The Future of Creation: Spirit and Science

Taken from a homily given by Dr Nicola Hoggard-Creegan at Holy Trinity Cathedral during the 2025 Season of Creation programme.

The Season of Creation

The Season of Creation has a lovely ring to it. We are meant to smell the new shoots growing, get more in touch with the ebb and flow of our days, notice creatures we have not seen before, meditate and pray more, and plant a few trees as a bonus.

But even this gentle call to renewal, and the theme of the peace of creation, can hardly distract us from the growing discord around us. To maintain any equanimity, we seem to be putting out fires and repressing images of disruption that crowd in from our newspapers. It is hard to have hope. It is hard to heed the promise in creation that each new season brings.

As a planet, as a people, we are entering a time of trial. It is a time in which the words of the prophet Jeremiah ring strangely true:

A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert, not to winnow or cleanse, a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them. I looked on the earth, and it was complete chaos, and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD. The whole land shall be a desolation.

These words resonate too well as we read our newspapers. There are the images from Gaza, the warnings in Europe this summer to take cover from the unprecedented heat, the ravaging wildfires, the rising seas in the Pacific, the breakdown of democracy and civility, and the threat of war. We seem to be living Jeremiah.

And these were also the words in the lectionary on this Sunday following 9/11, 24 years ago. Cities laid in ruins. Jeremiah seems to know. It has only gotten worse since then.

The theme of judgment runs deep. The Bible is nothing if not honest — honest and realistic. Judgment is the first interpretation of many Old Testament prophets. Judgment must still be part of the answer. I never know how much this theme should factor into our responses. And someone once told me bluntly that he did not come to church to be further disturbed or warned.

So I will take note of Jeremiah, but turn quickly to our need for hope. Surely the Church should be a place of hope in an agonising world. And even Jeremiah gets to the hope eventually. A lack of hope, a tendency to despair, has always been our temptation. It makes us fatalistic and anxious. Sometimes we get stuck in the enormity of our political realities. We get stuck in Jeremiah 4.

Nature’s Reliability

And that is easy to do, even without a movement towards diabolical politics. For as we travel further and deeper into this trial, we will experience — and we are experiencing — nature as unreliable at best. The winds are too strong, the floods come too quickly, the reports of rising seas and irreversible loss are too frequent. The visions of heat curves trending exponentially upwards crowd in.

Nature is and will disturb us, as well as being there to comfort us. Religious people and non-religious people are, and will increasingly be, asking questions about nature. Is it on our side? Is it good? Can we trust nature? Can we trust God? If we see the chaos as judgment, we will ask: how long can God be angry?

Even without a planetary disaster, nature is equivocal and provides a quandary. Although we often portray a romantic view of nature as peace and harmony, as mother, it is not always — not yet. We want to get back to nature, and there is something about the raw wilderness that is healing and speaks to the potential for the peace of creation. And nature does rest in deep harmonies and interconnectedness. But anyone who has watched David Attenborough knows there is another side. Sometimes nature is riven with violence and disease.

Sometimes nature nurtures life, and at other times it seems indifferent, or even hostile.

We wonder how this world, so seemingly turned towards us with favour, can suddenly turn away. Does this signify a world that does not care? A God that does not care?

As we enter a time of trial, believers and non-believers will increasingly doubt or question God’s presence. Is nature hostile? Is nature “blind and indifferent”? Is this the judgment of God?

The temptation is to give up on God, to give up on Church. But this is where the Church has some responses and needs to be present.

God’s Search and Hope

Think of the parable from today’s reading. It seems that the judgment of God is not the last word.

The Kingdom of God is like an obsessive-compulsive woman searching for her coin. Or the shepherd looking for his sheep. Of course, the first reference of this parable is us, as humans — and especially the least of us, the most condemned — but it shows two other important things: the active searching, the intensity of God.

Science in its modern heyday pushed God further and further away. But the God of Jesus is an active, searching, aching God. We may be lost. The natural world might be broken, but God is searching for us. And now that we have learned to read Scripture from the point of view of the earth, we know that God searches not only for every lost human, but for every lost living thing and ecosystem as well.

As Pope Francis said in his encyclical:

“The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.”

