To have faith

Calling that which made heaven and earth ‘God’ does not mean that you have to give up science. Charles Darwin discovered the laws of genetic variability and natural selection that drive the development of new species more fitting to survive in this everchanging habitat. Yet he did write that you could ardently believe in God and study the evolution of life. The laws that cause this universe to exist also govern the evolution of species on this planet.

But the words we choose do matter on the level of experience. Our language programmes us as to how we receive the world we live in. When you read this psalm, you can see how the composer rejoiced in the work of God. Let us picture the poet as a woman in Jerusalem praising God. In her spirit, she can visit every place in heaven and on earth. She rides with God through a tumultuous sky filled with clouds and the sun, sending down frightening bolts of lightning, urging winds and life-giving rain. She stands on the earth where bubbling springs form rivers that cut through mountains, or desert streams that quench the thirst of desert animals, grow the grass and bring forth bread, olive oil and wine. Take your time and read it again. Can you hear the sounds of the night, when lions go out? Can you see the first light at dawn, when humans wake up to leave the house and work the fields?

Of course, the composer of this psalm did not believe that God had planted the cedars on mount Lebanon with his hands, and certainly not that he had sought out a particular gazelle as food for the lion. Rather, she describes an experience of being at home in this world with all its creatures. This is her Father’s world and her mind is free to roam this domain. It is a bit like the father in the parable of the prodigal son: ‘everything I have is yours,’ he says. Thinking of the world as the estate of the father does not mean that it is ours to exploit and destruct. We are to use it as our Father, who made this place and loves its creatures, would approve of.

Not everybody feels like this about the world around us. At least not all of the time. You have the faithful and the fearful moments. Religious traditions can express and amplify both sentiments. People can experience the world, fate and luck as frightening. They can try to appease the powers they see lurking in the dark through superstitious rituals. People can believe that they have to make sacrifices to God to gain his affection or stop Him from being angry. But these supposed mechanisms get complicated when two people start asking for opposing things, or when there are too many gods messing up our lives for fun or because there is a disagreement among the gods.

For apostles like Paul, James and John, God is a singular force, he does not change depending on the sacrifices people make. Rituals are meant to bring us peace, not the other way around. ‘God is love,’ John wrote. So we should not try to make God do our will, but rather learn to desire what love drives us to do. When Paul walked through Athens, he saw how her citizens had built temples to all kinds of God, how they had fashioned statutes to address their prayers to and raised altars to bring their sacrifices on. They even had an altar ‘to the unknown God.’ This was to avoid that an overlooked deity would become angry and harm the city. That is what brought Paul (Acts 11:24-25) to say:

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else."

With those words, Paul said something that his audience in Athens could relate to. Already for centuries, Greek philosophers had come to understand the Greek gods in a metaphorical sense. They had started to interpret their myths as allegories, where these gods represent partial and lower expressions of the divine, contaminated with the corruption or earthly life. On a higher, more abstract level, philosophers spoke of God as the One, the absolute Truth, the absolute Good. This One God is very different from the mythological Zeus. Zeus is simply the strongest power in the sky. He is not the creator, but part of creation. He is the sky father.

It is thought that Indo-Germanic peoples from India to Ireland first worshipped the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Every year, the Sky Father would impregnate the Earth Mother with his rain and warmth. Spring would follow and the Earth Mother would bring forth vegetation and animal life. The welfare of the tribe depended on the harmony of the sky and the earth. Over time, more deities and mythological creatures were associated with (or split off from) each of them. Famine and natural disasters, on the other hand, came to be seen as the result of anger between the gods or towards humans.
When parents fight, children blame themselves. They will do anything to reconcile their parents; they will bring sacrifices. But it gets worse. Separating God the Father from God the Mother, tends to make the Sky-Father hyper-masculine. The ruler of the sky becomes a warrior, a womanizer, and at times a devourer of his own children. Most mythologies are focused on the Sky God and his entourage. And most of these stories are PG-rated when turned into movies today.

Some people in Paul’s time came to look upon the gods as cynical, and life within this cosmos as a form of slavery. Many Gnostic Christians from the second century on were looking for a Saviour that would deliver them from heaven and earth, and all its hostile quasi-gods. They wanted to be part of a transcendental realm where the true Father would be found. Some Christians and Muslims today are so concentrated on the salvation of their soul, the day of judgment, or a new heaven and earth, that they seem to care less about the earth we inhabit and the creatures that live in it, the works of God.

But when Jesus said, “Turn around and see, the Kingdom of God is near,” he also meant that God’s impact is to be felt today, in this world and in this life. It is not that there was no hardship or injustice in Jesus’s day (quite the contrary!), but rather that Jesus showed a way how we can come home to the Father within this universe. For him, the kingdom is a treasure hidden within us and a seed mysteriously growing.

Saying that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, is saying that God is both father and mother to us, that we are privileged to be his children, and that we may be at home in this world, wherever his voice within us calls us to go.
We can do more than saying it. We can try to make it a point to regularly enjoy the beauties of this world. Perhaps you have a special place in a garden or a park, perhaps there is a forest or coastline that you love to visit. Enjoy it with love and care - it’s family property.

*      *

Charles Darwin, painted by John Collier, 1881.

Darwin (1809-1882) studied theology and even brought his Greek New Testament on the voyage that led him to develop his theory ‘on the origin of species.’ He did not see evolution as opposed to faith but saw God as the ultimate ‘law giver.’
In the light of the increasingly critical theology of his age (in some ways too critical, as we now know), he lost faith in the gospels as contemporary accounts of real events. He could no longer trust in Christianity as a form of divine revelation. And although he cherished its morality, he was abhorred by the idea of eternal damnation that, according to the doctrine taught in his church, would certainly befall his ‘father, brother and almost all my best friends.’ He had always been active in his local parish but stopped attending church when he was forty years old. Shortly thereafter his nine-year old daughter Anna died, and Charles could not share his wife’s beliefs that Anna had a life in heaven.
Darwin’s earlier belief in God had gradually become a professed agnosticism. But both intellectually and because of his love for his believing family members, he refused to be recruited by a growing group of atheists who used his work to fight Christianity. He believed that science neither proved nor disproved God and that a man "can be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist” at the same time. In 1873, he wrote to a correspondent in Utrecht:

“I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty.”

Suggestions for dialogue

A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:

• Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness. 
• First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
• Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared. 
• Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
• Leave room for silence and contemplation. 
• Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.

These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com