Part 1 - Please note that this podcast has been edited to remove audience comments and questions which are inaudible. A handout is referred to at 00.18.38.704 - a copy of which can be found at https://www.stpauls.co.uk/SM4/Mutable/Uploads/medialibrary/Giraffes-handout.JPG

The scientific consensus is that humans have been on the Earth for some 200,000 years of its 4,700,000,000 year history. There have been arguments about what this means for the creation stories in the Bible, but the growing understanding of the Earth’s history challenges us to expand all our ideas of God.

In addition it raises fascinating and perplexing questions about, for instance, the Earth’s beauty and the violence which is also seemingly inherent to it. Why do so many of us find the natural world so beautiful? And is there an answer to the dilemma of the brutality that seems built into evolution –‘nature red in tooth and claw’?

Michael Reiss will explore some of the questions that science and the study of evolution raise for us about the wonder of God’s world and our place in it.

The Revd Professor Michael Reiss is a Bioethicist, Professor of Science Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London and a Priest in the Church of England.

Recorded 10 March 2018.