A lifeless galaxy?

 In a book launch speech, James Franklin uttered this memorable line:

"The explosion of a lifeless galaxy is just a firework, the death of a human is a tragedy".

Right on both counts, but wrong in coupling the two.

If the evolutionary view is right, then life came from the cosmos and is derivative of it. It has no inherent value because the cosmos has no inherent value. It contains no locus of value. It is axiologically neutral.

This morning at our ecclesium the prayer said words to effect: 'from the beginning of time, millions of years ago...' then went on to list the very forces at work which are the outcome of that very same materialist conception of the world.

He has bolted his Christian understanding onto the very world view that seeks to undo the Christian understanding.

It was a pulling-the-carpet-from-under-one's-own-feet moment.

Yet Genesis has it differently.

God is the father of live and he 'breathed' it into Adam whom he formed from the ground. Adam connected both, then, to the material world, and the life of God.

God, creating in the days of our experience shows our place in the hierarchy of dependency of creation, and before God as one 'like' him. God shows his active presence in that creation; working in the 'space' he has created by creating over the very days that constrain and govern the tempo of our experience of that domain. God with us indeed. God's action, like ours: in time the basis for fellowship.