Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Holy Cross, Seend
Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 19-26; Luke 24. 1-12
“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

Sketch to the Painting ‘Three Marys Walking to Christ’s Tomb’, Józef Simmler (1864), National Museum, Kraków.
Christians in this country are lucky that the celebration of Easter comes when springtime’s miracle of new life is at its peak. The miraculous nature of new life is clear whenever we see it, from an April field full of cowslips and celandine to a new-born child sleeping in the arms of its mother. The very existence of life is a mystery, and our existence, as a species that can reason and has a sense of right and wrong, is stranger still. There are two explanations for of human existence. One is that we are the product of the spontaneous emergence of life from non-living chemicals, and then trillions of chance encounters over four billion years—that we are a freak occurrence in a meaningless, and largely lifeless, universe. The other is that we were created by something greater than ourselves.
Our first instinct is probably that the only explanation compatible with science is that the human race came about by chance. The universe is a huge place and the four billion year span of life on Earth is a very long time indeed… far too long for us really to get our heads around. You can also be a perfectly good and faithful Christian and believe that God used the natural processes of the universe to allow a species in His image and likeness to evolveand, that, given the sheer size of the universe and the depth of time involved, nothing else would be required.
For a long time that was precisely my position. There is no scientific evidence for God nor, I believed, could or should Christians waste their time trying to find evidence for something that is fundamentally a matter of faith. But do you remember that old saying that if you had enough monkeys hammering randomly at typewriters for long enough, that one of them would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare?
Well, the maths on that have been done repeatedly, and if you had enough monkeys to fill not just the world, but the entire observable universe, and let them type for the whole time until the protons that make up all matter began to decay, then the chance that one of them would produce Hamlet is so low that we don’t even have a name for the number. It’s not one in a billion or one in a trillion, but one in one followed by hundreds of thousands of noughts. If it is improbable that a play named Hamlet could emerge by change, how much less probable it is that a man named Shakespeare could do so?
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