I had my sermon prepared and packaged neatly a week or so ago. Then came the inspiring sermon of Jean Lee last Sunday from doubt to faith. This is followed by Richard Dawkin’s television commentary on his book "The God Delusion." It is an attack on fundamentalist faith and certainties. Much of it I agree but I could not end as Dawkin did. He proclaims to be an atheist. Fortunately I stumbled upon Alister McGrath’s response to Dawkin which he entitled "Dawkin’s God." McGrath reconciled his Christian faith with science. So I had to unpack my sermon and updated it for presentation this morning.

We have in the first two chapters of Genesis 1 & 2 a detailed descriptions of Creation when it first began and no one was around except God. The traditional understanding is that God through divine revelation gave the story of Creation to Moses who recorded it.

On closer examination we find two separate accounts of the origin of the universe - one different from the other and could not be merged into one way of Creation. The order or sequence and the creative process vary between them.

Genesis 1 in a poetic form described how God in six days commanded with the word "Let there be…" brought the different things into being – day & night, heaven & earth, seas & vegetation, sun & moon & stars, living creatures & human, male and female. God saw all that was created and declared it to be very good and rested on the seventh day.

Genesis 2 narrated in prose style the story of Creation beginning with molding one man Adam from dust and breathing life into him. God then planted the garden called Eden. God caused the rivers to flow. Then God thought about the loneliness of man and surrounded him with living creatures. Finally God took a rib out of the man and fashioned the first woman, Eve.

There you have it and if you really take them in the literal sense of the word, it really stretches your imagination and assaults your mind or reasoning powers way beyond the limit.

Scholars after disciplined, honest and inspired study of these stories detected that each serve a somewhat different audience. Genesis 1 calls the Creator Elohim – a Priestly account written at the time of the Exile to Babylon in 550 BCE. Genesis 2 calls God Yahweh and written in the reign of Solomon in 1000 BCE.

They recognized that both Genesis stories are not SOP or standard operating procedures for creating, like making babies. They are not manuals of operation. It is neither recorded history of events nor a scientific description of things. It is purely a theological account of the early people who reflected when they were conscious of their life on earth. Almost all religions of mankind have stories of creation and they are copied or influenced by other accounts current at that time and place of their formation. The Genesis stories are no exceptions.

For example there is the Taoist myth around 200 CE. The God Pangu was embedded in a cosmic egg. It broke into two halves. The upper became the sky and the lower became the earth. As the god Pangu grew the sky and earth were compressed and separated from one another. Pangu died and his body parts became different parts of the earth.

Filled with the mystery of the origins of life and the earth and the sky and all the things and events that enclosed them and with their limited knowledge they spin their stories of their beginnings. In an act of self-authentication each will claim divine revelation as the message believed to be sent down from the gods on high and not fanciful tales of men below
The important message is the belief that creation did not come about by itself but that God is the Creator and they gave the reasons why God made it. What this particular Jewish Bible tries to answer is not HOW the universe and life were created but the WHO, the WHAT and the WHY of Creation.

The Genesis stories are not so clear-cut and straight-forward. Later the scientific method raises other fundamental questions about life and the universe which are contrary to the literal words enshrined in the Genesis stories in the Bible. Science and theology were in direct opposition to one another in their interpretation. The people with holy vestments condemned the people with scientific frocks for they seem to have displaced God. The Mitre and the sceptre were replaced by the telescope and microscope.

The doctrine of creation became the center of theological controversies in the history of the Church. Based on their interpretation of the Bible the leaders of the Judaism, Christianity and Islam subscribed to the biblical account in the literal sense. They have developed the theory and labeled them as Creationism, Creation Science, and lately Intelligent Design. The controversy never ceased and today we have court cases in the United States still dealing with the issue of introducing the teaching creationism in the public schools.

In the elementary private school where my grandchildren in Orlando were studying their science subjects they were taught creationism of course and in each chapter of their book there are Biblical texts seemingly predicting and prophesying what the scientists have discovered.

In one of the Methodist churches here that I had served about twenty years ago, the head of the Department of Molecular Biology in the University then had a lecture series of Creation and based on the Genesis stories. He added this observation that the Bible had a prediction about China in those early days. Quoting Genesis 1l:2 "And as the men migrated from the east, they found a plane in the land of Shinar and settled there." Is it strange that this scientist later went into the study of UFO. Both of us grew up in Kampar and we are family friends.

