For all his faults, and they are many, St Paul had the soul of a poet. He tells of creation groaning and travailing in pain, waiting and straining for the birth of something new and better, some kind of escape or transition into a better reality.
I like the idea of creation groaning, and it's not hard to hear it at the moment. Environmental strains, population growth, and the near collapse of the banking system in the West, global recession gloomily forecast by all the pundits.
But will something better come out of it? You have to have some kind of spiritual mindset, in my view, to think that what emerges will be better than what is replaced. If you're a confirmed Darwinist, you have to believe that what comes later is just different, not better. To believe otherwise would imply some kind of cosmic progress, and that gets dangerously close to the idea of a grand intelligence behind the universe, some kind of plan that's too big for most of us to see.
But if we see the groaning as a sign of growth, as birth pangs, as the emerging of new life, or maybe new social systems, new forms of interdependency, then there is always hope that what comes will be better. This seems to me to be the essence of the religious or spiritual impulse in people, the deep, deep idea that there must be, and is, something ultimately better than what we see at the moment.
So I give St Paul a decent 7 out of 10 on this one, in the solid hope that there's always something better to aim for, and that the groaning tells us that it's on its way.