Sermon from January 30, 2005

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning – the first day – Genesis 1:3-5.

That seems straightforward enough until verses 14-15. And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so.

People often state the problem this way: If God didn’t create the sun until Day Four, where did the light come from on Day One? It’s not a show-stopper, but it is an irritant. I had a physicist friend at Cornell University, who went into learned and accurate detail to explain the power of matter to emit light where there was no sun. I appreciated his scholarship and his devout faith, but it is not the best way to interpret the book of Genesis, because Genesis one tells a story; it is not science.

The godly people who framed Genesis one were not concerned with how light works. They were concerned with the act of God that dispelled the awful darkness that deepened the formlessness and emptiness of earth.

Last Sunday, I suggested that we read Genesis one as truth about God in story form, much like the Parable of the Prodigal Son is truth about God in story form. We know that Jesus made up that story to tell us what God is like. We know it is a fictional story, but we have no doubt that it conveys indispensable truth about God. That parable is as true a statement about the nature of God as any mathematical equation is true about the nature of the physical world.

Like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Genesis one tells a story that conveys indispensable truth about God. But because it is a story, we don’t have to make it agree with science any more than we have to make Jesus’ parable agree with inheritance laws in first century Judaism.

Reading the Bible like this makes an important distinction. The biblical revelation in the story of Genesis one teaches us that God created the universe and everything in it; but it does not teach us how God did it. To learn that, we turn to the natural sciences.

This distinction allows science to accumulate knowledge by its own methods and to be evaluated by its own standards. It also allows theology to accumulate knowledge by its own methods and to be evaluated by its own standards.

But science and theology do not go separate and parallel ways forever. Sooner or later they intersect. As Christians, we should expect that, because both the physical and the spiritual come from a common source, the mind of God. Today, I’d like to show you how the size of the universe and the significance of man bring them together.

The Pinnacle of Creation
The Genesis one creation story goes to the wall on three issues. God created the universe and everything in it. All God created is good. The pinnacle of creation is man. Genesis 1:26 makes this third point briefly: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” Verse 27 says it more fully: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Let me take a minute to review something. A Christian doctrine of creation builds on four foundational statements. First, the mind, will, power, and freedom of God account for the existence of the universe and everything in it. Second, the creation is good. Third, we Christians view nature as God’s creation. Where other people say, “nature,” we say, “creation.” When we say, “nature,” we mean, “creation.”

Our fourth foundational statement about creation says that the heavens and the earth serve as the setting in which God seeks to be united in covenant love with mankind. Knowing what we know about the size of the universe, someone might hear that statement and think it to be small-minded and selfish. Within our galaxy our little earth is a speck. Within deep space our galaxy is a speck. To treat all that magnificence as nothing more than the setting for the human drama, to say that man is the pinnacle of creation, seems like a retreat into pre-scientific arrogance and ignorance.

Fred Heeren, a respected science journalist, once asked Stephen Hawking, the brilliant Cambridge mathematician, why he didn’t like the idea that the human race was the only intelligent life in the universe.

Hawking replied, “The human race is so insignificant, I find it difficult to believe the whole universe is a necessary precondition for our existence. . . . Clearly the solar system is necessary and maybe our galaxy, but not a hundred billion other galaxies” (Fred Heeren, “Home Alone in the Universe,” First Things, March, 2002, 45). Cosmologist, George Smoot, said, “It seems to me a sort of hubris to think that God made the universe just for us. It seems to me, I’d just make the universe full of life” (ibid).

God created man in his own image. So says the Torah. So says the New Testament. So says the Apostles’ Creed. Against this enduring confession, Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Against this enduring confession, Stephen Hawking said, “The human race is so insignificant.” Against this enduring confession, the late “Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould viewed the intelligence of homo sapiens “as an ultimate in oddball rarity” (ibid, 44). Against this enduring confession, Sigmund Freud said, “Religious ideas, which are given out as teachings . . . are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of these wishes” (quoted in Armand Nicholi, The Question of God, 41).

Astronomer, mathematician, paleontologist, psychologist and theologian operate with knowledge and methods that differ from each other. All are valid, but each has to be careful not to intrude inappropriately into the domain of another. For example, Freud speaks as a scientist, when he calls attention to wish fulfillment as a factor in human experience; but when he draws the conclusion that God is nothing more than human wish fulfillment, he no longer speaks as a scientist but as a man of faith, and a rather incoherent faith at that. When Stephen Hawking does the math of quantum physics, he speaks as a scientist; but when he says that “the human race is so insignificant,” he no longer speaks as a scientist but as a man of faith, and a rather small faith at that.

Ultimately, there can be no conflict between the realities of nature and the reality of God, because, as Christian faith explains, nature came from the mind of God. Science and Christianity are not at odds, but some scientists and some Christians are at odds. An interesting intersection of science and Christian faith may alter that.

Fighting Back
As astronomers made the true scope of the universe more widely known in the 20th century, it became easy to point out man’s insignificance. The magnitude of the expanding universe can muffle our chattering habits and make us feel small. I’d like to show you two ways in which people have responded to this alleged insignificance of the human family. One has been an imaginative Christian response. The other is a completely unexpected possibility of evolutionary theory.

