Since starting kategoria I have talked to many scientists who are Christians about their views of God, suffering, creation and their response to sceptics of various kinds. When David Harrison sent me the following article, adapted from a talk he had given to a Christian men's group, it seemed to express many of the thoughts and feelings that I have heard from a range of scientists over the years. [Ed.]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men (John 1:1-4)

If asked to describe myself I would have to say, "A Christian and a scientist'. I was, in fact, a scientist before I was a Christian. I had always been interested in all aspects of nature, long before it was fashionable.

I have been a fan of David Attenborough since his early appearances on children's TV in England as the "zoo man'. He has an infectious enthusiasm for nature in all its manifestations"” from the gigantic whales to the tiniest insect"”and he reports it all in a way which is refreshingly free from sentimentality. He is not afraid to show nature "red in tooth and claw'.

So it was with great interest that I watched him being interviewed by Andrew Denton a few weeks ago. It was a very good interview, but one that left me a bit disturbed. Towards the end of the interview, Denton asked a very good question to which David Attenborough gave a very thought-provoking answer.

Denton put to Attenborough that he had been close to so many wonders of the natural world"”did this not lead him to believe that this must be the work of a creator? David Attenborough's carefully considered reply was that while it was true that there were many beautiful and wonderful things in the world, there was also a worm which lives in the human eyeball (and nowhere else) and makes the infected person go blind. He stated that he could not believe a merciful God would create such a thing. I think he was talking about the nematode worm (Onchocerca volvulus) that causes river blindness in parts of Africa. It is spread by small biting black flies. The worms move around in human connective tissue until they reach a suitable place to grow and mature"”this is often in the eyes. The adult worm can be over half a metre in length. It is a mode of life to which the worm is exquisitely suited, with tiny hooks and mouthparts to penetrate and burrow efficiently through the body until it finds a suitable place to grow, such as the eyeball. In terms of perfection of design to a life-style, it is up there with the athleticism and grace of the cheetah. Certainly it cannot be argued that it results only from something benign that has gone wrong through human interference. Such creatures' only mode of existence is to parasitise people, through which it causes its victims great suffering.

It is a fair question to one such as myself, who claims to be both a scientist and a christian: How can such a thing be created by a loving and merciful God?

A question that David Attenborough was not asked was: What does he believe in? It is my guess that his answer to this would have been, in common with the majority of leading biological scientists today, that he believed there was no transcendant creator but that the world arose and developed "naturally'. In the words of the French scientist and philosopher Jacques Monod, "out of chance and necessity". That is, all the details of life on earth arose by random chance based on an inevitability that life must necessarily form, given the structure of the basic universal laws of physics and nature, and that there is no preconcieved pattern or plan.

This philosophy is so widespread among scientists that it is often taken as fact. It is one of the reasons for the expensive efforts to find life on other planets. If life cannot be found outside our earth, the reasoning goes, then it would seem that there is something special about this bit of creation after all"”which would be an anathema to adherants of the "chance and necessity' philosophy.
This philosophy has been given particular impetus in recent years by developments in genetics, and by the popular writer Richard Dawkins in his very influential book The Selfish Gene. 2 Dawkins proposes that the development of all living things is driven blindly by the need of individual genes to "succeed'"”that is, to replicate themselves to a maximum through generations. For instance, a gene may survive and thrive by causing a worm to live and multiply in the human eye, oblivious to any suffering caused.

If you listen carefully to the commentaries of David Attenborough, you will see that they are premised on such a view of the world. The lion might hunt in a certain way because it maximizes the chances of its genes being passed on to offspring; the beauty of a bird's song has no other purpose but to enable its genes to be passed on. It is a very persuasive way of interpreting the natural world, and it has been used to explain just about every aspect of animal and human form and behaviour. It has been claimed that there are genes that make us fat or thin, depressed or happy, genes that make us commit adultery and genes that make us kind. There have even been scientists who explain a belief in god by genes!! (I find it interesting that atheistic scientists thereby admit that humans have an innate sense of God.)

Of course the selfish gene theory is flawed"”it even goes against strict Darwinism (so it is often called neo-Darwinism). How can mere genes, molecules of DNA, "plan' strategies for their own survival? It is at best a misleading metaphor, and at worst blatant anthropomorphism, attributing human characteristics to the inanimate DNA molecules. When examined carefully, it is just another way of saying that "species survive because they are fitted to survive", a circular argument which does not answer the question: Why is the world made so that such an animal as myself can ask this question?

The weakness of the atheist's view that the universe is created by accident as a result of occurrences necessarily resulting from the fundamental laws, is that it begs the question"”what has set up those fundamental laws in such a way that this particular universe should result? This should be a serious dilemma for the atheist. It is known that the slightest change in any of the basic constants governing the universe would render the universe, and life as we know it, impossible. In fact the conditions required for life on this planet are within incredibly narrow parameters"”even the slightest change in the moon would have rendered life here on Earth impossible. Some have tried to cope with this by proposing that there are, in other dimensions, an infinite range of universes"”it is just that this happens to be the one that we live in that makes it seem special to us. You wonder that they are prepared to dream up such fantastic schemes to avoid considering that it might be the work of God.
It is interesting that there has been a shift in philosophy among a number of cosmologists and physicists in more recent years. Among those who are studying the fundamental laws and the origin of all things, there is a growing move away from pure atheism to a belief that there is some form of intelligent force behind the creation of the universe. A leading proponent of this is Professor Paul Davies, an Australian-based scientist who has considerable following in science He argues that it is inconceivable that the universe developed accidentally and by random, but that there is an intelligent design behind it. He falls well short of concluding that there is a knowable God, let alone that Christ was his son.

