“Oi Street Pastor, what about Dionosaurs” shouted the young lad standing outside the club having a fag, he was addressing my friend Martin.
Martin had just joined the street pastor team and was only on his second patrol, he was a little new and nervous, but wandered over and chatted to the lad.
“How did that go?” I asked when he wandered back, “dunno really, tried my best” –this happens sometimes with Street Pastors, although normally we offer practical help most of the people know we are Christians and sometimes want to ask a big question, normally it’s around suffering although today it was about dinosaurs.
Basically this lad was asking “Genesis doesn’t mention Dinosaurs specificially and science also seems to tells us that their remains are much older than the oldest discovered human remains… how do we make this “work” with a straight reading of Genesis”. He thought he was being very clever with a question that the Street Pastors couldn’t answer.
“What would you have said Andy?” Martin asked…. I inhaled deeply and said” “I’d probably say something about the word Yom” –basically the word for “day” can also be translated period of time, so we don’t know how long the earths creation was –in fact the Sun and the Moon don’t appear to day three!- so if the question was one about time and how one thing can be older than something else if creation happened in 7 days, if days were 24 hours in length.
Yet I did wonder about whether this question is because we struggle to read Genesis well, it is written as an acrostic poem each bit starting with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet to illustrate God being the end from the beginning –I wonder if trying to make this into a science textbook seems like an overstretch.
My mind wandered to the nursery rhyme “the grand old duke of york” that came from a battle at Sandal Castle (near Wakefield) during the War of the Roses, where the Lancastrians gave the Yorkists the run around to wear them out so they could beat them in battle. This nursery rhyme is not a historical or military strategy document but it none the less is true, it’s a simple ‘ditty’ to tell of one side defeat of the other! Genesis isn’t meant to be written to explain all our scientific questions, it is meant a poem pointing us to God’s deliberate, intentional and intelligent design of creation.
I then thought: “why did I have to have an answer about dinosaurs”? I don’t know, I wasn’t there! What I can have is my best guess, I can know a little about science and a little about the text, but I don’t actually “know”. I don’t know about carbon dating or any of this stuff, I wonder whether “I don’t know” is actually an okay answer, I think it is.
As I thought with being okay with not knowing stuff I began to think about the danger of misrepresenting people, I know that sometimes scientists like Richard Dawkins often talk about people of faith disrespectfully, “making straw-people to knock down” and misrepresenting other opinions. Clearly there are many people of faith –and those of no faith- who are exploring the big –biggest- questions of the universe who are intelligent people and it is easy to caricature people who we don’t agree with as stupid.
Peter talks of faith as “always be prepared to give an account for the hope that you have but do so with gentleness and respect” –gentleness and respect are good buzz words for any discussion, I was pleased to see that Martin and this dude had ended their conversation with a handshake, clearly they’d exchanged some ideas but had discovered some respect for each other. I wondered whether perhaps the question was really “are people of faith stupid? Do people of faith think about things? If there might be answers to the smaller less personal questions about life, might there also be answers to the questions that really matter?
Whenever I now take an RE lesson, I always say “there is no question too stupid” (apart from maybe “who was the first person to milk a cow and what do they think they were doing”) and I’m happy to admit I don’t know everything about everything but lets try and talk intelligently and respectfully together and I believe in that something wonderful and beautiful can happen.
I’ve no idea what happened to that lad, but I know Martin is a good guy who is street wise and clued up about his faith, and they looked like they had a good conversation and enjoyed meeting each other.
I wonder whether “Oi Street Pastor, what about Dinosaurs” might have been the opening line in longer, deeper and more beautiful journey.
scruffyvicar 