Credo January 2025

Here’s my latest Credo article featured in today’s edition of the Newark Advertiser

In addition to the Newark Advertiser there’s another newspaper that has a weekly ‘Credo’ column. You may have heard of it. It’s called The Times.

One Saturday a few weeks ago the column in The Times was written by Dr Francis Collins. He’s a scientist who led the human genome project – the scientific undertaking that worked out the 3 billion letters in the human DNA code that scientifically makes us what we are.

“And,” he writes “I am a follower of Jesus. Some people think the latter is incongruous with the former.”

That is to say that often people think that science and religion are incompatible – that you have to choose one or the other. But he says that when he was a young man he realised that he couldn’t find the answers to questions like: What is the basis of morality? Why am I here? Why is there something instead of nothing?

Now those of you who have read my columns before may recall that I share Dr Collins’ view that there is nothing incompatible between the scientific and the religious worldviews. They are attempting to answer completely different questions. If you want to know the cause of a disease, the nature of an atom or, like Dr Collins, the sequence of DNA then science is where you need to go for an answer. If it’s questions like the ones Dr Collins struggled with as a young man you are wrestling with then science not only doesn’t have the answers it can’t provide answers.

The corollary to this is that religion really should stick to its own area of expertise too. So I believe most strongly that if you want to learn about how the universe and the Earth within it came to be you should listen to what the scientists say about it. There’s a very good level of agreement that it all started with a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. So to argue, as some Christians continue to do, that actually it came about as described in Genesis, took 6 days and it all happened just a few thousand years ago then I believe you’re using the Bible wrongly.

The same thing applies to the glorious diversity of life forms on our planet. Again if you literally believe that all the animals were created on day 5 of Creation rather than in evolution I would have to disagree with you.

I’d go further and say that giving the impression that you have to believe in 6-day Creation and deny evolution to be a Christian then you are likely to be deterring a lot of people (who just can’t accept this denial of what science has taught us) from taking seriously the many wonderful insights that faith can give.

You don’t have to deny the Big Bang and/or evolution to be a Christian. I know that. Because I believe in them both and I am a Christian.

Mark Taylor – Minister of London Road Congregational Church, Newark