Creation ex (almost) Nihilo

One thing we can do in Modern Britain is go to the pictures and watch Creation, the new Charles Darwin biopic, an experience allegedly denied to American audiences by distributors running scared from the religious right. As for me, I find the theory of evolution to be not only a good framework for understanding biological origins, but also a stimulus to excellent creative theology, from that of Frederick Temple (Archishop of Canterbury from 1896-1902) to Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), both of whom took it as a primary theological inspiration. Me Evolutionist.

Thus Lucy and I joined nine others in a High Wycombe cinema (Low numbers, given that it’s 2-4-1 night Tuesdays) for last night’s showing of Creation. I went with high hopes, having enjoyed Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s wonderful Darwin biography last year. John Collee is a script writer whose work I particularly enjoy, ever since his terrific Paper Mask back in the eighties. So far, so good.

This is lavish BBC style costume drama, spiced by some wacky psychadelic bouts of gastroenteritis, with abundant flashes backwards and forwards. Poor old Darwin’s tummy necessitated a lot of crazy lurching around like clubbers do on Saturday nights, with some hallucinations on the side — exploding slugs, stuffed birds flying, pickled babies winking, that sort of thing. Pretty standard stuff, really.

Charles Darwin was a decent family man, a sensitive Whig Squire, who studied nature, was very upset when his daughter died, and wrote a clever book. The visuals and design were sometimes gorgeous, and characters likeable enough, especially Jenny the Orangutan. Mrs Darwin managed to teach herself how to play the Piano to Paderewsky standard whilst waiting for something interesting to happen. That’s the story and I’m afraid it ain’t no King Lear.

If you are a real Darwin nut, this could be a worthy night out. For everyone else, the lovely cinematography and nice performances do not make up for the basic lack of plot. Two of the eleven people in our local fleapit nodded off. Perhaps the ultimate reason US audiences may have to wait until this movie reaches public TV is not so much skulduggery by the religious right as the fact that this is, regrettably, a dull film rather overawed by its subject, too ponderous and laboured to be rescued entirely by some genuinely lovely, inventive visuals and capable acting...
Unless that is, as some have suggested about Richard Dawkins’ TV series on the joy of atheism, the whole thing was actually got up by the religious right to discredit Darwin and all his works. Perish the thought. Two stars out of five.

Post-Christendom: rafts or trawlers?

Steve Hollinghurst works for Church Army in Sheffield, researching the cultures of people who don’t go to Church in the UK. He came to our local Deanery Synod last night with simple facts and figures about post-Christendom England.

• It’s an immensely fluid and complex picture out there. Fewer people buy into institutional church and the whole “Christian England” thing. Denominations are a thing of the past — a phase we went through, that means nothing to most people now. We are also globalizing massively.
• As “Religion’s” stock (genteely) declines, “Spirituality’s” increases. There’s a lot of curiosity out there. Steve contrasted the ubiquitous modernist “Scooby-Doo” interpretation of paranormal phenomena 30 years ago with multiple wall-to-wall ghosthunter shows now... Tech is cool, but the Eagle Comic optimistic scientism with which we all grew up has, worryingly perhaps, collapsed into widespread pessimism and cynicism about Science. People are massively switching off assertive fundamentalist certainties. Experts are now as good as their last job; Richard Dawkins is, in fact one of the best recruiting sergeants the Churches have.
• People find Churches spiritual places, but most of all when we’re not there! More people are passing through and by Churches (now up to 82% of the population a year), but far fewer committing themselves to the gathered twice-a-week experience.
  

So what do we do? We could retreat fast into the bunker, clinging on to what we fondly imagine were the certainties of the past. We could get the wagons into a circle for vigorous “Judaean People’s Front” debates around then camp fire. Alternatively, we can get the wagons out onto the trail, and see who we meet along the way. Where we decide to do the latter we will find ourselves needing the same kind of utter versatility St Paul talked about in I Corinthians 9 — Greeks to Greek, slave to slave, Jew to Jew. We need to distunguish clearly the gospel from its cultural wrappers. It’s a simple story — love is strong as death.

• Keep the core simple and authentic.
• Don’t rob the Word of its power as mystery — embrace the subtlety and poetry of it.
• Get engaged. Be holy pragmatic / entirely versatile about the wrappers.

The Brain — Stroke of Genius

As both my parents had strokes towards the ends of their lives, a remarkable TED talk caught my eye. Recently Jill Bolte Taylor, brain scientist, had a stroke which she was able to analyse as it happened. Her story, from this year’s TED event at Monterey, affirms powerfully the concept of the brain as a powerful self-organising structure, along with some fascinating workshop manual information about what Woody Allen called his “second favourite organ.”