That means that God will be active, and especially active through us. Our most prized and remarkable discoveries will be God-inspired. An active, almost OCD God is certainly not the God of a hostile reality. And not the God of unlimited judgment either.

And then, we can go further than that and suspect that love is central to matter and to life. Francis again says something like this:

“The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.”

Matter speaks to us of the caress of God.

But love is never uncomplicated. Love comes with a cross. Love anticipates the peace of creation, but is not yet there. We can read the pain of the world as the burden of love, not the indifference of God.

As churches we often feel discouraged, but we are the meaning makers, and the guardians of a story that speaks to both judgment and hope.

Faith, Science, and Climate Work

The church is also that place that can be aware of and encourage the other aspects of our climate work that should never have been splintered off from faith: politics, law, and science — science especially.

In 1968, almost 60 years ago, the historian Lynn White Jr. talked about the role of Christians in causing the ecological crisis. Christianity, he argued, had encouraged an instrumental, utilitarian approach to the world, motivated by the idea of dominion in Genesis. But he himself was also a Christian, and he went so far as to say:

“More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

In particular, he pointed to the contemplative Franciscan tradition within Christianity as being worth reviving.

I used to quote this to churches, agreeing with Lynn White — especially in the days when I was part of groups trying to persuade the church that we had a vital role to play in our collective healing of the planet. The idea that we could go from being the problem to being part of the solution was compelling, and is still needed. That is what our ecochurch work is all about.

But I now look at what he said, which has been so influential, and think he was also pitting science and technology against religion — against faith. That is something I have never wanted to do.

I have always wanted to promote science as a way of imaginatively seeing the wonder and depth of creation. Science is the endpoint of thousands of years of human observation and interaction with nature.

And although I think we all want to change our connection to nature, that all takes time. Changing habits and responses is hard, even for those of us who care. Now we have to do what can be done quickly — and that includes the support of all the God-inspired technical and scientific solutions to climate change happening all around us.

Because science and faith are two sides of the human endeavour, and should never have been separated, the Church is the ideal place to champion and endorse the scientific approach.

The Church is a good place to say clearly that scientists and engineers — and even those who control and direct the movement of capital — are going to be crucial to our constructive response to climate change. Almost any profession, in fact, can be a part of the work of climate mitigation and adaptation.

We have no idea what the future will bring. We have over 8 billion people on the planet, and between us all there will be an amazing number of local and planetary solutions — especially if, as we might well suppose, the creative exercise is one in which the yearning, seeking God of the lost coins and lost sheep is actively inspiring our efforts. This will be especially true in places where science has not been hijacked for the purposes of war.

For instance, in Wellington, a young Māori scientist, Ratua Mataira — whose grandmother started the Māori language movement — has co-founded “OpenStars Technologies,” where he is working on a form of nuclear fusion using a “levitated dipole” model, showing early signs of success.

Nuclear fusion would change the energy landscape and the geopolitical landscape overnight. It seems to me that it is a god-like thing that an indigenous scientist at the ends of the earth might be working on a small-tech solution to one of the biggest problems of our age.

So, those of you who are starting out in work, or encouraging those who do: there are many different avenues to be a part of the solution. And if you take your faith with you, your contribution will be so much more holistic, more integrated, and more aware of the wholeness of being human.

Science is often western, colonial, siloed, reductive, materialist, responsive to market forces, and vulnerable to political malice. But it doesn’t have to be. It produces wisdom and wonder as we penetrate deeper and deeper into mysteries that we have never seen before. Science exists in places where there is very little nature. The Church has a mandate to support both theological and scientific approaches to nature.

Science is quintessentially human and will be a part of bringing about the vision of the peace of creation.

A Wide and Deep Movement

When we speak of science, or of religion, of course the elephant in the room is the degradation of the political environment, the threat that hangs over scientific progress, and the shame that is attached to so much religion. Naomi Klein refers to these realities in this statement, which I am extending:

“Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, spiritual as it is scientific… A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.”

That is, in many ways, a mandate for our work of leaning into the peace of creation — in and through our Churches.

Dr Nicola Hoggard-Creegan

New Zealand Christians in Science