The snowdrops featured here come from a former domicile - taken by Tim - as my bulbs, planted a month late, will also be late in flowering, if ever! However, there are lots of daffodils, tulips, and some snowdrops and crocus emerging, so all is not lost. Perhaps Spring is on the way after the recent Arctic weather?

I expect that everyone has been familiarised through TV, broadcasts, books and exhibitions, with the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth this year. As someone has put it, Darwin's theory of evolution was the beginning of modern biology. All I am doing here is to put out this amazing, ground breaking work as a foil to an initial discussion about what I see as some of the problems of modern theology. So I begin with the final paragraph of Darwin's work, The Origin of Species, from the 6th edition, 1866, page 429. The first edition was published in 1859 in London on 24 November by John Murray -

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin's amazing research has changed the way we understand life forms and their changes. But, for him, these brute facts unsettled his own faith as a Christian. He retained belief in God but he could not fit what he had learned scientifically with the beliefs of the Christian church. It has been said that clergy of the time were not necessarily disturbed by Darwin's findings (although he experienced a great deal of other opposition). It seems that the geological discoveries of the 19th century along with the new biblical criticism of the Bible were the greater cause of uproar in the churches. We have got over all those disturbing rows long since - except for those who reject Darwinism and opt for what has been called 'creationism' in one form or another, making God the cause of all living organisms directly. The facts of evolution cannot be gainsaid.

Theology, unlike biology, is concerned with arguments about the impossible. If only there were some theological space like the Galapagos Islands where Darwin was confronted by the specimens which led to his theories of natural selection, we should be almost home and dry with reasonable arguments to determine the nature of God and of the person of Jesus. But unfortunately we have to deal only with literary evidence, the use made of this in countless theories filtered through the imagination of philosophers and theologians, and the claim by the Christian churches to have settled the arguments in doctrinal formulas beginning with the ideas of clergy (and the Emperor) in the 4th-5th centuries. Theologians (which, according to the Greek hermit Evagrius of Pontus includes all who pray!) perhaps need a sort of theological algorithm - (an algorithm is a procedure or formula for solving a problem used in computer programmes. One puts the problems into a programme and, if the programme works, one gets the answers one is looking for!

Unfortunately for Charles Darwin, there was not much lateral thinking around in the mid nineteenth century to accommodate the new theory of evolution. To think of God in relation to real life it is necessary to say that God is at least as personal and 'human' as we are; that he is not either like the clockmaker who sets the machine going and then leaves it alone nor like the interfering busybody who cannot leave anyone else to get on with life in our own way, whatever the consequences of that. To quote Darwin, "There is grandeur in this view of [God]" What the centuries have lived with, in some sort of fear, is a God like, to quote David Pailin, 'a pernickerty fusspot!' Because life has been for many people, 'nasty, brutish and short', we have so often caricatured the god who, it was thought, was responsible for all that suffering.

But it is in Jesus that we are shown what God is like. And that raises all the questions of who Jesus is - Son of Man, and/or, Son of God? Bishops, clergy and the Emperor in the 4th-5th century also resolved those impossible questions with formulae which, input into a modern algorithm, would cause the computer programme to crash!!

I mention these ongoing problems about God and Jesus because I have recently read a large book by a well known theologian who hinted (not dogmatically I must say) at answers which I consider untenable and unworthy in the 21st century. One can feel the despair of Darwin when confronted with Christian statements that gave no answer to his real concerns in his research into the origins of species.

Just as a theological experiment, draw two columns on a sheet of paper. On the left hand side write down all that you think the God and Father of Jesus is like - there are lots of examples based in part on our own good experiences of life, as well as from the bible and from the accounts of Jesus' life. On the other side put down all those things which appear to be in complete opposition to our conception of such a 'good' God - famine, war, disease, pride, selfishness, hatred of others, self will ... Now there is a sort of algorithm for you! It is important to let this 'programme' run in our minds and prayer for some time.

Perhaps that is what Darwin did at his home at Down House in Kent and came to the decision that he could not believe some of the negative ideas of Christian faith in which he had been brought up. His wife, who remained a Christian, supported him to the end - showing that such compassion was the reflection of positive ideas of a God who could still be believed in beyond the mistaken (for us today) formularies of many centuries ago.