The Creed: That God made all things

This is the text of a sermon given by Revd Prof David Wilkinson as part of BBC Radio 4’s Lent talks, on the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene creed.

A little while ago I was walking through the University in Durham when a fellow physicist, with tears in his eyes, came up and hugged me. Now this doesn’t happen a lot in Durham, and it certainly doesn’t happen a lot with physicists! The occasion was the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves. Almost exactly one hundred years earlier, Albert Einstein had described gravity as a stretching or warping of the time and space of the universe by large masses such as stars. With this description, he had predicted that when two large masses collided small ripples in the space-time would be sent throughout the universe. But, he said, they will be so small you will never see them.

The day of my hug was the announcement that the Advanced LIGO experiment had detected the ripple in space-time produced by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away from the Earth. The ripple stretched the Earth by less than the diameter of the proton, and we were able to detect it!

My physicist friend was Professor Tom McLeish, and his worldwide renown for his work in the properties of matter, and my much lesser work on stars and galaxies, had no direct involvement in this discovery. But we were moved by two things. The first was the vastness of the universe over billions of light years which could produce such a phenomenon, the second that we could understand it – that the universe is intelligible to us through experiment and mathematics. Such is the joy of science. But something else was going on in that emotional moment. Both of us as Christians saw in it the Creator God who had created all things, given order to the vastness of the universe, and given us the gift of science to explore it.

It was one of those moments of being awe-struck. As most working scientists know, this doesn’t happen often. Most of science is boring and frustrating – it is about experiments which don’t work, about research councils that don’t give you the money to do experiments, about peer-reviewed journals which do not recognise the brilliance of your work, and about PhD students who do not do what you tell them to do. But in the midst of this are what John Habgood, former Archbishop of York and himself a research scientist, called, ‘Cor, look at that’ moments.

As an astrophysicist, moments of awe at the vastness, the beauty, and the intelligibility of the universe were never for me proofs of the existence of God, but reflections of a Creator God who created all things. Seventeen hundred years ago, the writers of the Nicene Creed saw this as a central truth of Christian belief beginning with ‘We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible’. It reflects, of course, the first line of the Bible, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. But the writer of Genesis 1 is very careful to emphasise that this means all things, sometimes in rather subtle ways. Take for example where the writer states a few verses later, ‘God made two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night’. The writer is obviously referring to the sun and the moon, but why not simply use the terms ‘sun’ and ‘moon’? The answer seems to be that the writer is engaging in theological polemic. In many stories of creation, the Sun and Moon are gods. The writer of Genesis is saying ‘Don’t be so silly as to believe that the Sun and Moon are gods, they are simply the greater light and the lesser light created by the one God who created all things’. God did not have to triumph over other gods or work with pre-existing matter to make it go bang. Rather, God created all things.

“In Christ, all things hold together.”

But the Nicene Creed goes even further. It states that it is the Lord Jesus who is the one by whom all things were made. Once again, this reflects a clear understanding within the New Testament. John’s Gospel, Paul’s letter to the Colossians, and the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews all locate Jesus as the one through whom all things were made, that the Father and the Son were together in the work of creation. Indeed, Paul goes on to say in Colossians that in Christ ‘all things hold together’. This is such an important insight for those of us who are scientists. To explore all things in the universe and to see how they are held together in the laws of physics is only possible because of Christ, and therefore to be a scientist is a Christian vocation as important as a priest or a theological teacher. Our embrace in the streets of Durham was that of two scientists who delighted in the vocation of exploring how black holes and gravitational waves – the visible and invisible – reflected God’s power and extravagance in creation. As Tom would write, ‘Seen in that light, far from being a threat to faith, science becomes one of the most holy Christian ministries one could imagine.’

However, there was another time when I embraced Tom, and on this occasion there were tears in my eyes. Tom, at the height of his scientific work and Christian witness, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This stealth cancer often does not manifest itself until it is too late to be treated. Such was Tom’s case, and he would live just for a matter of months. On my part there were tears, prayers for healing, and an honest and sometimes angry questioning of God over why, when someone such as Tom had so much still to give. He was my friend, a close collaborator on a number of projects, and he continued to teach me so much.

