We live in a beautiful universe. It is vast, incredibly old, and just extraordinary. In our Senior School Muster in Week 3 we heard from Ms Katherine Bennell-Pegg, Australian of the Year and Director of Space Technology at the Australian Space Agency, based here in Adelaide. I deliberately chose a section from Genesis chapter one for our Bible reading at the start of Muster that week. The very first chapter of the Bible tries to capture just something of the beauty of the created order. It is a lovely expression of faith: faith that behind all life, life which the ancient Jews saw as inherently good, was God the Creator.
Sadly, as many of you will know, that particular chapter of the Bible has, at least in the last 150 years or so, been sometimes mis-interpreted (wrongly interpreted) as a scientific document, which somehow denies the evolution of the universe as we know it.
It is nothing of the sort. When the Jewish priests edited, collated and partially wrote this story of creation in the 6th century BC, they were not at all attempting to describe some kind of scientific process.
Rather, they were writing a stunning expression of faith. The God, whom they worshipped in the Temple, whose presence they felt in their daily lives, including around the family table when eating the evening meal at home, was the source of the life itself. Interestingly, in this account of creation they specifically (and quite deliberately) included the stars above them: the very same stars, which their ancestor Abraham had observed in the night sky and marvelled at, as he received God’s promise of descendants.
Occasionally I reflect on that narrative about Abraham, but also on the first story of creation in the book Genesis, when I walk into our Chapel and look up at the stars on the ceiling: which is why they are there, of course.
We live in an expanding universe, whose dimensions are unfathomable, and we live on an inhabitable planet, a Goldilocks planet, whose conditions are just right for life to emerge. This is truly a remarkable thing.
The Reverend Dr Theo McCall
School Chaplain