Animal Magic?

The Rector’s Wife makes no apology for the fact that she doesn’t raise the cultural bar very high.  She mused upon this irrefutable fact during a recent perusal of the family DVDs.  There was the WW2 epic, ‘Band of Brothers’ that The Rector wanted one Christmas alongside ‘The Goodies’ box set that TRW had asked for. FYI,  Kitten Kong is still one of the best pre-CGI effects ever!  TRW however is capable of  Deep Thought* when required and would like to share some with the St. Matt’s on-line community.

With absolutely nothing on  TV recently, (not even Cash in the Attic or Come Dine with Me), TRW came across a programme about Darwin presented by David Attenborough.  And oh boy, is David a fan or rather a FAN!  It’s Darwin’s bicentenary so we got the full treatment on how he came to write ‘The Origin of the Species by Natural Selection’,  the book that set out Darwin’s theories on evolution.  To say that this juggernaut of a book upset most of the religious folk of the western hemisphere is like saying the ordination of women caused a bit of a kerfuffle.  In fact he delayed publication for years as he knew it wouldn’t be well received.  But for many it heralded what they believed to be a new way of understanding the physical world past, present and future.  However, it caused deep theological and intellectual divisions that exist to this day.

Darwin was troubled by God in the way that you or I don’t know how to deal with the maddening ‘left over’ bit in a tile puzzle.  He just didn’t know what to do with Him.  He detected no sense of the Creator in the natural world.  His theories led him to understand that we all evolved from simple single cell organisms, we all come from the same building blocks of life and become more complex as ‘nature’ dictates.  Therefore man has no centrality in the scheme of things and is not the ‘crown’ of God’s creation; apparently we are all just animals.  The Creation Story therefore was a myth that could be ignored.  He went as far as stating that it could all happen without divine intervention.  It just seems extraordinary to me that Darwin and David could go into paroxysms of delight over the natural world in all its dazzling wonder and still not see God’s hand in it!  Yet Darwin effectively erased God from the picture.  For him, and for others, a choice was made and that was to dismiss God from Life, the Universe and Everything.*

Personally I have no problem with evolution; the evidence weighs overwhelmingly in its favour.  Besides, I’ve never thought the Creation Story was really about  how and when we were literally made.  It’s much more about why our relationship with God went wrong.  Can you imagine the manual called ‘Creating the World and All That’s In It’?  Have you ever tried following an IKEA leaflet for a flat pack wardrobe?  We can barely understand the offside rule; anything more challenging might bust vital brain cells.  For me it’s enough to know that ‘In the beginning, God….’  It’s all entirely His however He bought it into being.

*Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Douglas Adams

Next instalment includes:  Why nature isn’t like a box of Ferrero Rocher and more like a Spaghetti Western!