CREATION

You should try your hardest to supplement your faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with fortitude, fortitude with piety, piety with brotherly kindness, and brotherly kindness with love.

      2 Peter 1: 5-7

To embark on a short account of the creative process from the beginning of the world to our present day is no easy matter. It requires sufficient factual knowledge to make the venture credible, and also a deeper spiritual awareness to invest that knowledge with significance that goes beyond the apparent finality of mortality to the concept of fulfilment in life eternal. The conflict between science and religion has been sad, for each has something vital to give the other: truth on the one hand and vision on the other. Where there is no vision, the people break loose (Proverbs 29:18), but the vision must come from a person with lawful authority. This authority comes with obedience to an ongoing tradition, whether civil or religious, and also the intellectual capacity to receive and analyse new data that are constantly impinging upon us all.

In this book I have drawn upon the knowledge of various authorities. Amongst those especially of note are Science and Creation by John Polkinghorne, which has instructed me in physics and cosmology; Origins by Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin as well as The Making of Mankind by Richard E. Leakey, both invaluable sources of information about biological evolution and anthropology; Back from the Brink by Guy Mountford, an important account of success in wildlife conservation; Latin America: a Short History by George Camacho and Everyday Life of the Incas by Ann Kendall, which have given me details about the aboriginal inhabitants of Central and South America; The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Living Faiths, edited originally by R. C. Zaehner; A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation and its successor The Presence of the Past by Rupert Sheldrake, which discuss the interesting concept of "morphic resonance" as part of the evolutionary process; and finally Chaos by James Gleick, the making of a new science.

I would finally like to thank my parents and mentors who have made it possible for me to appreciate all this knowledge through the education they afforded me, culminating both in my medical profession and my work as a Christian priest.