First are two examples of Christian imagination. Sydney Carter died last March 13, just shy of his 89th birthday. He was an English songwriter, who had the knack of coming at things from unexpected angles. For example, he wrote this about Christ:

Who can tell what other cradle,
High above the Milky Way,
Still may rock the King of Heaven
On another Christmas Day?

Casually taking hold of those four lines is like taking hold of a bees’ nest in the dark. They clearly imply that there could be another race of rational creatures somewhere else in the universe that bears the image of God. More daring, they suggest a second Incarnation by the Son of God. If you would like another imaginative treatment of intelligent beings in the universe other than man by someone you trust, I recommend a science fiction novel by C. S. Lewis called Out of the Silent Planet.

But it is not just poets and novelists that fight skepticism about man’s uniqueness. Of all the unlikely contradictions, the least likely has come from the theory of evolution; and it is here that Christianity and the natural sciences intersect with each other.

John Polkinghorne puts the scientific disturbance this way. “We may find (the) immensity (of the universe) to be a rather chilling thought. We should not do so, however, for if all those trillions of stars were not there, neither would we be here to be upset at the thought of them. . . . A universe that is smaller than ours would not have survived for the fifteen billion years or so needed to make men and women; it is a process that cannot be hurried (Serious Talk, 69).

In other words, for those who accept an evolutionary account of nature, the evidence seems increasingly to point, not to intelligent life in other parts of the universe, but to the uniqueness of our species in this galaxy, in this solar system, and on this planet.

Robert Naeye, editor of Astronomy magazine, has said: “‘On Earth, a long sequence of improbable events transpired in just the right way to bring forth our existence, as if we had won a million-dollar lottery a million times in a row. Contrary to the prevailing belief, maybe we are special.’” (Fred Heeren, ibid, 45)

The science journalist, Fred Heeren, a Christian, said, “Personally, I’ve never thought of myself as making a leap of faith, at least, not a leap that was any greater than the alternatives” (ibid, 46). Sagan, Hawking, Gould and Freud all made leaps of faith, which the evidence of their science did not necessarily warrant.

So, yes, Professor Gould, humanity is an “oddball rarity,” tucked away, tiny as we are, in the Milky Way; but it really looks as if the whole show exists so that we oddballs might exist. And as the work of Professor Sagan and Professor Hawking and many others demonstrates, we, tiny and tucked away, can photograph the galaxy we call home, and we can identify laws that operate on the most distant star. And we can do those astounding feats, because we bear the image of God. God has fired into human nature a startling congruence between what goes on inside our heads and what goes on everywhere else in the natural order.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Let me show you something. (Show slide of an Earth Rise.) Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home. For me, it will always be the most beautiful photograph from the Apollo Space Program. (Show slide of Milky Way.) Now, this, in a galactic way of speaking, is home: the Milky Way, in a composite photograph made with radio telescopes by the Anglo-Australian Laboratories. Now, watch the cursor. It’s going to move from the center of the Milky Way. Where it comes to a stop is approximately the site of our solar system, nothing more than a dot within our galaxy. Light travels just under six trillion miles per year. That’s what astronomers call one light year. We would have to go that distance non-stop for 30,000 years to get to the center of the Milky Way.

Now, let me show you one more photograph, made by representatives of our oddball species. (Show Hubble Space Telescope slide.) Those are not stars. Those are galaxies, nearly 10,000 of them, photographed through the Hubble Space Telescope, as it aimed at one small segment of the universe.

In the movie, Chicago, John C. Reilly plays the role of a pathetic husband, named Amos Hart. In a particularly poignant scene Hart sings about himself. “Mr. Cellophane, Mr. Cellophane should have been my name. You can see right through me, walk right by me, and never know I’m there.” At certain moments, that’s what it can feel like, tucked away in one of the spirals of the Milky Way and lost among the heavens. But we are not lost among the heavens, and we are not alone in this universe, whose scope is beyond comprehension.

Long ago, on a Galilean road, a desperately ill woman came up behind Jesus in a throng of people and clutched at His garments. She said to herself, “If I touch even the fringe of his garments, I shall be made well.” And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone forth from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched me?”

Out of all the pushing, poking, shoving, grabbing, elbowing and jockeying for position, Christ knew the touch of faith. It was tangible evidence of what He meant when He said, Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows (Luke 12:6-7). Christians do not measure a person’s significance by laying him side by side with the diameter of the universe. It is from our Lord that we learn never to be intimidated by mere size, whether the measuring rod is Goliath or the distance to the farthest galaxy.

We believe that, because God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Of all God created only poetry-writing, genome-mapping, history-making man bears the image of God and can enter into a permanent relationship with the Creator of all this.

When you see a theater production on Times Square and come out into the night air, the energy of New York and the affairs of earth quickly swallow up your theater experience. But human life on this planet is the enduring drama, and we can’t step outside it. The Playwright can join us, and He has. We, the center of creation, must live out our part until the curtain falls on the old creation, and then rises on a redeemed humanity that will inhabit new heavens and a new earth in union with Jesus Christ.