Embryo Wars — five critical questions

What did I do in the great embryo war? — stay out of it is one possible answer, but if twentieth century science was driven by physics (leading to us going nuclear) the twenty-first is set fair to be driven by life sciences. Towards what? Hard to say, but it’s a vital question. I am very much an ordinary Joe, Historian not life scientist, but people have asked me for a view, so here are some preliminary critical questions (in ascending order of importance):

• Q1: Why whip people’s consciences?
  There is a political dimension, because politics is where laws come from. I like the idea of free votes, because it requires people to make out cases that persuade others rather than coerce them using the party machine. This is all the more true of a conscience question — Using whips looks like you know you really can't persuade them, and maybe you can’t.
• Q2: Is Every sperm sacred?
  It’s a simple modern idea that conception defines the logical top of the slippery slope. It’s one easy and obvious place to draw lines. Christian tradition, however, has taken a rather more “farmer Giles” view of these things. Augustine talked about embryo inanimatus, not yet endowed with a soul. Medieval Christians dated ensouled life from “Quickening.” Trying not be be too gross, Lucy and I once lost an early pregnancy and turned up to our surgery with what our doctor tactfully referred to as “matter of conception,” wrapped in a hanky. Was it within the purpose of God, whatever its precise status? Yes. Did I want to rush out and give it a Christian funeral? No. Ten weeks later I would have, and it would have mattered very much to me. Call me illogical. I’m with Saint Augustine on this one. A Blastocyst has the potential to become a baby. The vast majority don’t make it, within the purpose of God, including that one.
• Q3: What about Species bending?
  Well, producing Chimeras sounds much more frightening than breeding mules. We’ve been doing some degree of this since the Bronze age. But what about altering what it means to be human or animal? Genesis teaches a sacred ordering of nature. God asked the man to name what was already there — to order and steward all pragmatic possibilities. We have many more possibilities before us than Adam. How do we fulfil the charge and avoid the curse that was laid on us all in him? If I have a pig's valve put in my heart, does that make me a hybrid? technically, yes. Practically, even within the Jewish/ Christian view that you are a body rather than have a body, such hybrids obviously retain their full humanity. Cytoplasmic embryos are emphatically not the same thing as true (mixed gamete) hybrids. We already use transgenic embryos for medical purposes, but on the “One step at a time, and learn from it” principle I would oppose any proposal to put animal genes into human embryos. As to the matter under discussion, if we should be reluctant to monkey about with this stuff (and I feel we should be) use of Cytoplasmic embryos actually reduces the requirement for human embryos. There are thus pro-life arguments for allowing it. Radically different research options are coming up in the outside lanes, too, but we need to take every proposal very much on its own merits.
• Q4: We can do all sorts of things — does that make them right?
  No. Life is God-given. The Warnock report gave limited special protection to human embryos, and this is surely right, to honour the concept of humanity. I don’t buy the idea that something becomes right merely because we can do it. Lots of things we can do are emphatically wrong, and this lies at the heart of the classic nuclear dilemma. Far better if nukes had never been invented, but you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Saint Paul pointed out that Instrumentalism is not enough — something isn’t right merely because it can be done. If I have to err, I would do so on the conservative side of this argument. It’s easy to mock slippery slope arguments, but one thing does lead to another. We should keep in place strong legislative protection against, for example, the implantation of research lab embryos in a woman, or culture beyond the current 14 day limit. What we actually need far more is a map for the country around us as research proceeds — a major agreed framework within which to understand the implications. I can’t see we’ve yet quite got that, though Warnock was a start. Our lack of this worries me more than than anything proposed in the current bill, and I think serious ethics committee work needs to be done at a more theoretical level.
  
• Q5: What is our Moral duty here?
  Cherishing life is a plain moral duty, but part of cherishing life is to relieve suffering and help people, and this often involves radical intervention in natural processes. Dr Frankenstein and Nazi mad science are very different from what is being proposed and why. God gave us brains to use, and there is a clear moral and social objective in enhancing our capacity to understand and promote healing. Of course there is the principle of Double effect (no good should rest on a bad); but you can only know Cytoplasmic embryo research is inherently bad if you take the “every sperm is sacred” line, which, with Saint Augustine, I don’t.

Whatever we do is within the mercy of God. These are very much preliminary musings. I’d like to hear very much more from morally aware Christians within the research community — like you?