Lucy, Hannah Blakey, Amy Busby, Tony Hill, Madeleine Chapman, Irene Pitman, Liz Blakey, Kay Harrison, Margaret and Colin Guy and the soul of their daughter Amanda who died tragically last week.
Mara Livermore (16th), Duncan Wall and Joy Abbott (17th), Neil McLeod (19th), Helen Southall and Caitlin Hillman (20th).
Between now and the end of September, members of the Ministry Team may be taking annual leave. If you need to speak to anyone, try their usual numbers and if unavailable then contact the Benefice Office. This answer phone will be checked regularly and detals passed to the appropriate person. (Please note emails may not be answered for some weeks, again contact the Benefice Office)
St Mary’s notices can be sent to the Parish Office at info@stmarysmoseley.co.uk, or by phone: 0121 449 2243 (mornings) by 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday. Voicemail messages can be left at any time. Also see http://www.stmarysmoseley.co.uk.
St Anne’s notices can be sent to Revd Rosemary Donovan at info@st-annes-moseley.org.uk, or by phone: 0121 449 1071 by Thursday. Also see http://www.st-annes-moseley.org.uk.
Gift Aid: If you are a taxpayer, please maximise your giving in the Offertory Plate by using the Gift Aid envelopes provided.
St Mary’s has a loop system for the hard of hearing, in the centre block of seats. Turn your hearing aid to the ‘T’ setting.
During the summer when there are no children’s groups, families are welcome to use the family worship zones so that they can take part in the services together. Alternatively for little children the crèche room can be used, but children must be supervised at all times by their parents or guardians. Happy summer holidays to all our children and their leaders and helpers! Groups recommence on 6 September.
The groups have now finished for the summer. Thanks to all leaders and helpers for their hard work during the summer. Please make use of the family zones during this period. Groups recommence on 6 September.
The Youth Group which meets on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. at St Mary’s will not meet again until 16 September.
Once a month from April to October we will be holding a group during the 10:00 a.m. service at St Mary’s (the same time as the Children’s Sunday Groups) and hope that you may be able to join us.
The dates and titles of the sessions are:
| Date | Subject |
|---|---|
| Sun-26-Apr | What do we believe? |
| Sun-May-17 | Knowing Jesus Christ |
| Sun-14-June | Come Holy Spirit |
| Sun-12-Jul | Knowing the Bible and praying |
| Sun-9-Aug | Holy Communion |
| Sun-13-Sep | Belonging to a Church Community |
| Sun-11-Oct | Getting ready for Confirmation |
| Sun-18-Oct | Confirmation led by Bishop David |
We’ve also creating a group to look at the above subjects. Dates and times to be announced.
If you would like to join the groups to consider confirmation or know more about the Christian Faith, then let us know: info@stmarysmoseley.co.uk or contact Jeremy (449 1459) or Rosemary (449 1071).
Would you like your home to be more energy efficient? Susmo (Sustainable Moseley) is entering a competition in the hope of receiving a grant for energy-saving projects. St Mary's has been asked to nominate 5 low-income households that would benefit. If this applies to you and you would be interested please contact John Dowell (449 3332), or Ann Andrew (449 9682) by Thursday 20 August at the very latest.
Elisabeth Leicester suggests that if you would like help with your housework then you contact her refugee friend, Maria Fowler, telephone 07985 763 322.
