Jobs

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Can you catch the eye
of the beautiful Pleiades sisters?
Or distract Orion from his hunt?
Can you get Venus to look your way?
Or get the Great Bear and her cubs to come out to play?
Do you know the first thing
about the sky’s constellations?

I’m speechless in awe ...
Words fail me!

        The Book of Job in the Bible

Highbury Astronomy Page

So how did you celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday?

For reasons I won’t go into here I found myself at Gloucestershire’s unique art gallery, Nature in Art, in the beautiful setting of a Georgian mansion.  The artist in residence was David Miller.  As I entered the Artist’s Studio and marvelled at his wonderfully realistic paintings of birds and fish, I joined a small group of four youngsters from a local infants’ school.  They were busy interrogating the artist in residence.

Their questions were wonderful.  They ranged over the whole process of painting the artist engaged in.  From the underwater photography he did as a diver while wearing a decoy bird on top of his head (is that to trick other people?  they asked.  No, to trick the fish he said in reply)  through the first pencil sketches (is that the same pencils as we use?  Yes, he said.  Ours are shorter, they replied a little indignantly), to the studies that he was in the process of painting in the studio (But there isn’t a pier in the photo!  No, that’s the beauty of being a painter I can put the fish under the pier!  So, you’re tricking people.  No, I’m not tricking people, the artist insisted, there’s one I finished yesterday.  You couldn’t have finished it yesterday, you’re tricking us.  No, I’m not tricking you!  That’s really good.  Do you have to wait until it’s dry before you paint the fish on to the water.  No, it’s called wet on wet painting with oils.  I would wait until it’s dry to do the real detail in a painting) right through to the wonderfully, detailed finished painting of beautiful fish.

Then the final set of questions that caught my attention.  How do you paint the scales?  It has to be said the fish shone and the scales were beautiful in the finished painting.  

The leaflet that accompanied his residency had quite a bit to say about the artist:  ‘Born in Oldham, Lancashire in 1966, David Miller now lives and works in the heart of the West Wales countryside, in a wooded valley near the  Taf and Towy estuaries with the dramatic  Pembrokeshire coastline on his doorstep.

‘He paints mostly British wildlife, usually in oils, preferring to return again and again to subjects he knows well, travelling widely to gather reference and inspiration for his work.

‘David is perhaps best known for his underwater studies of game, coarse and sea fish, inspired by a lifetime passion for angling and by many hours spent snorkellilng and diving in rivers, lakes and gravcel pits.  This knowledge and understanding of his subject is clearly reflected in hiws work and has led to him becoming perphas one of the best known and well-regarded fish artist in the country.  Internationally his larger fish paintings now hang in London, Tokyo aned New York board rooms.’

The children were wowed by the beauty of the paintings and their detail.  I was too.

“How do you paint the scales?” was their question.

“I count them,” David Miller replied.  And then he went on to explain that each fish of the same species has the same number of scales.  “If you are going to paint them, you need to count the scales.  Some artists try to paint a fish without painting the scales and the fish never looks quite right.  You need to count the scales.”

So there you have it.  The secret was out.  Whether any of that group of youngsters, their teacher or I will ever aspire to the heights or is it the depths of painting fish I somehow doubt.  But the six of us have now been let into the secret.  And we know if we are going to have a go we’ll have to count the scales.

What a wonderful way to celebrate Darwin’s birthday.

I had thought of asking one of the stewards or the person on the welcome desk whether there was anything to do with Darwin to have a look at.  Fortunately, I resisted that temptation and asked whether they remembered our dear friend Adrian Stanley who spent many a long day stewarding at Nature in Art.  Had I been foolish enough to ask my first question, I think they would have smiled and simply said, look around you.

It’s all about Darwin.

I was pleased to listen to such a wonderful artist speaking in depth in response to such enlightening questions of his observations.  That’s the wonderful thing about Darwin.  He was so painstaking in his detailed observation.  And David Miller was such a wonderful observer.

And I guess it was that one word that stuck out for me.  Every fish in a single species of fish will have the same number of scales.  What an observation to make.  And what a wonderful thing each species is!  Darwin would have been proud to have been there …. Had he been I guess the conversation would have gone off in all sorts of different directions.

The children weren’t so fascinated by the word ‘species’ they kept on coming back to the thought that the artist was tricking them.  That question kept on cropping up.  He smiled a little more each time they asked it.  And so did I!

But their question set me thinking.

He was a painter.  He used photographs but then he went on to paint the fish and the birds he so carefully observed.  It was as if painting gave him a greater freedom.  He could put the fish under the pier.  His painting of the pier was wonderfully accurate.  His painting of the fish was equally so.  But the fish weren’t under the pier in his photo.  They might well have been at some point.  He was able to paint the fish.

Was he ‘tricking’ us?  Or was he presenting the reality of that underwater world with not so much poetic license as artistic license?

What came home to me was the way in which reality can be portrayed not simply by the accuracy of a photographic record, but by the artistry of a painter.

It has been said quite wrongly, not least by David Attenborough in his tribute to Darwin broadcast in the week of the anniversary, that for 1600 years and more Christians read Genesis 1 literally and believed the world was created in 6 days.

I do not accept David Attenborough’s account of the history of the interpretation of the Bible.  For fifteen hundred years the Bible was interpreted in all manner of richness, with allegorical meanings, moral meanings, spiritual meanings read into the text, in addition to the surface meaning of the letter of the text.  It was only with the Renaissance, Erasmus and his contemporaries that there was a move towards focusing on the letter more and more.  That came to a head only in the enlightenment when with developments in ‘scientific’ thinking some Christian readers began to read passages like Genesis 1 as if they were ‘scientifically’ accurate in every detail.

Genesis 1 is not the only passage that tells of the creation of the world.  There are other passages too.  My favourite is in Job 28.  There are wonderful passages in the Psalms; of them all, I love Psalm 104.   Look through those passages and they are full of wonderful poetic imagery.  Look back to Genesis 1 and is there not a wonderful beauty about the writing of that passage that’s full of the power of poetry.

So what am I saying?  Are those writers who reflected on their observations of the world around us ‘tricking’ us because they are writing in poetry and not scientifically?

Not a bit of it!

Their poetry is based on wonderful observation of the awesome nature of the world they lived in.

Through their poetry they communicate a wonderful truth that this whole world is the creation of God.

That’s a conviction I share.

It is expressed in the Bible with the truthfulness of a poet in the way that David Miller’s incredibly accurate and realistic paintings depict the truth of his observations even though the precise scene of his painting has often never actually occurred in that precise way.

It’s that truth that I take a stand on.

To read such passages as if they were scientific writing is to do them an injustice and to miss the point.

Darwin’s observations led him to a description of the way in which those fish came to have the number of scales they do.  That explanation has been borne out by more and more detailed observations.  And it is a wonderful explanation I have no qualms in celebrating.

But what about the sheer randomness of evolution?

Does God really throw a die?

The  God I believe in is greater than anything I can begin to imagine.  I see God is above and beyond, beneath and within everything.  God is life itself, the process of living, being itself, the ground of our being.
Whether the die comes down as a 1, a 2, a 3, a 4, a 5, or a 6 God does not know.  However it falls he will be there.  His presence will be there with his creation.

Evolution has worked out the way it has and God is here.  Had it worked out differently God would still have been there.

I too am convinced with Paul that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Standing over and above life on this planet God ‘sees’ it all.  He is quite content, indeed it is of the very nature of his creation that he does not know which way the die will fall, but he does know it will not land on a ‘7’.