York Minster

Credible Faith

Date: 10th June 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jonathan Draper

When we were on holiday last summer, we spent one day at Disneyland Paris. I have to admit that we all had a very good time, and the kids, no matter that they’re not little any more, thought they were in heaven. I’m not sure, however, what they would make of the latest bit of interesting enterprise to emerge from the Christian conservatives in America. Designed by the same people who brought you the Jaws and King Kong attractions at Universal Studios, and costing £27m, the Creation Museum in Kentucky is designed to put the case for creationism and so-called ‘intelligent design’ as the truth about the origins and history of the world through the kinds of rides and displays and sophisticated animatronics that would be expected of any magic kingdom.

The displays at the Creation Museum are all built to illustrate and demonstrate what the founder and his followers call ‘the seven Cs’ – just the letter ‘c’, and not the oceans – which forms a kind of summary of their take on the Christian faith: they are – creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, cross and consummation. A fantastic piece of selective alliteration. So as you sail the ‘seven Cs’ you can experience Noah’s flood, you can meet Adam & Eve, Moses and Paul, you can see animated vegetarian dinosaurs mixing with humans on an earth which is only 6000 years old. And you can see a demolition ball labelled ‘millions of years’ smashing the foundations of the church, symbolising the way in which scientists, with their ideas about evolution and the age and size of the universe, have caused moral decline through undermining the authority of the Bible and the church about the nature of creation. The cracks in the foundation of the church lead directly to a boy watching pornography on a computer in his home. About 60% of Americans, apparently, accept more or less this view of the world.

It may seem like a bit of harmless eccentricity not only to believe these things but to give them flesh in what can only be called a genuinely ‘new way of being church’, but it’s not – harmless, that is. For building theme-parks and replicas of Noah’s ark isn’t all that flows from this kind of understanding of God and the world. From it also flows a whole range of understandings about the nature of the Holy Land, about the way God is supposed to act in the world and about how the world will end, and perhaps even about how that can be helped, that have had and continue to have disastrous consequences for the peoples of the Middle East or those who live in grinding poverty in Africa or who suffer with HIV infection or AIDs. Ideas, even loopy ones, are powerful things because they often shape action in the real world.

During this past week I’ve given our eldest a little help in preparing for her AS level Religious Studies exam. We’ve talked through all sorts of things from the problem of evil to the nature of sexual ethics and morality. Parts of the conversation took me back to the time when I began my own academic studies in theology, and the fun we used to have discussing these issues into the small hours of the morning – generally in the college bar or over someone’s bottle of indescribably awful cheap wine. One of the bits of the conversation which never really got me going, however, was what is usually called the problem of science and religion; about how to reconcile the claims of the Christian faith with the discoveries and the developing understandings of modern science. I was very interested in the science, in an ignorant lay person’s sort of way, but couldn’t really see where all the conflict came from. Yes I realise it has to do with the nature of God’s interaction with the world and the nature and possibility of miracles, like the one described in our Gospel reading this morning and so on, but if the scientists were showing us that the universe is unimaginably old, and that the earth and life on it emerged out of the processes of ancient cosmic chaos, and that life not only has but continues to evolve on our planet, then I’m inclined to accept that as a reasonable picture of the way things are, and to understand something like the biblical descriptions and understandings of creation as both wonderfully imaginative ways of speaking of it, and as the product of their pre-scientific time. It had not occurred to me, and this is why I found that bit of the conversation less than stimulating, that anybody really did take Genesis literally. It’s like saying that there must be unicorns in the world because they are also mentioned in the Bible, or that angelic beings really did come down from heaven and mate with the daughters of Eve to produce a race of giants. I don’t suppose it occurs to many people to believe those things, so I am endlessly surprised to find that people feel a need to take Genesis literally too.