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, winds it up – he gives it its initial position
and energy – and then 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 interaction 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 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.
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, and the very structure
of material reality itself, all of this is in some sense, SOMETHING.
When we are talking about creation from nothing,
we are not designating the emergence of a determinant
matter from a 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 is 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 cannot 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, and 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 cannot 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 both analogous to these
creaturely forms of goodness and yet also that
is infinitely greater and higher than them.
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.
Our minds easily imagine a time (time 1) when the whole cosmos did not yet exist, and then,
at another moment (time 2), it was produced in being.
But this is a mistake because – as Aquinas points out – time itself is a creaturely
reality.
There is no "time 1" before creation, and even the word “before” is potentially
misleading.
Or to put it another way, there is not an already-existing timeline into which God inserts
things.
Rather, the existence of time is itself is bound up with the creative activity of God, so that
in a sense, time too 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 esse 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 a 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 are contingent, while God is absolutely necessary.
Creation, then, is not a moment in time or a past event.
It is an ongoing activity of God, as he holds all things in being at every moment.
This is important because it helps us see that God does not 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, and so there is 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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