From these stories of Creation humankind formed different images God and the universe. We live on a flat earth with life below on earth and the Creator God residing in heavens above.

Creation was completed and God presides over the universe sitting on a majestic throne and watching. Humankind is left to his or her own devices with or without interference or intervention from God. God is made in the image of man. God is imaged as the all-Powerful Ruler, Emperor, Lawgiver. Judge. In more common language God is the blind watchmaker who has made the watch and let it run on its own power without changing the batteries or re-charging them. God can be viewed also as being remote and passionless and unconcerned now with creation. On the contrary God is seen to intervene and pressured by our requests to act directly to solve the problems of the world. So we have the picture of Divine Superman flying down from space to save the earth. Others see him as the Holy Magician who can do extraordinary things like Houdini or David Copperfield. God is also pictured as the Grand Puppet Master holding the strings and manipulating the people and everything is determined by God.

Some believe that the world is of no consequence and will be destroyed at a certain time in history and they are more concerned not with the things of this decaying world but with heaven and the assurance of being raptured. The church far too long has really not been concerned with this world. She was not so concerned with the doctrine of creation more with the doctrine of sin and redemption and the other world.

A peep at church history when the scientific age dawned to challenge the teaching of the Church. While the church was teaching about the apple that fell from the tree in the Garden of Eden and the beginning of sin through Adam/Eve and the fallen nature of man, Isaac Newton saw the apple fall from the real tree in real time and reflected and discovered gravity. It is gravity that keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth. The traditional flat earth theory was replaced by a spherical body. There is no question about this scientific though unBiblical fact.
Galileo was regarded as a man of piety in his time and close to the Church. His scientific investigations and mathematical argument according to the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, experiment and verification resulted in affirming the Copernican system rather than the Ptolemaic one. Galileo in searching the sky with his telescope came to the conclusion that the earth is not the center of the universe. The sun is the undisputed center and all the planets including the earth revolves around it. This is the Copernican revolution which shattered the Vatican authorities responsible for the teaching of the Church. Cardinal Bellarmine led the attack in 1616 and exercised ecclesiastical authority. Galileo out of deference and obedience to his church delayed the publication of his work "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" till 1632.

He was brought to a Church trial and though he was more convincing in his presentation he was sentenced to life imprisonment but immediately commuted by the Pope to house arrest. It is interesting to note that the ban against the Copernican theory was lifted as late as 1820 and the condemnation of Galileo himself was revoked formally only in recent times.

Charles Darwin published "Origin of the Species" in 1859. Humankind, he concluded, was descended from "a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits." This endangered the concept of human dignity and reduced human to be just another animal. The fierce debate ensured between scientist Thomas Huxley and the church leader Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. The story that came out was that the bishop sarcastically asked whether Huxley was descended from an ape by way of his grandfather or his grandmother. The retort was that Huxley would rather have an ape for an ancestor than to have a bishop who was unwilling to face the truth.

Religious leaders were opposed to Darwinism and felt it made God redundant. At that time there were other leaders who approved the Darwinian theory which views of survival of the fittest and natural selection as the process of the "how" God created and evolutionary instead of instant creative acts in six days.

Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921), an important fundamentalist theologian, supports the concept of biological evolution and the process was guided by divine providence. One of their essays claims argues that evolution "is coming to be recognized as but a new name for ‘creation,’ only that the creative power now works from within, instead of the old conception, in an external, plastic fashion." The process of natural selection is consistent with Christian theism.

In the scientific understanding of the universe we have the Big Bang theory. It was the discovery of a Belgian priest called George-Henri Lemaître. Here we find the universe beautifully designed, the beauty and simplicity of its laws, the constants that go into those laws. The mathematical predictability that made it possible for the spacecraft that lifted from the space pad in Cape Caneveral in Florida to land on the surface on the moon or to travel further towards the planet Mars and return to earth.

Then we have the Universe designed in such a way to the amazement that life and especially human life can exist. This universe in held in tension between expansion and gravitational force pulling back into a Big Crunch. If the expansion is faster than it is, then no galaxies and stars can form by gravitational collapse as condensations in the expanding gas. If the expansion rate is slower, the universe will rapidly re-collapse. All of us will die deep fried or frozen still in the end.