| Service | First Reading | Second Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Morning Services | Ephesians 5:15-20, | John 6:51-58 |
| Time | St Mary’s | St Anne’s |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 a.m. | Holy Communion Celebrant & Preacher: Revd Hugh Houghton |
|
| 10:00 a.m. | Sung Eucharist Celebrant: Revd Hugh Houghton Preacher: John Dowell |
|
| 10:15 a.m. | Sung Eucharist Celebrant: Revd Richard Tetlow Preacher: John Gray |
|
| 6:30 p.m. | Celtic Worship Officiant: Lis Sparrow |
| Day | Time | St Mary’s | St Anne’s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesdays | 9:00 a.m. | Holy Communion | |
| Wednesdays | 9:00 a.m. | Morning Prayer |
| Time | St Mary’s | St Anne’s |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday 23 August | ||
| 8:00 a.m. | Holy Communion | |
| 10:00 a.m. | Sung Eucharist | |
| 10:15 a.m. | Matins | |
| 6:30 p.m. | Healing Service | |
| Sunday 30 August | ||
| 8:00 a.m. | Holy Communion | |
| 10:00 a.m. | Sung Eucharist | |
| 10:15 a.m. | Sung Eucharist | |
| 6:30 p.m. | Modern Language Evensong | |
| Sunday 6 September | ||
| 8:00 a.m. | Holy Communion | |
| 10:00 a.m. | Patronal Festival | |
| 6:30 p.m. | Choral Evensong | |
| 6:30 p.m. | Evensong | |
See also: Calendar of Future Events
| Date | Time | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Wed-19-Aug | 11:00 a.m. | Outing to Hop Pocket Craft Centre, Worcester. There are still seats available for this trip, which departs from St Anne’s at 11:00 a.m. Cost £10 plus cost of lunch if required. Names and a contact number to Julia 441 2265 by 12 August please. |
I have entitled this talk ‘Science, Religion and Truth’ because both Science and Religion are concerned with the search for Truth, but in different ways. What I mean by Science is basic or pure science, which is seeking to understand natural phenomena — what the things around us, including living things, are made of and how they work. What makes the sun shine, how do things grow? This is not to be confused with Applied Science, which uses the results of basic science to create products or procedures that usually improve our standard of life, but can also be destructive. In the latter case there is a strong overlap with politics.
I am a Christian, which means I believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God. I should say that I encountered Christianity long before I decided to become a physicist. It was very conventional. I went to Sunday School when I was about four and later became a choirboy until my voice broke, when I became a server. After that, I essentially left home and went to University. As you know, I am a churchwarden. So was my father and my sister is also one — could be genetic?
So why did I become a physicist?
I was attracted to Physics at school because of the ability to describe physical phenomena in terms of mathematical equations, and the possibility that the entire physical world could be explained starting from a few basic building blocks and the laws governing their behaviour. Chemistry and Biology both depend on the physical laws but are more complicated and therefore less easy to explain from first principles.
Mathematics is however the most basic of all the sciences, and also consists most obviously of a set of truths.
Take for example something that everybody learns at school, Pythagoras’s theorem, which he proved by the way about five hundred years before Christ. ‘The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides’. This is an example of a truth. It has stood the test of time, and furthermore it would be true even if Pythagoras hadn’t proved it, or even if he’d never existed. Even if no-one had proved it, it would still be true. In fact, the whole of mathematics is like this — a set of truths, some of which have undoubtedly yet to be found, which exist whether or not they are written down and in fact do not require any kind of medium.
One could argue that music is similar. It also exists without the need for a medium. There is some music that has never been written down. Of course one needs an instrument or a voice to express music, but there are, for example, blind musicians who have never seen a written note, or others who cannot read music but are perfectly able to perform it. I have no difficulty believing that God, the Holy Spirit, exists in a similar way to mathematics or perhaps music.
I have said that mathematics consists of a set of truths, and that physical phenomena can be described by mathematics. It doesn’t follow however that a mathematical description, or theory, is always a true description.
Let’s take an example. For more than two centuries, Newton’s Laws of Motion were believed to be true, and indeed they appeared to explain the behaviour of objects subject to mechanical forces perfectly well, including the motion of the planets around the sun under the force of gravity. It was not until the twentieth century that Einstein showed that Newton’s laws were far from true for objects travelling at speeds comparable to the speed of light. This is the theory of relativity or relativistic mechanics, which we now believe to be the truth. Nevertheless, Newton’s laws are perfectly adequate in most cases. They break down for example in particle accelerators where high speeds are encountered. It is only in the last few decades that this has become apparent.
