Did Darwin Kill God Page #2

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That would not have occurred to them.

They'd have asked, "What is the truth that God wants

to communicate to us in this text or that text?"

So we need myth on occasion

to communicate complex truths?

Mythological speech

is often the only kind

we can use to talk

about important things in life.

So this approach to truth,

this approach to scriptures

is not a modern anomaly,

or invention, it's what the church

has always been about?

That's the position of the Church.

Reading Genesis as myth and metaphor

is not a modern trend.

This has always been the

mainstream view, this is orthodoxy.

And we see it clearly in one of the most influential

thinkers in all of Christian history, Saint Augustine.

Writing in the fifth century,

Saint Augustine wrote a text

helpfully entitled

The Literal Meaning Of Genesis.

For Augustine, the authors of Genesis were

trying to communicate unfathomable events.

How do you communicate the beginning

of existence or time itself?

This meant we had to use

different modes of communication.

Augustine even warns Christians

against treating Genesis,

or the Bible, as science or literal,

saying they'd be ridiculed

for talking nonsense.

If we take the Bible only literally,

we will have an impoverished

account, not a richer one,

and there will be no room

for theological reflection.

Saint Augustine has another and almost prescient

point to make about the creation of life.

He wrote that God is not temporal,

and it is only for us, being a part

of the process, that time exists.

He says that life involves a process of

realisation through the course of time.

He tells us that,

over time, life evolves.

And many of the Church Fathers

echoed his views.

This is not to say that Augustine

knew about natural selection,

but if we were to tell him

about this today,

he would be wholly unperturbed.

When we read what the early Fathers

of the Church wrote about the Bible,

it's clear it stands at the heart of

Christianity, not as a science textbook,

but as

a communication of God's nature,

and the reason for existence.

For them,

God was not an armchair God

who sat outside of his creation

watching it unfold,

but nor was it a deity

who intervenes arbitrarily.

Rather, God was seen

as ever-present in all creation.

This was, and remains,

the view of orthodox Christianity,

a view that would be completely

compatible with Darwin's theory.

But, of course, Christians

have not always remembered this,

and over the centuries, there have

been some who read Genesis literally.

The most significant took place in the

I've returned to England, for in Westminster Abbey

lies someone who was central to this development.

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