Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (16 page)

The fact that the Bible opens with a description of the creation is to a certain extent misleading. It suggests that the main message of the Bible is cosmological, or at any rate that the plot of that message is played out on the cosmological scene. This suggestion is endorsed by our view of the world, which under the impact of the progress of science in the last three centuries, sees everything from the perspective of the fact that the Earth is a small planet revolving around an average star. In addition,
Genesis
, the grandiose title tradition has bestowed on this book,
¹
seems to allude to our instinct to search for roots: what is
our
genesis? However, the
Book of Genesi
s is not the first book of the Bible chronologically. It was compiled during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C. from passages which were probably transcriptions of a still earlier oral tradition.
²
The chronologically earlier books of the Old Testament focus on the historical aspect of God’s covenant with His Chosen People (the calling of Abraham, the delivery from slavery in Egypt, the establishment of Israel as a kingdom etc.). It seems that it was not until the profound religious crisis triggered by the sack of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. and the carrying off of its people to Babylon and hence contact with a foreign culture, inspired a more outward-looking form of theological reflection. Yahweh was not only the God of one nation, but also the creator of the entire universe. Even oppressive conquerors were merely a tool in His hands. It cannot be ruled out that the high level of advancement of Babylonian astronomy also contributed to drawing the attention of the originators of the
Genesis
story to the cosmological background to their nation’s history. Nonetheless, the familiar story of the Creation was not devised as a strictly cosmological doctrine, but rather as a backup to the belief that God had always been present in the history of His People.
³

Just about everyone from our culture is (or, until recently, used to be) familiar with the opening words of the
Book of Genesis
: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Virtually all the exegetes agree that the expression “the heaven and the earth” corresponds to what we call the “universe” today, with an allowance for all the transformations the concept associated with this word has undergone due to advances in science.

The key word in the Bible’s first sentence is “created” (Hebrew
bará
). On the strength of the fact that in the Bible the act of
bará
is always attributed to God, many exegetes have been trying to read the idea of a creation out of nothing into this word. However, its immediate context does not necessitate this. Emphatically, in the following sections of the account of the Creation its author (or editor) no longer used the word “created” but instead “made” (
àsá
). For instance, God
made
the firmament, dividing “the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament;” and He
made
“two great lights,” the sun and the moon.
Bará
does not appear again until the end of the account, as it were in conclusion, in the passage about God resting after His work of Creation.
⁴

The second verse of the Creation poem says that “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
⁵
This may be understood as referring either to the state from which God derived everything that exists now, or the state immediately after the original act of creation. There is only one direct reference in the Old Testament to the concept of creation, in the much later Second Book of Machabees, written in 130–135 B.C. A mother encourages her son to suffer martyrdom, saying, “and now, my son, this boon grant me. Look round at heaven and earth and all they contain [an echo of Genesis?]; bethink thee that all this, and mankind too, God made out of nothing.” (2 Mach 7, 28 after the R.C. Knox translation)]. Note that these words were put into the mouth of a simple woman, therefore the “theology of the Creation” must have been a well-known truth by that time.

The phrase “In the beginning” (
bēreshit
) is not altogether clear, either. It may be understood more familiarly as “at the beginning of the world’s history,” or more in the context of the biblical account as “at the beginning of the work of Creation,” but we should certainly not associate this expression with our present-day investigations into the beginnings of cosmic evolution. However, theologians will point to the parallel with the opening words of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word…” John’s “In the beginning” is the Greek
en arche
, exactly corresponding to the Hebrew
bēreshit
, but it means something different from the “beginning” in Genesis. John’s “beginning” is something that was before, or beyond, “any thing made that was made” (J 1,3). It is certainly right to point out the parallel between Chap. 1 of
Genesis
and St. John’s Prologue, but we should not impute John’s theology to the
Book of Genesi
s. The two “beginnings” are cloaked in the Mystery.