The lesson is that our understanding develops as far as the material world is concerned as more knowledge is acquired. We believe a description of how things work until it is shown to be wrong or only partially true. Things are rarely entirely certain. The truth surely exists, but we have to find it. We try to interpret what be observe and explain it as best we can with the knowledge we have. I’m quite sure this is not limited to Science. It is certainly the case for History, and it must be true for Theology, which is the equivalent of Science as far as Religion is concerned. Some things we have taken to be facts may have to be modified or reinterpreted.
I said that mathematics exists without the need for a medium — that is to say it exists in a vacuum, which we normally think of as empty space or nothingness. However, modern physics teaches us that even a vacuum is not empty. According to the uncertainty principle, discovered by Heisenberg, which is a result of Quantum Mechanics, another great revolution of the 20th century along with relativity, a certain amount of energy can exist, even in a vacuum, provided it is for a short enough time. The product of the energy and the time has to be less than a certain constant, Planck’s constant. The bigger the energy, the shorter the time, and vice-versa. From relativity, we also have Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2, which relates energy and mass. A given mass m is equivalent to an amount of energy E given by the mass times the square of the velocity of light. The consequence of the uncertainty principle is that we can create mass or matter provided it is for a short enough time. This is called a quantum fluctuation. Thus the vacuum is never empty, it contains matter which spontaneously comes and goes. This in fact is the origin of the theory of the Big Bang. A huge amount of matter was created for an incredibly short time. The matter consists of particles, which separated and gave rise to the Universe.
However, there is one big problem. The laws of physics require that matter and antimatter must be created in equal amounts, to balance each other out. For example, you can’t create a single electron, but only an electron-antielectron pair. But somehow, the antimatter has disappeared, at least down to one part in a billion compared to the matter, leaving us with what we have today. What is the answer? In fact, in studying the decays of certain unstable particles and their antiparticles, we have discovered a small difference in their decay rates, but it is not big enough to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe. This is still an unsolved mystery. All other astronomical observations are consistent with the Big Bang hypothesis in which the Universe was created about 14 billion years ago and has expanded ever since. I want to emphasise that this is something we believe. Probably, no-one will ever prove it.
There are other things about the Universe we don’t yet understand: only about 4% is composed of the matter we are familiar with, that the earth and we are made of, about a quarter is made of ‘dark matter’ that is invisible (i.e. doesn’t emit light) but experiences gravitational attraction, and the rest is something that we call ‘dark energy’ that we also don’t understand. It behaves like a kind of anti-gravity, pushing things apart. Needless to say, these are major topics of investigation in astronomy and particle physics.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva will create conditions equivalent to those that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang, and could find the particles that account for the dark matter. Its main aim is however to search for the Higgs particle, that is the hypothetical carrier of a field (rather like a magnetic field) that is supposed to cause all other particles to have a mass. It is part of the current theory of elementary particles and is the only ingredient that has yet to be found. Without mass there would be no gravity and no stars or planets. Everything would be a gas and we would not exist. Some people have therefore called the Higgs Boson the ‘God Particle’. We may know the answer soon. Higgs by the way is a physicist at Edinburgh.
Of course, the Big Bang is a ‘creation’ although on a timescale somewhat longer than that described in the first chapter of Genesis. In fact, it wasn’t until the 16th century that people like Galileo began to make the kind of observations that have led to our present interpretation of the Universe. Until then people had accepted the wisdom that had been handed down to them by great thinkers such as Aristotle rather than questioning things themselves. Similarly, the people who wrote the Old Testament were presumably doing the best they could to explain what they saw around them, but were limited by their level of understanding. In the same way, the story of Adam and Eve cannot be taken literally but should rather be taken as representing the first human beings who were capable of making moral choices (Adam in fact just means man in Hebrew). Nevertheless, the message the text conveys is the same.
