Transcript

What is creation?

This is an important question, not only for faith, but also for philosophy and for science.

Some common views of creation are quite misleading, and they can lead to serious misunderstandings of the relationship between science and faith.

For example, some have thought of God like a divine watchmaker who makes the whole of creation, the whole cosmos, everything that is, like a very complex watch.

On this view, God makes the universe, he winds it up, he gives it its initial position and energy, and then he lets it run on its own power.

Others might want to make this view more nuanced by introducing more complexity to the system, even by introducing seemingly random interactions, as if God were like a pool player who set up the cosmos like a rack of pool balls, which he then breaks at the big bang, unleashing a myriad of unpredictable or even indeterminate interactions of things through time.

There are some fundamental problems with views like this from the perspective of the classical Christian understanding as taught by St. Thomas Aquinas.

This mistaken view of creation thinks of it as a past historical event, that is, as a moment in time, the very first moment, and that leads to another misleading idea.

On this view, God is no longer directly involved in the unfolding of all things.

Even if God might occasionally intervene in the world through miracles, his creative act would remain in the past, and likewise, it then becomes possible to imagine a world that unfolds without any active divine governance over it or presence within it at all.

We could add more, but let's turn to Aquinas's answer to the question, what is creation?

Along with the whole Christian tradition, Aquinas affirms that God creates from nothing, or in Latin, ex nihilo.

This is a view already found in the Church Fathers, and it means, at its most fundamental level, that creation does not start from some pre-existing material.

Even the very laws of physics, the most fundamental forces, space-time, the very structure of material reality itself, all of this is in some sense something.

When we're talking about creation from nothing, we're not designating the emergence of a determinate matter from the background of indeterminate forces or pre-states.

Rather, to speak of creation ex nihilo, from nothing, is to designate something even more radical.

The point is that there is nothing at all whatsoever that's in the background, nothing at all that God acts upon, nothing at all that exists other than God prior to, or as the basis for, the divine act of creation.

This is very hard for our minds to grasp, because we can't have any clear idea of pure nothingness, and our difficulty is related to a larger point that Aquinas makes about how we speak about God.

It has a special relevance in talking about creation.

Our language, even the way that we conceive of things in our minds, always have their starting points with creatures, with what we experience and know in this world.

In this life, we can't see God directly, nor can we grasp his divine essence in itself, and that means that we must constantly purify our language as we apply it to God, so that, insofar as we can, we bracket or set aside everything that is finite or creaturely in whatever we say about him.

So, to give an example, a chocolate bar is good, a beautiful sunset is good, friendship is good, and we also say that God is good, but we say this in a way that is analogous to these creaturely forms of goodness, and yet also that is infinitely greater and higher than them.

Now, when we speak about the concept of creation, we confront a similar problem of language, because we tend to think of creation by analogy to our experience of things in the world coming to be, as if creation involved a change from non-being to being.

So, our minds easily imagine a time, time one, when the whole cosmos did not yet exist, and then, at another moment, time two, when it was produced in being.

But this is a mistake, because, as Aquinas points out, time itself is the creaturely reality.

There is no time one before creation.

Even the word before is potentially misleading here.

Or, to put it another way, there is not an already existing timeline into which God inserts things.

Rather, the existence of time itself is bound up with the creative activity of God, so that, in a sense, time two is created from nothing.

To put it another way, strictly speaking, creation is not a change.

What is it, then?

Aquinas holds that creation is a relation of creatures to God.

Specifically, it is a relation of ongoing and radical ontological dependence.

Only God is, absolutely.

In fact, Aquinas famously teaches that God is ipsum essae subsistens, that is, in English, to be itself subsisting.

God exists necessarily, absolutely.

His very essence is to be, to exist.

He is absolutely uncaused, and he could not not exist.

This is why, according to Aquinas, we have to think of God in a radically different way than we think of things in the universe of creatures.

God stands outside of the whole creation as its transcendent source and cause.

In contrast to God, to be a creature means to receive being, to be caused, to participate in existence at every moment.

So, being a creature, being created, characterizes all finite things at all times.

They're contingent, while God is absolutely necessary.

Creation, then, is not a moment in time or a past event.

It's an ongoing activity of God as he holds all things in being at every moment.

This is important because it helps us to see that God doesn't just get the universe started and then step out of the picture.

What is more, this view of creation helps us understand how God is a cause of an absolutely different kind, in a different order altogether, from all other causes that we know.

He gives to other causes their very being and, therefore, their capacity to cause.

Creaturely causality is real.

There's no competition between taking seriously the creaturely causality that we find in the universe and simultaneously affirming that God is the first cause of all of these things.

God's creative activity manifests the infinity of his power.

It also manifests his goodness.

In fact, God's goodness is the reason why he creates.

He desires to share the plenitude of his being by making other creatures from nothing.

As we read in the book of Genesis, God saw all that he had made and, behold, it was very good.

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