I believe in God, Maker of Heaven and Earth
23rd February 2025
A sermon on Genesis chapter 1 by Kenneth Padley
In the beginning God created the Heaven and Earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep; this was due to a malfunction at Lots Road Power Station.
And God said, Let there be light; and there was light, but Eastern Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.
And God saw the light and it was good; He saw the quarterly bill and that was not good.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night, and so passed His GCSE.
This is the beginning of the Bible according to Spike Milligan, his version of the story of creation.[1]
The opening chapters of Genesis are among the best known and most theologically loaded passages of Scripture. They have inspired extraordinary paintings from artists like Michelangelo and William Blake. They have been articulated in poetry – most famously Paradise Lost by John Milton – and captured in music, including the Creation oratorio by Joseph Haydn which – sponsored marketing feature – will be sung here in the Cathedral by Salisbury Musical Society on the evening of Saturday the 22nd of March, bookings now open.
It is precisely because the story of creation is among the most significant passages of Scripture that it has also been exposed to caricature and hyperbole. It has become a plaything of comedians, and a subject of popular misrepresentation. In part, this is because it has also become a bastion for radicals: so-called creationists who think that the world was made in 6 days in the year 4004BC; also of millenarians who would hasten the end times by abusing that dominion which God gives humanity as a mandate for irresponsibility with the environment.
So, it is high time for us to reclaim a robust doctrine of creation. To do this we’re going to need to establish a clear understanding of what is (and is not) being said in the picture language of Genesis. Christian exegesis of this passage has undoubtedly evolved over time, frequently in dialogue with developments in science. That said, many of the fundamental truths about creation which Christians have asserted for centuries – often aligned with our sisters and brothers in other monotheistic traditions – remain as valid now as they were when first advanced.
Let’s start our quest with the existence of God himself. This is because it was possible two hundred years ago to argue from the sophistication of life on earth to the existence of an intelligent designer – but this argument no longer checks out. In his book Natural Theology, published in 1802, the philosopher William Paley drew an analogy from a pocket watch. Look at the complexity of a watch, said Paley, and we must deduce the existence of a watchmaker. Just so, he argued, the diversity of flora and fauna on earth demonstrates that there is a creator. Charles Darwin put pay to this of course, showing that the Origin of Species was the product of natural selection and gradual evolution over millions of years.
However, it would be fallacious to jump from the theory of evolution to a denial of God’s existence. This is because the existence of God (and God’s nature as a creator) can be asserted on grounds other than the argument from intelligent design. They that go down to the sea in ships do indeed see the works of the Lord, even if they cannot argue to his existence from the zoological diversity thereof.
For me, the strongest philosophical case for the existence of God is what is known as the cosmological argument. This argument proceeds from the observation that everything in the universe is in a chain of causation and that the presence of this chain can only be explained either by saying that ‘it just is’ (which isn’t very satisfactory) or by deducing the existence of an uncaused cause that is responsible for every other cause – which Uncaused Cause, declares Thomas Aquinas, is what we call God.
In reaching this point, you will notice that I fully accept the theory of evolution, a position which – I suspect – is echoed by most contemporary Christians. It is right to endorse evolution because it is the scientific consensus. Biologists are experts in their field such that, all things being equal, we need to be led by their expertise about the things to which their expertise pertains.
By extension, we should also accept the received wisdom of physicists about the Big Bang, the theory that the origins of the universe lie in a singularity of time and space nearly 14 billion years ago. As an aside – useful pub quiz knowledge – the Big Bang theory was first formulated by a Roman Catholic priest, George Lemaître, in the 1920s.
George Lemaître must have found coherence between the Big Bang theory and the cosmological argument for the existence of God. This is because physicists cannot get beyond the substance of our universe and so are left with the metaphysical question of why did the Big Bang happen? The cosmological argument answers that question with the Uncaused Cause, the only alternative to which is to say with Betrand Russell that the universe ‘just is’ – which, as I have indicated, is not very satisfactory.
To assert that God is the uncaused cause of everything has a number of theological consequences. A God who is self-existent (whose very essence is existence) is not the product of anything else and is not beholden to anyone else. Such a God cannot be a creature of time and space but is unchanging and eternal. In turn, this means that God creates out of nothing, ex nihilo, such that the stuff of time and space is not the substance of God, nor does it contain the substance of God: as monotheists, Christians are not pantheists, nor panentheists. But this also means that God is not a distant figure, a remote originator who lights the touch paper of life and then stands back. A God who creates everything from beyond time and space must be as much a creator now as 13.8 billion years ago, as much a creator today as He will be tomorrow and a billion years’ hence.
Humans see time in a long line which we call history. God – in a way which is beyond our comprehension – must encounter everything in an instant, what one twentieth century theologian, Karl Barth, called the ‘eternal now’. The paradox of the God who exists beyond time and space is that She is always and everywhere with us, closer to each of us than we are to ourselves. And all this is true, even before we start to think about Jesus, in whom God talks to us face to face.
We have asserted tonight in the creed that ‘God the Father Almighty’ is ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’. This major tenet is too great to cede to those who do not yet believe, nor to extremists who would misrepresent the mainstream Christian tradition. Such a God is rightly the object of our devotion and service, the one from whom all things come, for whom all things exist, and to whom all things tend – so to whom we ascribe all power and glory, praise and majesty, now and forever, Amen.
[1] The Bible according to Spike Milligan, 1.