a great story, a lovely myth, a nice way for our ancestors to explain the inexplicable. But I don’t believe it any more than I believe that the walls of Jericho came tumbling down when Joshua and co. blew a trumpet. I’m pretty sure that people have been asserting explanations since our ancestors started to walk on two legs. It wasn’t all that long ago that it was accepted wisdom that the Earth was the centre of the universe It was only in the 1960s that a senior scientist at Shell or BP offered to drink every drop of oil in the North Sea. The evidence is that there are no certainties, no matter how confidently we may assert them. But I do believe in an “organising force” - a God for want of a better word - that was in the beginning as our Gospel reading to-day makes clear and eventually, via the survival of the fittest, evolution or whatever process, made me and you unique.
And I do believe that God sent Jesus into the world to teach us how to run our lives and organise our minds., whilst giving us free will and the hope of eternal life. We need through our Christianity beliefs to strengthen our spirituality, our sense of awe at the world and the universe that we inhabit. We need to place less emphasis on the idea that we know, or shall know, everything. Unravelling the Human Genome has opened up a whole new fields of understanding and opportunities for scientific endeavour. But it does not explain the workings of your mind or mine or how those minds were formed.
The great debate about Darwin’s theories that took place between Thomas Huxley and “Soapy” Sam Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, at the Natural History Museum there in 1860, is now the a stuff of legend. Huxley, who coined the word agnostic to describe his view of the world , was asked by Wilberforce whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he was descended from monkey. That debate which was regarded as a draw at the time, has subsequently come to be seen as a defining moment in scientific history. Despite its rigour and its cattiness in parts, the outcome was that they all went off for dinner afterwards in a jovial mood, a very British outcome The protagonists did not change their minds of course .
So where does all this leave us? I’ve looked again at the “Decent of Man”. Darwin writes in its last paragraph “Man may feel some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertion, to the very summit of the organic scale, and the fact of his having thus risen instead of his having been aboriginally placed there may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future
I can accept that quite happily and at the same time firmly believe that in the beginning was the Word that began our rise to the very summit of the organic scale. As for the hope of higher destiny, that’s a matter for the minds of men, the unfathomable factor that Darwin did not address. But I hope that you like me can make a leap of faith to know that our redeemer liveth and live our lives as best we can according to his teaching.