In fact, curiously for someone who goes to great lengths to present an open and honest approach to finding the truth, he dismisses Christian belief out of hand with no investigation and no arguments.

For a long time Stephen Hawking, who is considered by some to be the greatest scientific brain of our age, argued ferociously against any suggestion that the universe was driven by anything but an impersonal mechanism. This comes across strongly in his book A Brief History of Time and is one of the reasons the book was so popular (despite the fact that only a small proportion of people who bought it, read it, and even fewer understood it"”I include myself in the latter category). Stephen Hawking has of late changed his position rather radically, and seems no longer to believe that the universe can be explained away in purely mechanistic terms. Yet again, he falls well short of admitting a loving creator God.

However, some physicists are firmly of the view that the universe can only be explained by a personal God, and that Jesus Christ is his son. John Polkinghorne was a colleague of Stephen Hawking's, and is a fellow of the Royal Society and a distinguished particle physicist in his own right. He gave up a successful career in science to serve the Lord as a minister in the Anglican Church in the UK. He is author of several books giving an alternative view to that of chance and necessity.
It is gratifying that scientific minds far more sophisticated than mine find no incongruity in a scientist believing in God. Indeed it would seem to me to be more incongruous for a scientist to dismiss the evidence of creation as needing the Mind of a creator"”a creator who is merciful and loving.

Some modern science is, in my opinion, motivated by arrogance"”an attempt to show how clever scientists can be. Certainly I would put attempts to clone humans, and probably much of the cloning of animals, in this category (what else could we call the grafting of a human ear onto the back of a living mouse!). Such things are a wicked misuse of scientific knowledge and reminiscent of the Tower of Babel.

But science is a worthy occupation for a Christian"”to investigate the mechanisms of God's creation, to see the amazing economy and beauty that comes from the mind of our creator. Also, it is surely a blessed thing to be able to apply science as technology to improve the life of humankind here on earth, to relieve suffering and pain"”even to prevent worms from causing blindness.
And yet it is still a valid question to a believing scientist: Why did a loving God create the worm that makes people go blind?

We could, of course, say that this is because we live in a world which is suffering from the fall from grace. That such things were not to be found in paradise, but resulted from Satan's temptation and mankind's rebellion. This I believe to be true. But we know that even so, God made all things, which means he made the worms, adapted as they are to life in the human eye.

What shall we say then? Is our God capable of being cruel as well as loving? Or has God made a few mistakes in this creation? Are parasitic worms examples of his slip-ups? Should we point these out to him?

When Job questioned the justice of God, God gave it to him with both barrels: "Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me" (Job 38:3).
Who are we, the clay, to tell the potter how to improve his work?"”especially as his work in us is not yet complete.

The honest truth is that I do not know, and no amount of scientific investigation will reveal, why God has made the world precisely the way it is, but there are a few things I am certain about:
A creator God made the world"”there is no other plausible explanation for it. So-called "chance' is no more than an accumulation of circumstances beyond our abilities to compute. The fundamental laws underpinning the universe are so delicately balanced that even the smallest variation would render life on earth impossible. The odds against this universe appearing as it is from nothing are ridiculously high (a fact acknowledged by honest cosmologists).

This creator God is a personal God who makes himself known to us. This I know because he has made himself known to me"”and to everyone"”through his word. He broke into history as Jesus Christ. To deny the historic evidence of the New Testament is to deny that any written history has validity"”I understand that there is more evidence supporting the life of Jesus than that of Julius Caesar.

This God is loving and merciful. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Who but a loving and merciful god would be prepared to pay the price himself in order that his created creatures"”that he created from the very earth, that are of the same substance as the animals, and which behave no better than animals in their ingratitude"”should become his adopted children? If, then, such a God chose to make worms that cause suffering, there must be a reason for it. Sometimes such reasons may be discerned. I heard a story of some women in a concentration camp, who were being tormented by fleas. Some prayed to God to relieve them. Why was this torment added to all the others? Later they were to discover that it was only these pesky parasites that deterred their guards from raping them.

Mostly, however, we have to admit that we can discern no good outcome for disease and suffering. It would seem that this would indeed be a cruel creation if it all ended here on earth. As the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, "I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind" (Eccles 1:14). But it does not end here on earth. We have a sure and certain promise of a resurrection, to an eternal life in a perfected creation. I have not done the calculation, but I fancy that, if the whole history of the universe were represented by all the grains of sand in a large truckload laid out end to end, then our own lifetime here on earth would probably not even span the last grain. Does this not put a different perspective on the intransigence of this life compared to eternity? What if we must endure suffering in this world? It would be a small thing compared to an eternity with God. Our Lord himself said: "And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell" (Mark 9:47-48).

We do not know why God has made a world in which there is the particular suffering of blindness, but we do know through the work of His son (who made blind to see) that he does care about our physical suffering. But he regards spiritual blindness as a far more severe handicap; and he desperately desires us to come to have it cured.

The apostle Paul tells us:
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now (Rom 8:18-22).

Sufferings in this world are the pains of our new birth. If our short life here was all there was, and there was nothing beyond this world derived by mere chance, it would be a bleak place indeed where selfish genes frustrate and torture us. Then our existence would have no more meaning than that of a worm that lives in the eye.

I feel extremely sorry for Sir David Attenborough and scientists like him, who deny a place for a loving creator God. All the great wonders of creation that he has enjoyed at first hand must ultimately be meaningless for him, and bound for oblivion. No amount of conservation science can change that. David Attenborough does not know that the pleasures and wonders of this world are but a small example of the love and wisdom that a merciful God wants to share with us for eternity.

Dr David Harrison has had a scientific career spanning over 35 years of academic and industrial research in England, U.S.A. and Australia. He recently retired as Managing Director of a biotechnology research company and now has more time for writing.