Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Part 1

 A reflection in the May 2026 issue of Grapevine, the parishmagazine of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

The Doxology, a much loved hymn of praise,
was written in 1674 by Thomas Ken,
Bishop of Bath & Wells

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

I am starting to write this on Earth Day, 22^nd April, marked around the world as an annual opportunity to celebrate our wonderful, living planet. On this warm, sunny spring day, flowers are blooming, birds are singing, trees are leafing, and bees are buzzing. How can we not express our joy through praise to the Creator?

Genesis chapter 1 tells us how God made Earth and the heavens, and living creatures, including people like you and me. It is a myth, but like the best myths, within it we find important nuggets of timeless truth. Two are central to our faith, I think. First, God sees all he has made to be very good. And second, we human beings are made in the image of God our Creator.

Today, modern science compels us to tell the story of creation in a new way, perhaps even more glorious in its breadth and depth. The story is still being written, and there is much we do not understand yet. But it does not, I believe, conflict in any essential way with these timeless truths. Here is a precis of the story.

The Universe came into being from nothing around 13,000 million years ago in a hot burst of energy. After inflating rapidly, it started to cool, and the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, began to clump together into the first galaxies and stars. The stars shone brightly through thermonuclear reactions, making ever heavier elements. They lived and died, and many exploded as super-novae, spewing heavy elements into clouds of cosmic dust. From this dust new generations of stars were born, and are still being born, many with planetary systems. About 4,000 million years ago our Earth formed, a small planet circling the star we call the Sun, on the outer edge of the Milky Way, one of innumerable galaxies in the observable universe.

If fundamental physical constants were not much the same as they are, none of this would have happened – there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, and no Earth on which biochemical processes could generate living beings. What an extraordinary fact. The God-given laws of nature have been fine-tuned to make our living world possible!

Praise him all creatures here below!

Life began to appear on Earth thousands of millions of years ago. At first simple single-celled organisms, like bacteria, using DNA as an instruction template, evolved to feed, grow, and reproduce. They competed against each other. They ate each other. But some evolved to cooperate, to form relationships with other cells where both benefited. Some even became engulfed in the cells of others. This is the origin of cellular structures called organelles, such as mitochondria, which power respiration, and chloroplasts, which make sugars from light, water and CO2. Both were once free-living single cells, and still retain their own DNA.

Complex, multi-cellular organisms, plants, fungi and animals, evolved as cells divided and differentiated into specialised organs. Bacteria and viruses evolved to live inside these creatures, forming communities such as our gut microbiome, so important to health. Later, fungi began to cooperate with higher plants to form the mycorrhizal root systems, which are essential for most plants to grow well.

The Creator fine-tuned the laws of nature to make the process of evolution possible. Evolution is the way he has made the bewildering diversity of life on Earth today, all descended from a single common ancestor. He will continue to use evolution into the distant future to create new worlds and communities we cannot even imagine.

Until recently, people have thought of evolution as driven by competition to eat and reproduce – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. But more important than competition is cooperation, the selection of cooperative behaviour. By cooperating in different ways, different creatures flourish better together than they can apart. Looking back over the history of life on Earth, I see our Creator at work building relationships between his creatures, and communities in which all may flourish. It would be a blasphemy not to cherish these relational communities.

Next month I shall examine what God has created human beings like you and me to be. We are souls, with the capacity we call conscience to tell right from wrong, distinguish truth from lies, and prefer good to evil. And I shall peer into the distant future to speculate what we may become.

Joc Sanders, 24^th April 2026