Having marked in 2009 the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, it is instructive to remember the utter furore that the publication in 1859 of his "On The Origin Of Species" caused in the mid-Victorian Age, and the arguments that have followed it ever since. You may remember the famous film of 1960 entitled, "Inherit the Wind", which told the story of the trial of John Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. Scopes was a high school biology teacher who dared to teach Darwin's theory of evolution in contravention of Tennessee state law. In the courtroom, he was prosecuted by William Jennings Bryan, a former Secretary of State, and was defended by Clarence Darrow, one of the leading criminal lawyers of his day. Bigotry won, and Scopes was convicted, but the judge, realizing the ridiculous fundamentalist nature of the prosecution case, fined Scopes only $100. Spencer Tracy's performance as Clarence Darrow was an absolute tour de force. Mind you, the scriptwriters gave him some great lines… "Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. Soon… with banners flying and with drums beating, we'll be marching backward. Backward! To the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind."
However, in 2009, I received an invitation from a church in Maidenhead to attend a lecture which intended to prove why Darwin was wrong and why evolution is an allegedly anti-Christian concept. As the writer of Ecclesiastes remarked, "There is nothing new under the sun!"
Fanaticism and ignorance are having a resurgence across the world. It is not just a case of Islamic fundamentalism in the east or Christian fundamentalism in America or, dare one say it, even in Britain. Rampant, fundamentalist atheism, using carefully chosen bits of science to demolish the more ridiculous bits of fundamentalist religious teaching, is not only on the rise, but is making its authors immense sums of money. The quiet voice of the thoughtful middle way is utterly drowned out in all the shouting and the posturing.
Keith Ward, sometime Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, was the first to challenge effectively the likes of Richard Dawkins and his cohorts. I have heard Keith Ward lecture and he starts from an unexpected premise. He asks why human beings are moved by great music and by great art, and what this might tell us about a spiritual dimension to life. Of course, those who wants proofs – or believe that they have already got them – rather more than they want subtle signs are too busy shouting at each other to heed such invitations to actual thought.
When you get tired of people shouting at each other, inside or outside of the church, what can you do? You can go on holiday, that's what! Try crossing the English Channel first. You might no longer be able to hear all the shouting from across that expanse of water.
The more that you think about it, the more you appreciate the wisdom of Keith Ward's approach in a predominantly non-Christian Britain. He does not call upon people to start in a place where they no longer have personal experience, but to start where they might have. This might be called an aesthetic approach to the perception of spiritual realities and truths. But, let us not use jargon or technical terms. Let us keep it very simple indeed.
Let us, indeed, clear one huge obstacle out of the way first – the question of whether Science and Religion are in opposition to each other. Well, I don't want to go back to an age of bigotry any more than Clarence Darrow did, so I tend to resolve the problem with a very simple formula: Science and Religion are not in opposition to each other, because Science tells you How and Christianity tells you Why.
You may or may not be convinced by that formula, but it satisfies my intellectual and spiritual requirements, so now let us pursue Keith Ward's suggestion a little further – that great music and great art point very clearly to a spiritual dimension in life and to the God who has inspired them in the first place. I would want to add to Keith Ward's list of signposts great literature. I am not a musician and, although I know quite a lot about art, I am not an artist. But I am, albeit in a very modest way, a writer, and it has always fascinated me to contemplate how the mind that God has given to each one of us can analyse, describe and interpret the creation about us in such a way that we can discover new things from it and convey those discoveries to others.
I like to explore where great writers lived, worked and wrote, and to visit the places that inspired them in their writing. I like to try to understand their feelings of inspiration and to share the sense of how different places led them to write as they wrote. You may have done the same thing if you have visited Stratford-upon-Avon and visited the house where William Shakespeare was born, but in that case, Shakespeare didn't do a lot of writing when he was just a baby, so you need to go somewhere else to find the place of his inspiration for King Lear or Twelfth Night. In the case of Twelfth Night, Tom Stoppard has been there before you when he wrote the film-script for Shakespeare in Love.
Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours, and was writing just after the time of Jane Austen and whilst Charles Dickens was getting under way as a novelist in England. Although he lived in Paris most of the time, he came back to Touraine and lodged in a big country house of a friend of his – at the château of Saché – to find the peace to write and to dodge his Parisian creditors. He wrote his novel, "The Lily of The Valley", there and he set the story in the very valley in which the château of Saché stands, between Pont-de-Ruan, a few miles to the east, and the great château of Azay-le-Rideau, a few miles to the west. As you walk or drive through the valley of the River Indre, you can feel the echoes of the words of the psalmist: He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. And you can feel why Balzac loved the place so much, and how he found the inspiration there to write what he wrote.
The château of Saché now houses a museum of the work of Honoré de Balzac. The room where he wrote is kept as it was in his time. You can stand there in the silence and almost hear the scratching of his quill pen, his slurping of dozens of cups of very strong coffee that kept him writing often for sixteen hours at a time. You can feel something similar when you stand in the study of Émile Zola's house at Médan, just west of Paris, and look out of the great window onto the Paris-Rouen railway at the bottom of his garden that inspired his novel, "La Bête Humaine".
Ah, you may say, but weren't Zola and many of the artists of the nineteenth century, both in France and in England, atheists? Yes, that's true. Émile Zola, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, William Morris, Edward Burne Jones, had all virtually abandoned, not the spiritual journey, but the institutional Church, because they felt that it shouted in ignorance too much and too often, and had forgotten how to look and to listen to the testimony of God's world around about them – and to interpret what they and the pioneers of scientific discovery perceived it to be saying.
Do not make the same mistake, and allow all the shouting to blot out the quiet testimony of God's marvellous world and universe. Go where you can feel what the psalmist felt: He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. Go where William Wordsworth and Alphonse de Lamartine were absolutely overcome by the intricate and stunning beauty of God's world. And, yes, go where great writers have understood the depths of despair of the human condition.
For if you do, you will begin to understand how Jeremiah could say, "The word of the Lord came to me…" You will begin to understand the circumstances in which the aged Saint John could relate, "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day…" Walk along the banks of that peacefully flowing river where the Lily of the Valley still blooms and where a great writer is still honoured for his God-given gifts.