As we have seen, the truth about God creating the world had an “established position” in the Old Testament, but Jewish religious thinkers did not follow it up with profound religious reflection. For them the truth about the Creation was not so much a cosmological truth important in itself, but rather the cosmological backdrop to the history of the Chosen People, a guarantee of the fulfilment of that history. In Early Christianity the situation was quite the opposite: from the very beginning the truth about the Creation had always been a focus of attention. Of course, for Christians the “historic truths” of the Incarnation and Redemption held a central position as well, but it cannot be ruled out that perhaps they were the factors that prompted deeper reflection on God the Creator. On the grounds of a certain contrast: God, Creator of all things, entered history to become one of His own creatures: “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not” (J 1, 11). But for people living at the crossroads of the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Biblical cultures the truth of the Creation was a difficult truth. On the one hand it called for a re-reading of the passages from the Old Testament in a new context; while on the other hand there was a need to square up with the contribution made by the Greek philosophical tradition to thought on the origins of the world. It was a tradition constantly under pressure from evil and chaos: even if it admitted a Creator or Organiser of the world, it excluded all that was bad or disorganised from his authority. There was a certain element (matter, or perhaps chaos?) which defied the creative power of order and rationality. Christian thinkers could not be reconciled to this idea. It was from this conflict that the Christian interpretation of Creation was to develop. But before we turn our attention to this, we shall take a synthetic overview of the Greek doctrines of the origins of the world.

What we encounter here is above all a philosophical endeavour. The Greeks made a bold attempt to contend with the mystery of the origin of the universe rationally and with no overt reference to religious beliefs. I use the word “overt,” since one can never rule out an unconscious or partially conscious reliance on aspects of a religious nature, even if one repudiates such a procedure. Characteristically, the Early Christian theologians who worked on the concept of Creation contended with Greek philosophy, not Greek mythology, which Christians never considered a serious partner for dialogue. From the very beginning Greek rationalism was seeping into Christian theology.

What is meant here is not only a search for the
arche
, the fundamental “principles” from which everything is composed (according to the Ionian philosophers these were the elements of earth, air, water, and fire, or the
apeiron
, the undetermined unboundedness); but also the opinions of those thinkers who believed in an eternal universe. They, too, were well aware of the fact that it had not always been “in its present state.” According to them, the present state had emerged either due to random collisions between atoms in eternal existence (as held by the Atomists like Democritus and Lucretius), or went through cycles of change, from chaos in fire, through order, to the next catastrophic fire (as the Stoics believed).

An interesting explanation for the development of order was put forward by Empedocles, who suggested a substitute for Democritus’s mechanical atoms in the form of organic miniatures of living organs able to form random combinations. But only combinations with an advantageous system had a chance of survival. Empedocles’ concept was, of course, blatantly naïve, but it entailed the germ of a creative idea – natural selection.
⁷

Another position on the origin of the world was represented by Aristotle, who also believed in an eternal world, but from a conceptual perspective radically different from the one held by the Atomists or Stoics. According to Aristotle the universe was eternal because the movement which made its mechanism work was eternal. But this movement was not spontaneous: it was bestowed on the world by the Prime Mover, who remained motionless himself. The Prime Mover did not operate like a mechanical cause: in his generation of movement he acted as the attractive Good. It was at this point that the Aristotelian principle of purposefulness appeared: all beings by their nature sought to achieve the purposes proper to them, which was always a good. The harmonious order of the world was neither the outcome of random chance, nor even of random chance assisted by the principle of natural selection, but the result of general purposefulness. This ruled out an “evolutionary view of the world.”

Plato approached the issue of the world’s origin in yet another way. He employed the metaphor of a Demiurge Artist or Artisan at work. The dialogue
Timaio
s, Plato’s poetic vision of the creation, was most probably deliberately fashioned as a myth to stress the metaphorical nature of the Platonic concept.
⁸
His eyes set on the eternal, perfect Ideas, which incorporated mathematical forms, the Demiurge composed the universe out of a pre-existing chaos. Here chaos means not just disorder, as a state of suspension between existence and non-existence, which was more in line with the Greek manner of thinking.
⁹

Such an interpretation (if we admit it) would be in agreement with the Greek concept of Logos, the rationality in the world, responsible for the world’s harmony and order. The Logos concept, which went back to the times of Heraclitus and the oldest roots of Greek thought, had already been fairly widely disseminated by the time Early Christianity appeared on the arena of history.

