"Genes, Genesis and God." Lecture 10 of the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, series 1997/1998. Lecture given December 1, 1997.
Online at: hdl.handle.net/10217/37814

Can one move through the genes and their genesis to a glimpse of God? The argument of this concluding lecture is that we have no reason to deny that the startling genesis on Earth is sacred, nor to deny that humans, funded by their evolved perceptual and cognitive equipment, can ever detect that sacred presence. This returns us to the global claims of religion, claims that are transcendent at least in the sense of detecting a divine power in, with, and under the genesis on Earth.

Does biology leave space for such claims, or even invite such claims as complementary explanations? Against the reductionists, religious persons have to be compositionists, to move up, not down, to get the interpretive level needed to frame and complete lower level truths. The essential characteristic of narrative is that events have to be understood in the light of the complexities to which they lead, not just in the light of the origins from which they flow.

Genes record only a portion of the history that has taken place; they do not, for instance, record the pre-life cosmological story, nor do they record the post-genetic cultural story. Still, vital to the Earth epic is this fertility intimately linked with the genes, the means by which all the more complex structures on Earth are formed. Genes remember, research, and recompound discoveries; and the storied achievements, the values achieved, rise, over several billion years, to spectacular levels of attainment and power. The cosmic universals give way to the particulars of earthen natural history. The question is whether the dramatic events on this Earth contain any hint of larger, more universal powers in which they are embedded.

The ten lectures were:

1. Genetic Creativity: Diversity and Complexity in Natural History
2. Genetic Values: Intrinsic, Inclusive, Distributed, Shared
3. Genetic Identity: Conserved and Integrated Values
4. Genes and the Genesis of Human Culture
5. Genes and the Genesis of Science
6. Genes and the Genesis of Ethics
7. Ethics Naturalised and Universalised
8. Genes and the Genesis of Religion
9. Genes and the Prolific Earth
10. Genes, Genesis and God.

Only Lectures 1 and 10 were recorded. Lecture 1 is previous entry. Lecture series published as: Genes, Genesis and God: Values and their Origins in Natural and Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.