WE are sorry Dave Goldsbrough is so troubled over the Evolution Weekend.

If he had come along, we might have set his mind at rest, or better still, begun a conversation about faith and science, face to face.

‘Relevance’ does not need to be manufactured: it has always been there in our concern and care for the world.

Dave starts off with a couple of sad generalisations about ‘Darwinists’ and about ‘Christians’, which he assumes must be both different and daggersdrawn.

It ain’t necessarily so! The happy and liberating message of Evolution Weekend is that, with integrity, you can have your cake and eat it. The insights of science enrich our faith. It is truth, as Christians say, ‘that sets you free’.

The idea that the creation story of ‘six days’ is about six periods of 24 hours – followed by a day off – has seldom been taken so narrowly as Mr Goldsbrough assumes, and there is plenty in the Bible which shows a deep awareness that God’s vast and awe-inspiring timescale does not compare to ours. God has never agreed to be limited by our ideas of him, or of the universe. Finding out all you can about the world is never any threat or insult to God.

Saddest of all, perhaps, as we approach Easter, when Christians reflect on the solidarity, weakness, and self-giving of God in Christ, is this assumption that ‘what makes God God’ is a sort of overblown perfection, which is to be defended at all costs.

Neither the Bible, nor the history of life on this planet as revealed by science, take us in that direction. Instead, through all the stumbling, wrong turnings, trial and lots of error, God keeps faith with us, and with all life.

We don’t believe in the God Dave Goldsbrough doesn’t believe in, but a God far more wonderful!


REVD DAVID COLEMAN AND DR ANDREW WEBB
Malvern Evolution Weekend speaker and organiser