In Plato's Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates asks a question about piety and the Olympian gods, which in 21st Century terms we might recast as: "Is something right and good because God approves of it, or does God approve of it because it is right and good?"

This is a sharper dilemma for us than it was for Socrates and Euthyphro, because the Olympian gods were never generally regarded as "That than which no greater can be imagined"–a phrase we owe to St Anselm, and a concept more Hebraic than Greek.

The dilemma is simple enough. If something is right and good only because God approves of it, that makes God into an arbitrary tyrant, declaring things to be right and good purely because they happen to suit Him. If, however, God approves of things because they are intrinsically right and good, that sets up a standard that God is Himself subject to, so that there is something greater than God.

Fortunately, the way through the dilemma is equally simple. All we need to do is replace the "or" in the question with an "and", and then agree to both propositions. Yes, a thing is right and good because God approves of it, and He approves of it because it is right and good.

The consequence of resolving the dilemma that way is, of course, that we equate God with the Right and Good. God is what is Right and Good. What is Right and Good is God. And that means that we might be able to work out what is Right and Good by considering the way that His universe operates.

At first blush, though, we see a big problem. The amount of evil in the world is all too evident. I have much sympathy with those who say, "Everything is getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster!" Nevertheless there is a strong case that Evil is only something parasitic on the Good. For instance, there could be no such thing as pain, unless there were first a sentient being capable of feeling pain. And even the sentient being's capability for feeling pain serves a useful purpose, for it warns it of damage. It does seem that Good is in some sense more fundamental than Evil.

So what can the universe that we live in teach us about the direction in which it is travelling? As it happens, we're very fortunate to be living at a time when a new science is starting to make great strides in coming to grips with that question. That science is called Complexity, and it got going quite late in the 20th century. Complexity is essentially the study of how, time and time again, the Whole becomes much more than just the sum of its parts.

To begin as near to the beginning as I'm able (although I doubt whether there is any actual beginning to Complexity) you can take a proton and an electron, and find out all about them that there is to know, but when you put them together you get an atom of hydrogen, and that atom has quite different properties; ones that you couldn't possibly predict from anything or everything that you knew about protons and electrons separately.

Then you can take two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and find out all about them that there is to know, but when you put them together you get a molecule of water, and again water has quite different properties; ones that you couldn't possibly predict only from what you knew about hydrogen and oxygen separately. Those properties include being liquid at normal temperature and pressure, in which conditions both hydrogen and oxygen are gases. They also include the fact that water is most dense at only a few degrees above its freezing point, so that ponds can freeze over in winter and the life in those ponds can continue to survive quite happily underneath. That property is most important, for only a few steps further up is the one where many large molecules club together to form a live cell. It's just as if the properties of water were designed with life in mind. (And I genuinely wonder whether the "as if" in that sentence is necessary.)

The next step after that is the one where many live cells club together to form a multicellular organism. One of the most interesting is the slime mould. In favourable circumstances the many cells in a slime mould move around quite freely and independently, but when the situation gets less favourable, those cells club together and form into a particular shape, and the cells in the different parts of that shape assume different functions, and everything they do is conducive to producing spores that can escape to more favourable environments.

I expect by this time you will have got the picture. The more complex the structure, the greater the opportunities to form yet larger wholes at a still more complex level, and each successive whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The common thread is "co-operation". Just think how many million cells there are in your own body, all working together to ensure your survival, your well-being, and if you're lucky, your chance to reproduce!

So what's the next step up for us now? That's still a bit of a mystery, but I can see a few clues. One is the ant hill, where thousands on thousands of ants club together in such a highly integrated fashion that some entomologists consider the individual ants to be mobile cells in what is essentially a higher order being, the ant colony itself.

Another clue is contained in something John's Gospel reports Jesus as telling his disciples on the eve of his arrest, "I am the Vine, you are the branches." Similarly, Paul tells us that we are all "members", that is "organs", in the Body of Christ. And some people, a few of whom I've met myself, claim themselves to have experienced, or even be currently experiencing, a second and higher order identity. They remain aware of their individual identities, calling them, perhaps, "Little John" or "Little Mary", but at the same time they are vividly aware that their "real identity" is something much more complex: their "True Self", or "Christ Consciousness", or "Cosmic Consciousness". (I guess that if the individual cells in your body were self-conscious, they'd feel much the same way about you.)

Coming back to the Problem of Evil here, if you can think of it as being something like a malignant tumour in the Body of Christ, I reckon you'd not be all that wrong. Another point: the more we co-operate, the better we are able to compete, but it is not true that the more we compete the better we are able to co-operate! Despite all appearances, and local instances to the contrary, Good is stronger than Evil, and bound to win out in the end. (OK, so the universe may be bound for a crunch or a heat death in a few billion years' time, but that need only be at the physical level. I'm betting on Cosmic Cosciousness to survive even that.)

So, since the science of Complexity is all about having more and more fruitful co-operation, the higher we climb; it's hardly a huge step to say that the universe around us is proclaiming, "God is Love".

Let me close with a short piece that I felt motivated to write while I was preparing this talk. It is loosely based on the Song of Simeon, so I call it

Lord, I'm in the closing years of my life and I'm ready to go when the time comes. But all my life I've been eager to discover what my purpose in it is supposed to be; and, more than that, the purpose of life itself, and of all Your creation, and I thank You that at last I seem able to see it all reasonably clearly.

For not only I, but all my fellow travellers in this life that You have given us, are all the time discovering new ways of working together in harmonious co-operation. (Not that we always follow them up once we've discovered them, but that's another matter.)

However, as often as we do follow them up, the more such ways are revealed to us. I might describe that as Your Plan of Salvation, for the root meaning of "salvation" is healthiness, after all, and Your Plan, which we can discover in Nature, is clearly designed for the healthy function of all that is.

For You are not only the Ground of Being, but the Ground of Life and the Ground of Love and Fruitful Co-operation as well; and although I'm addressing You now as though You were just another being of much the same kind as myself, I recognise that I can only treat You as a Being at all by way of analogy, and that the deepest truths about You will always remain beyond my understanding, and (for that matter) even beyond the understanding of the very wisest of my fellow beings.

But, in the meantime, I know that one of my most important tasks is to pass on to others whatever partial understandings about You I have been able to acquire; for the more we understand about You, the more we will be inspired into loving co-operation with each other, and that in ever more worthwhile and creative ways. Moreover, in behaving that way we will in truth be loving You, and others will also recognise, however dimly, that we are doing Your work.

Should we, indeed can we, ask for anything more?