Available Light

A number of people recommended this book to me recently and I'm glad they did. I interrupted my reading schedule and knocked it off in a couple of sittings. It is a thorough book but not a difficult one. Francis S Collins is a scientist of impeccable credentials. He has studied physics and biochemistry and is one of the world's leading geneticists. He is also an evangelical Christian. The book is in part his testimony of faith but mostly it is a defence of science for those who are sceptical about science and an apologetic for God for those who are sceptical about religion. He includes a brief history of the years he spent as leader of the team which produced the first map of the human genome, one of the most significant scientific achievements of the last Century. It is a book whose emphasis I found a little surprising. For me, it is axiomatic that the universe and everything in it is evolving. It has been about 40 years now since the issue of reconciling evolution to f...

Stained glass window in the recently deconsecrated church in Millers Flat About a month after the night in Lower Hutt I was baptised in the New Life Centre in Christchurch by Pastor Peter Morrow. It was a Wednesday night, and there were about a dozen of us, all young men. The women were baptised on a different night because of the effect of water on 70s clothing and the need for decency. Together, we constituted that month's crop of converts, and we all shared a common experience. All of us had known what it was to be born again, which I now see was a conglomerate of a number of things all experienced in close proximity. There was a sense of release and freedom from guilt and anxiety There was an affirmation of us as individuals and, for me, the cessation of crippling lack of self esteem. The Lord of the universe loved, astonishingly,  even me! There was, for most of us,  one overwhelming experience of being immersed in the presence of God; of having senses and bound...

Yes I know that if you've had much to do with me over the past couple of months  I've shown you a thousand pictures of my grand daughter, but just before you nod off, here's one more. This one was taken about 6 weeks ago when she was two months old, and she is, as you can see, underwater. Her eyes are open, she is holding her breath and, so I have read,  if her mum were to let her go she would be able to swim to the surface in a completely co-ordinated fashion. Of all the photos I have of her this one maybe doesn't show off her cuteness as well as many others, but it fascinates me. How is she able to do this? She goes weekly, along with about a dozen or so other children of her age to swimming lessons, but nobody taught her the necessary skills to survive underwater; she was born with them. And this is the fascinating bit. Somewhere in the long evolutionary history of our species it was necessary for new born babies to be able to survive in the water and conseque...

I spent most of last week in Southland. I preached and talked to people and drove and celebrated the eucharist and drove and talked to people and drove and talked some more. Wynston and Lorraine Cooper gave me somewhere to sleep and provided me with interesting conversation and showed me some of the parts of the countryside I had never seen before, for example Curio Bay where there is a petrified forest. Amongst the slowly eroding composite rocks ancient tree trunks lie exposed to the actions of surf and wind and rain. Some of the trunks lie straight along the ground, scattered around like pick-up-sticks. Others are stumps of trees that must have stood upright when they were petrified sometime in the Jurassic period; that is sometime before even birds and flowers were invented. More ages ago than my mind can get itself around these long straight patterned rocks were living things. Now they are being turned to sand and are slowly being washed onto the ocean floor. At some equally unim...

Some years ago I had some well meaning friends who, greatly concerned for my theological failings, used to give me creationist magazines in an attempt to convert me. The magazines were very well produced: large and glossy, with good photos. Each issue contained 20 or so stories each proving without a shadow of doubt the shortcomings and imminent demise of the theory of evolution. Each of the stories was quite convincing. Each of the stories was complete and utter bollocks. A typical story might involve a rock that had been sent to a laboratory for age testing. The age given by the laboratory would be completely at odds with the age calculated by some geologist or other, thus proving, once and for all, the fallacy of the dating process and thus the fallacy of the whole theory of evolution. Of course if the good people at 6 Days R Us want a cover story and send enough samples away to enough different laboratories, they will sooner or later get an aberrant reading, especially if they c...

There is no doubt that the earth is very old, about 4.6 billion years old by most calculations and that life appeared on it a very long time ago although no-one is sure when. It is certain also that all the multifarious forms of life we know evolved from a common ancestry. What is not so certain is how. How did life begin and what was the mechanism by which species divided off, and prospered or not as the case may be? For 150 years the dominant answer to these questions has been "Darwinism." Darwinism is not a synonym for evolution; rather, it is a particular theory about how evolution occurs. Darwinism posits that random variation and natural selection are the two mechanisms which gave rise to all the various species that have ever lived and by which life itself began. There have been other theories over the last century and a half and a determined rearguard battle on behalf of those who are incapable of thinking metaphorically and thus need to accept the literal truth of t...

My readings for this morning continue: Joshua 18-19, Psalms 149-150, Jeremiah 9 and Matthew 23. In terms of living the day, I shall probably get more sustenance from the two psalms than from the continuing story of Joshua's division of the booty with his fellow Hebrews, and Jesus' warnings about various spiritual traps will certainly give me pause for thought. But there is something edifying about today's complete set of writings: it's like a core sample down through the layers of scripture. In these four passages is seen the development of spiritual insight down through the centuries. In this progression of understanding and revelation is the beginning of the trajectory which leads from Joshua in the second millennium bc through to me at the start of the third millennium AD. All things evolve: it seems to be one of the fundamental properties of the universe. Things change, grow develop: individual things, and groups of things such as solar systems and galaxies and sp...

For a long time now I have been in the habit of reading through the Old Testament once and through the New Testament and Psalms twice a year. Usually it's a pleasure. Sometimes it's a discipline. Occasionally it's a burden. Today was occasionally. One of the four chapters I read today was Joshua 11, which carries on the story of Joshua's genocidal progress through the land of Canaan. Joshua, like most mass murderers, has a ritualistic pattern to his butchery. He takes a city. He butchers every person in the city - men, women and children. He makes off with those things - sheep cattle and basic equipment, for example - which his limited imagination can make use of and those things which are too sophisticated for his taste- houses and chariots, for example - he burns. Lastly, if he has captured him, he ritualistically tortures and murders the king of the city, mutilates the corpse and erects a stone cairn as a sort of trophy. Of course it's wrong to apply the moral s...