The biggest puzzle of all is that in order for the chemical elements we are made of to exist at all, the laws of physics — that is the forces that hold everything together — have to be quite finely tuned. For example, for carbon and oxygen to be stable, the forces have to be extremely close to their observed values. Incidentally, both carbon and oxygen are created in stars such as the sun. The earth originated from the sun about 4½ billion years ago, and human-kind developed perhaps 200,000 years ago. In other words we are all made of stardust. But, how did we get here?
The Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin was the great intellectual revolution of the 19th century, and all the evidence from fossil records etc. supports the theory. Life began on earth as simple organisms many millions of years before human beings evolved. The discovery of the DNA molecule by Crick and Watson around 1960 explained how the genetic code works and hence how characteristics are passed on from generation to generation, the mechanism behind Darwin’s hypothesis.
Some biologists such as Richard Dawkins assert that that’s all there is, in other words there is no need for a God — the whole of evolution is explained by genetics and the dominance of some genes over others — The Selfish Gene. There is growing evidence that this is an oversimplification and that the whole organism is involved through environmental factors etc., but the basic point remains — and many of my biologist friends accept the argument.
To a physicist it is already remarkable that the forces of nature are so finely adjusted that carbon and oxygen, which are quite complicated atoms made up of 36 and 48 quarks respectively, exist as stable elements from which, along with a few others such as hydrogen, we are all made. It is much more remarkable that a molecule as complicated as DNA can exist, and although we know all its basics ingredients and how they interact with each other, we could never have predicted it from first principles. The natural question is, Why are the laws of nature the way they are? We believe they are the same throughout the Universe, and this is one reason that the search for extra-terrestrial life is such an interesting topic.
It is my experience that physicists (quite a few of whom are even churchwardens) are less sceptical about the existence of God than most other scientists, simply because physical processes underlie everything else. Although we know vastly more than people did a century ago, when some even suggested that everything was more or less known, there are plenty of things we don’t understand, some of which I’ve mentioned, and we may never be able to say why the physical laws are the way they are, compared to what might have been. Perhaps only God knows.
Although it isn’t my field, we are even further away from understanding consciousness — how the mind functions, how we relate to each other — love, hate, trust, respect, thought, imagination, the whole realm of human behaviour. Most would say these things are more concerned with God than the things I’ve been talking about, and many turn to God for guidance in such matters. I believe firmly that, among other things, God embodies the set of moral truths by which we should live. But they are not all handed to us on a plate. We have to find them, just as we have to find and prove the theorems of mathematics. People like Moses, and of course Jesus Christ himself, have helped to point the way, but we need to keep searching and adapting.
Finally, I have to say that it is a big disappointment to me that there are still people who are prepared to kill in the name of religion, in an age when we are able to communicate around the planet at the speed of light. The same people are prepared to deny education to women and otherwise suppress their human rights. Even within the hierarchy of the Anglican Communion, there are people who are reluctant to accord equal status to women. I’m sure you can all think of other examples of misguided deeds carried out on religious pretexts. All these people choose to take a shallow interpretation of the scriptures to justify their prejudices. It doesn’t follow that there is something wrong with religion. But unfortunately, the behaviour of a few can serve to make the uncommitted question its value. As I have indicated, we have to update our understanding of what is written in the bible to match our current understanding of the world we live in. This isn’t a new idea. As my good friends George and Ira Gershwin wrote in the year I was born, ‘the things you’re your liable to read in the bible — it ain’t necessarily so’. And they were Jewish!
If I can pass on a message it is this. Everything I have encountered in my scientific career involves belief. We believe something until it is found not to be the whole truth — until there is a better interpretation. I don’t see why religion should be any different. Understanding evolves — we must always be ready to question what the scriptures are telling us and relate it to the way we live today. This is surely what belief in God needs and what God would expect us to do.
Amen.
Let your merciful ears, 0 Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions make them to ask such things as shall please you; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.