Transcript

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The Bible opens with these, what had become famous words, and they reveal to us God, the creator.

He spoke, and the world was made.

He created heaven and earth, and the vast multitude of living and non-living things.

It's important for us to reflect on exactly how God creates.

The way God creates far surpasses the way any of us can make or create something.

God creates in the strictest sense because he doesn't use any preexisting material.

He brings things into being from nothingness.

God also didn't just create and walk away.

He holds the world in being, so that everything depends on him in order to continue to exist.

To really understand God's role as our creator, we need to turn to the scriptures.

The book of Genesis has two different creation accounts that all form part of one revelation.

They emphasize different aspects of God's creation.

This is fine because we don't interpret them simplistically.

They're not strictly historical accounts.

They're accounts that are meant to reveal theological truths to us, truths that form the basis for our reflection on the God who made us.

Why is there any world at all?

Why did God create in the first place?

And people in all times and places have tried to answer these questions.

In ancient times, some believed that the universe was the result of a cosmic conflict of gods, and others thought that some primordial divine power was forced to overflow and create.

In our own time, perhaps more familiar to us are those who say that the world came about by chance or that there's no real meaning to creation at all.

None of these is right.

Revelation refutes these explanations.

Sacred scripture and tradition give us clarity about creation.

The creator has explained his reasons, his reasons for creating us.

God, who is in himself father, son, and holy spirit, is eternal and outside of time.

And everything other than him was created by him in the beginning, at some first moment.

God didn't need to create.

From all eternity, he was, as he is now, self-sufficient and perfectly happy.

So, God didn't create because he was lonely or because he was lacking anything.

Rather, he freely chose to create all things.

He, who is perfect goodness, freely created all that is to show forth and share his goodness.

So, you can see how this is different.

Creation is not an unintentional byproduct or an accident, but something God delights in.

God's creation is something fundamentally good.

As Genesis tells us, it's very good.

God's creation is incredibly rich and diverse.

God couldn't manifest his perfect goodness by just making one type of thing, so he created a whole bunch of different things, a multitude.

And we do something, if you think about it, similar when we're trying to explain an idea or a concept and there's no single word that matches our thought.

We have to use a full sentence or many different words to try to get at exactly what we're saying.

So too, St. Thomas Aquinas says, God spoke forth and created not just one creature, but a dazzling variety of different creatures.

God created a diversity in order to manifest and communicate and share his goodness.

The creation narratives capture the powerful variety of creatures.

God not only makes heaven and earth, but the seas, plants, living things, and all of the creatures on the earth, the birds of the sky, and the fish in the sea.

Above this are God's intelligent creatures who are capable of thinking and choosing and knowing and loving.

Angels and human beings belong to this highest domain of God's creation.

The angels are pure spirits and they most resemble God who is perfectly simple and spiritual.

But we as human beings have a very special place in God's creation.

According to Genesis, God breathed into the first human beings the breath of life, that is, the spiritual soul.

And since we have a spiritual soul, we also have a mind, an intellect, which allows us to grasp the truth.

We also have a free will that allows us to make free choices.

To have a human nature is to be both physical and spiritual, to have a physical body and a spiritual soul.I'm not merely my body, and I'm also not merely my soul.

I'm both together.

And each human person is thus, because of this, a kind of summary of all of God's creation.

We belong to both the physical and the spiritual domain.

As Genesis reveals, man is the crowning work of visible creation.

Everything we can see exists for human beings, so that we can thrive and attain our destiny with God.

God intends, as Genesis tells us, to fill the earth and subdue it through man.

He's entrusted us with dominion and stewardship over every living thing.

Many people have the impression that the Catholic doctrine of creation is at odds with modern science, and this isn't right.

Faith and reason cannot conflict, because they flow from the same divine source of truth, who is God Himself.

So this means that the true findings of scientific research can't be in contradiction with the truth of divine revelation.

Revelation affirms that God brought everything into being out of nothing and continues to preserve it in existence.

So, any account offered by physicists to explain the origins of the universe ought to be understood as taking place within a larger creative and preservative action of God.

Similarly, any account of human origins offered by the theory of evolution ought to be understood as an account of something happening within God's larger creative action.

Biologists study the biological origins of the human species and of other forms of life.

So if we're speaking about how higher forms of life may have arisen from lower forms through a process of evolution, this theory presents no difficulty from the Catholic perspective.

Human beings are rational animals, and it may well have been part of God's providential plan that our animal bodies would evolve from lower forms of animal life.

But at some point, this is the very important point, at some point there had to have been the infusion of the spiritual soul, the creation of a spiritual principle that couldn't simply evolve from lower life forms.

And Revelation affirms with certainty that God did infuse such a soul.

Even if man's body evolved from lower life forms, God directly created the first human beings by infusing into them a spiritual soul.

In fact, Catholic doctrine affirms that God continues to directly create the spiritual soul of every human person that's conceived.

The first human beings were created in a state of communion and friendship with God known as original justice.

God gave them natural gifts, their human nature, their reason, and their will, but he also lavished upon them supernatural gifts, his gifts of grace.

He infused into their soul divine knowledge and love.

So, they weren't in heaven yet.

They were in a kind of paradise, but it wasn't quite heaven.

They were directed towards heaven.

They experienced a perfect harmony within themselves and among one another and with the creation they lived in.

They were strangers to suffering and death.

They knew God and found it easy to do good and obey his commands, and they used their freedom to choose him and to choose all of the good things that he'd given them.

God made creation good, but angels and men introduced into creation moral evil.

They sinned.

That is, they chose something else over God.

Revelation teaches that some of the angels fell and became demons through a primordial evil choice.

The highest of the fallen angels, known as Satan or Lucifer, tempted Adam and Eve.

Satan is signified as the serpent in the Book of Genesis, and Adam and Eve fell to his temptation.

They abused their freedom and chose against God by eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Scriptures reveal that this first human choice to sin against God known as original sin had drastic consequences.

Man was separated from God's friendship, and suffering and death entered into the world.

The harmony of original justice was lost, and man began to experience strife and conflict with the world, with others, and within himself.

The natural paradise gave way to an imperfect world that must be cultivated through difficult labor.

It's a world prone to other evils, to natural disasters.

In all the ages that followed, human beings would attempt to dominate one another.

Greed and lust would frequently, as we know, mar human relationships.

The effects of original sin have been passed on to us.

They're sort of like spiritual hereditary defects passed down from our first parents.

We experience a deep tension within ourselves, and our lower powers and appetites often rebel against our better judgments.

We have concupiscence.

That's a weakness in doing what's good, and so we must struggle to make proper moral choices.

Our minds have also been weakened.

There's a lot of ignorance in the world, especially ignorance about God.

But despite all this, our human nature remains fundamentally good.

We can still know the truth and make free and good choices.

In later chapters, we'll talk a lot about our souls and how they can be healed and transformed by God's grace.

While the doctrine of the fall and original sin are bad news, in a way, in a mysterious way, they're also good news and can be very consoling.

We now know why the world we live in feels so broken.

Human nature is good, but it's been deeply wounded and scarred by the effects of sin.

The doctrine of original sin convinces us of the importance of the saving action of Jesus Christ.

Saint Paul says, For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

So from the hindsight of Christ's death and resurrection, we realize that the sin of Adam and Eve was mysteriously beneficial, a happy fault that led to our merciful redemption by Christ.

Thank you for joining me in this session.

In our next session, we'll begin to explore our relationship with Jesus Christ and how he himself has brought about our redemption.