Physicist Freeman Dyson has put it this way: 'The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we (life) were coming."

Sir Fred Hoyle, the famous Cambridge astrophysicist, discovered that in order to make carbon, the building block of life, and oxygen, also essential for life, the forces of nature have to be balanced in a very remarkable way. He was moved to remark that 'A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.'

Quantum physics studies the behaviour of sub-atomic particles shattered closed system of deterministic cause and effect. The world is open-ended and unpredictable. There is the Principle of uncertainty. chaos and order, chance and necessity, freedom and determinism. It is not a closed system but an open-ended world. The future is full of Possibilities and filled with Probabilities.

It is therefore essential for us to be in the journey of exploration. Arnold Toynbee has this famous expression: "The whole enterprise of Christian theology, like human civilization itself, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.

The famous Sir John Polkinghorne, Mathematical Physicist turned Priest of the Church of England concluded that God did not set off the big bang and left the world to its own devices. The Christian understanding is that the cosmos is not self-sustaining but is kept in being by a continuous act of will by its Creator. God as Creator is not a statement at a particular time he did something, but rather that at all times he keeps the world in being.

There is the glory of the galaxies and the majesty of the universe which these scientists have uncovered for us to behold in our time and affirm of faith in God the Creator of the heavens and the earth.

God of love has decided to endow creatures with freedom. As a consequence of this act of love our future is not determined in advance. The future is open. God limited himself in power by granting us the freedom of choice.

At the same time the creative process never ceased. It was not completed on the sixth day and God rested ever since. God continues to create out of the new chaos that resulted from our disobedience to the laws of nature that are in place and our failure to be good stewards on this good earth. We experience the great fluctuations of weather, the destruction of our environment and how humankind is responsible. We dare not blame God for the terrible violence that exists in the human community and the horrible destruction of our environment. God suffers when we cause such human misery and such natural disasters. There are seen not so much as the acts of God but the results of the irresponsible acts of man that cause such natural disasters today.

Romans 8:22 "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now." God is much more actively involved with his creation, sharing its groanings and travail.
Albert Einstein’s aphorism: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Genesis 1 calls the created man to have dominion over all living things and subdue the earth. Psalm 8 reminds us that God created human beings so that they have dominion over the works of God and all things that God has placed under his feet. This means that God has given human beings the powers of domination. Dominion is regarded not as aggressive exploitation but as responsible stewardship. It is a call to responsibility not only in relation to humans but also in relation to nature.

In our eagerness to overpower people we have engaged in conflict and violence. We are being confronted with communities torn apart and destroying one another. We have not worked hard enough for peace and harmony. In our greed to rush for material progress we have depleted earth’s resources and polluted earth’s environment. We face now an ecological crisis and experience daily the ill effects of the exploitation of nature. We have not emphasized enough the responsibility to care for and to preserve the creation.

When we affirm that God is the Creator and found creation and this world to be good. We believe in the process of continuous creation and that the future is open. We are to respond to the call to responsibility to take care of one another in the human community and live in harmony with nature and so fulfill the divine purpose to reconcile all people and all things unto God.

When Jesus was criticized for healing the paralytic on the sabbath he answered them as recorded in John 5:17 "My Father is working still, and I am working."

The prophet like Isaiah interpreted and gave a more convincing account of the work of the Creator God. In Isaiah 40:21-31 the prophet encouraged the people of faith at the time of the destruction of the Temple and their exile into Babylon when the Jews were at the darkest hour of their history with his rendition of the Creation story and lit the candle and gave them hope.

God the Creator who created all things at the beginning is still in charge and continues to act in history. In Colossians 1:15-20 we believe in the purposes of Creation - so that all things, whether on earth or in heaven will be reconciled to God.

What I have said about the doctrine of creation can be summed up in 4 C’s. 1. Creator God. In the beginning there was God the Creator. 2. Continuous Creation. Creation is not complete and the process goes on. 3. Co-Creators. We are co-creators with God. 4. Consummation of Creation. We will have shalom when we live in harmony with one another and with nature.

This is what our Christian faith should inform us about Creation.