After a short spell of wavering, Christianity transformed fairly quickly from a splinter group in Judaism into a universalistic religion. The Christian concept of God adapted to this transformation. Easily – because the God of the Old Testament, though the God of the Chosen People, was also the Creator of the universe. It was enough just to draw the conclusions from this. The truth about the Creation attracted the attention of Christians not only on account of their interest in cosmology (that came later), but for its relevance to the new religion’s central message. The belief that the universe had been created by an omnipotent God to Whom all things without exception were subject was a powerful demonstration of the drama in the truth of the Incarnation. Theological reflection on these truths reached its zenith in the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel. The phrase “In the beginning” may be a deliberate reference to the opening words of the Book of Genesis. But John makes no mention of the Earth being “without form and void” or “an empty waste,” “[i]n the beginning.” In the beginning was Logos – the Word. “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.” (J 1, 1-3).
¹¹
An educated Christian of those times, brought up in Greek culture and familiar with the Bible, immediately saw a multitude of nuances in this text, which we today have to comb out with the help of meticulous comparative analysis.

Then comes a contrast: Logos the Word, the Creator of all things and present in all things, as it were became concentrated in one man. We are presented with a striking literary shortcut: “The Word was made flesh” (J 1, 14). “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not” (J 1, 11).

From the very outset Christian thought built its fundamental truths into a cosmological scene. Christ’s Second Coming at the end of time was to be the finale both of that scene and the drama. The cosmological scene assumed an importance not so much on its own behalf, but only insofar as it portrayed the drama more fully.

However, the nascent Christian theology also had its practical purposes. The new dogmas had to be defended, the opposition offered by the “Greek wisdom” overcome, and answers supplied to allegations from “secular thinkers.” This process was played out not only in the written and oral polemics, but also in the heads of those Christian thinkers who were true believers while at the same time immersed in the Greek culture. And this was where the original source of the conflict lay. Numerous vestiges of this have survived in the writings, as we shall see. In all the Greek concepts of the origins of the world the element of order had to contend with the element of chaos, the element of good had to overcome the element of evil (with difficulty and in defiance). Meanwhile in the Christian vision God is the Lord of all things, absolutely everything. He is responsible for everything that is and happens in the world. Not surprisingly, the Christian theology of the Creation developed in the course of a struggle to eliminate the Greek dualism of order and chaos, good and evil. That this was no easy venture is borne out by the fact that the Fathers of the Church, such as for example Justin Martyr, Irenaeus or Clement of Alexandria, still retained a Platonic understanding of the Creation as God constructing the world out of a pre-existing matter in a state of disorder, in other words out of a matter which in a certain sense resisted the Creator.

The Early Christian thinkers would not have been men of their own times if they had not thought “in the Greek manner.” That is why they could never have considered the Biblical metaphors of God’s omnipotence sufficient, and sooner or later were bound to ask questions concerning “the metaphysics of Creation.” The first surviving reflection on this issue is in Hermas’
The Shepherd
, an apocalyptic text written in 140–150 A.D. probably by a Greek who was once a slave. Its central subject is the problem of evil: can those who have repudiated their faith be saved? In it we read, “First of all, believe that God is One, even He who created all things and set them in order, and brought all things from non-existence into being.”
¹²
We get a distinct stress put on “created and set in order,” and – to make doubly sure – “brought all things from non-existence into being.” With time the Latin phrase
ex nihilo
(out of nothing) would become a technical term.

Christianity owes its theology of the Creation chiefly to two thinkers: Origen and St. Augustine of Hippo. Origen prepared the ground, and Augustine supplied the theological finish to the concept of Creation.