Is God the cause of the world?

It is true, I think, that our view of the world is dominated by the natural sciences. Our children learn at school that water is H2O and that salt is NaCl. The natural sciences form the background against which we understand what the world is. It would be difficult to receive an education in our culture that lacked this understanding.

This is the great difference between our way of thinking and the thinking of men and women before, say, the 16th century. When we look at the world we see physical causation, we know that the light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach us from its surface. When we look at the night sky we know that we see back in time millions of years.

How, then, do we read an ancient text about the origin of the world written hundreds of years before the birth of Christ? It is almost impossible for us to walk in the same shoes of the writers of these texts. We automatically understand them causally and when we do this we, just as automatically, summon up theories of modern cosmology. It is then that unbelievers scoff at the primitive notions of the creation stories and relegate them to the realm of quaint fairytale.

Faithful Christians, thinking that science cannot contradict the faith, attempt to produce a common narrative that includes the activity of God and, for example, the big bang. The question inevitably arises, did God ignite the big bang, a completely fanciful idea.

When we look at the texts in the beginning of the Old Testament we come across not a scientific document that describes how God created the universe, perhaps setting the speed of light or determining the gravitational constant etc, but we encounter in Genesis 1:1-2:4a a document that is not scientific in its character but liturgical. The world is created by command, by the Word of God. This account of the creation is known as the Priestly account because of its repetitive nature and its concern for the seven days of creation.

It is significant that the culmination of the narrative is not the lighting of the stars by atomic fusion but the creation of human beings as men and women and the command to be fruitful and to multiply. The last and seventh day conforms to the priestly concern for rest on the Sabbath.

The second creation story begins at Genesis 2:4b and is a much older account that uses agricultural imagery. In this account God formed man from the dust of the ground. The entire narrative is anthropocentric: man is at the centre of creation, unlike the scientific narrative that has man as just another species inhabiting a speck of insignificant dust in one corner of a galaxy among millions of galaxies. This account has been called the Yahwist account because of the name of God used by its author or authors.

One thing that this account shares with the Priestly account is that the creation of man and woman are the pinnacle of creation. When the woman is created from the rib of the man and she is presented to him he cries out: “This at last is bone of my bones (literally) and flesh of my flesh.” We are told that “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh”.

My point is that these two creation narratives from the Old Testament do not have cosmology at their centre but, remarkably, human marriage. The love that exists between men and women and the fecundity of that relationship is at the centre of creation. This is not cosmology, it is not an explanation of how the universe came into being but is rather an indication of where men and women are to find their lives, in marriage. In doing so it strikes at the heart of what it means to be human. To the scientific mind it is absurd that human marriage lies at the heart of creation. Human fecundity cannot really be distinguished from the fecundity of any other species.

The above observations lead me to conclude that when we say that God is the cause of the world we mix two important categories, that of a folk legend that is intended to indicate what kind of creature we are and the modern causal narrative of scientific cosmology. The result is the confusion we see in the arguments between the creationists and the evolutionists. The creationists have taken these ancient legends as scientific statements, which they plainly are not. Likewise the evolutionists mock them because they are plainly not scientific.

The first line of the Apostles and the Nicene creeds begins with “I believe in God almighty, maker of heaven and earth”. These are the creeds most said by Christians on Sunday morning. It is interesting that the Athanasian creed does not mention creation at all. It seems that the notion that God is the cause of the world is standard Christian belief. While “maker of heaven and earth” seems pretty water tight to indicate direct causation, the preface “I believe” opens a window for a different interpretation because we are immediately not in the realm of scientific fact but in the realm of faith, of belief. We do not believe that the earth revolves around the sun, we know it. Belief does not rest on evidence; it is a different way of knowing than that of scientific knowledge. It begins with assent rather than scepticism.