In such a situation, did it make any sense at all to believe that through Christ ‘all things were made’? Is God responsible for abnormal cells in the pancreas starting to grow and divide in an uncontrolled manner? Here, a better option would surely be to say that there are parts of creation which are evil and not created by God.

In his beautiful book Faith and Wisdom in Science, written before he became ill, Tom had reflected on the awe-inspiring nature of science which so captivated him both as a scientist and as a Christian, and he did so using an unusual part of scripture. Rather than Genesis, Tom went to the latter chapters of the Old Testament book of Job, the so-called ‘Lord’s answer’. The story of Job is about a man who loses everything and struggles with the perception of moral chaos. Is God capricious in his dealing with human beings, and how much is beyond God’s control? Job’s torment is not only in his loss, but also in his understanding of God, and he is not helped at all by the thirty chapters of not-so-wise counsel from a variety of friends who cannot stop themselves filling up the silence of grief with many words.

After 38 chapters of the book, the Lord finally appears to Job in answer to his repeated demands for vindication and admission that his suffering is unjust. But rather than tackling Job’s complaints head-on, the Lord takes him on a journey through all of creation, in what Tom called ‘surely the greatest poem of natural wisdom in all ancient literature’. From the springs of the sea to the constellations of Pleiades and Orion, via donkeys and hawks, the Lord surveys the wonders of the natural world. Some have charged these four chapters with irrelevance. In Charles Williams’ novel War in Heaven, the Archdeacon muses that there is something lacking in an argument to someone who has lost everything and is sitting in a dustbin by simply saying ‘Consider the hippopotamus’. Others have suggested this is a God of the petulant put-down, wanting to overpower Job and humiliate him by showing Job’s ignorance.

Tom argued that this is not about an irrelevant or petulant God. The story highlights that this is a God who is not silent but speaks, and God is named as Yahweh, the Lord who is known by his saving actions. It is this God who invites Job to walk with him through creation, engaging him with questions, picking up the nature imagery throughout the earlier chapters of the book. Job is invited to stand up and talk with Yahweh on Yahweh’s level. This is an image not of an undergraduate humiliated by an impatient Professor, but a young researcher who is a valued member of a research group. The invitation to walk and talk is the affirmation of the gift of observation, enjoyment, and questioning of the natural world.

This, once more, is a biblical affirmation of the role of science, but it goes much deeper. It shifts the emphasis from wanting easy answers to the value of living with questions. Tom would often remark, not least in his role in the Education Committee of the Royal Society, that science is about learning to ask the right questions alongside the joy of getting some answers. In an education system which is often pressured to focus on getting the right answers to an exam, this is an important reminder.

But this is true of Christian faith also. The God who is experienced in Jesus Christ is not only the God who speaks, but also the God who does not give easy and comprehensive answers to all of life’s questions. For the Christian, God is not a philosophical theory which ties up all loose ends, but rather a God who invites us into relationship where both trust and questioning are part of the journey.

For Tom there were no easy answers to the ‘why’ of pancreatic cancer. Yet his faith in Jesus Christ enabled him to live with these questions, make the most of his time, and continue to affirm his belief in the God who created all things.

It is interesting that in the Nicene Creed, the clause that in Christ all things were made is immediately followed by the statement that Christ became incarnate as a human being, that he ‘suffered’, died and then rose again.

For me, the journey of Lent is an important reminder that the God who created the hundred billion stars in each of a hundred billion galaxies also experienced the fragility, vulnerability, and pain of being human – even to death on a cross. ‘Hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered’ as Graham Kendrick would write in the song Servant King. The reason was not just an act of solidarity with humanity, but an act that offers salvation for humanity.

This gives me both comfort and hope. The Creator of all things is also the God who takes the pain and suffering of the world seriously, and in the death and resurrection of Christ I see a promise of a new creation free from tears and death. This allows me, as scientist and Christian, to live with many questions and to join with fellow Christians over many generations in proclaiming that I believe in Christ by whom all things were made. Indeed, the Creed acts as a framework which invites and holds those questions, a reminder of a bigger story and a God who is big enough to be questioned in both science and tears.