Rather than affirming that God is the cause of the world in the sense of material science, which was of course beyond the comprehension of both the writers of the creation stories and the creeds, what is being said is that the believer accepts, among other things, that the material world is only ours by gift, that humanity is not the creator and that there is a differentiation between what is God and what is creature. What we have here is not a statement of causality but the basis of a theological scheme.

This does not, however, vacate the idea of creation; the emphasis shifts from the material world to the world that men inhabit, that world of husband and wife being paramount. This is further illustrated by how the second creation story continues to describe the fall of man into sin and death. Although there has been outrage at the negativity of this picture one has only to look into ones own heart or open a newspaper to know that it is true. But that surely is the point, the creation narratives are about what we are like and how we find ourselves in the world. In short, they are existential narratives that awaken us to our true nature.

The insistence that God is the cause of the world creates all sorts of logical problems. The most significant is the question of how spirit interacts with matter. This was a fundamental question that arose in the 17th and 18th centuries with the rise of causal explanations of the natural world and is the prime controversy between religion and science.

If God is an immaterial being then how does he interact with the physical? The problem is that this question has been posed using an understanding of God that is more Greek than Christian. It begins with the God of monotheism rather than that of the Christian God whose name is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Irenaeus described the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of God. By this he meant that God acts in the world through the Son in his earthly life and that this action is continued in the Spirit. That is, the Spirit of Jesus, which is the Spirit of God persists in the world after the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ.

If the act of God is simple this means that the Father only acts via Word and Spirit, i.e. the Father does not act directly by himself in the world. The Trinitarian scheme avoids the problem of how spirit interacts with matter by restricting the action of God in the world to the action of the Son, a human being who can be an agent in the world and the persistence of the Son’s words, actions death etc in the Spirit. That means that the action of God is via the Word, it is noetic, it enters the world of men by their ears. There is no need for spirit/matter interaction, indeed no need for supernaturalism.

God creates by the Word spoken in Jesus Christ which is extended in time in the Spirit. As God spoke the world into being in the first creation story so again he speaks a creation into being by the Word made flesh. When we have to do with Christ something in us is put to death, as in the baptismal liturgy, and something is raised from the dead as Jesus was raised from the dead. Thus the creation that the Word brings about in its reception is a new being who lives a life free from sin and death. The Bible refers to this kind of life as “eternal” because it is a life not bowed down by death, even though we die.

The change we have to make when thinking about a theology of creation is to cease thinking about the cosmos and begin thinking about redemption, deathlessness even in the face of death. The healing of the earth can only come about at the hands of the risen man, the one who, being deathless is capable of the stewardship of the earth. For greed springs from the desire to secure the self against death, so those who are freed from death are also freed from greed.

What is created by Word and Spirit is nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth. This means that creation is an ongoing activity towards a goal that the Bible calls “the kingdom of heaven/God” when every heart will be transformed by the love of God.

The Word spoken in Jesus is the same Word by which God summoned the world into being in the first creation story. This is a Word that names the world as it is, natural, therefore not inhabited by Spirit and thus receptive to investigation by men. This Word also establishes the world as real, there can no longer be doubt about its existence, as though it is a dream or a construction of our minds. The Word of God gives the world ontological status.

This real world is the setting for human history which likewise is not a dream. Again we can ask when God creates, what does he create? The answer in this respect is a history that is more than “one damn thing after another” it is a history with a goal, the aforementioned kingdom otherwise known as the fulfilment of all things in Christ.

This reorientation of the theology of creation may be seen as yet another concession to the modern age bringing about a further weakening of the faith. Certainly, before the dominance of the scientific view it was common belief that God was the cause of the physical world. The scientific view has forced us to think more deeply about what we say about creation and there is plenty of biblical material that supports the view set out above that creation and redemption must be held as one. It is no longer possible to talk about two acts of God, the initial creation of the universe and the later creation of the new creature in Christ.

One would hope that the above would disarm the critics of Christianity who use natural science as their weapon of choice. One can only hope!