Bible Stories

The implications then of the opening words of the Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, are immense, greater than anything we can conceive. The first words of John’s Gospel re-echo the words in the beginning‘. The beginning of what? The author of Genesis doubtless meant the beginning of the world, or better the beginning of God’s creative activity. It is a theme unimaginable to Greek philosophers or contemporary secular science.

Greek understandings of the beginning

Thoughtful Greeks, in the five or six centuries before Christ, had great interest in the question, in what sense did the world have a beginning?

• Some Ionian philosophers thought such a beginning had a material basis — water, air, fire, matter.
• A moral view was taken by Anaximander who first speculated that it was necessity, ‘guilt’, or the order of time that led to the infinite becoming finite. But he could not conceive of the universe coming into being through an outside cause; rather it was an ordering process, whereby the infinite came into active existence.
• To the Pythagoreans, it was number that was the principle of all things in the world, evidenced in the principles of musical harmony.
• The pre-Socratics, such as Parmenides, were to argue that mind is what brought about the beginning and the logos (the Word) was the ordering principle of all things.
• Plato thought not of a principle but of an event, the world-soul which, as ‘the unmoved mover’, set the universe in motion.
• Aristotle alone seemed aware of an absolute beginning which so awed him that he hardly made any attempt to determine its meaning. He appears to reject all previous attempts to give a precise philosophical form to the concept. Instead, he confines himself deliberately to the observable world, whose ‘beginning‘ must be the supreme cause.

Modern science and the beginning

Modern science is also limited in what it can say about ‘the beginning‘. This is because of the tentative nature of what it can say about the origin of the universe. There are three major schools of thought on this today:

• There are the evolutionary theories of the universe, such as those of Lemaitre and Gamow. They argue for an initial concentration of matter, out of which ‘the cosmic egg’ was hatched (Lemaitre) or the ‘big- bang’ explosion took place (Gamow). The former theory is no longer tenable scientifically. The latter can speak only of a relative rather than an absolute beginning.
• Then there are the steady- state or continuous creation theories of Hermann Bondi and Fred Hoyle, which see no evidence of a beginning. The universe has always existed and always will exist. Thus it is impossible to speak of an origin of the universe, since no origin is conceived possible.
• The theory of the pulsating universe accepts the ‘big-bang’ hypothesis, but denies it has only collapsed once. Instead, it lays open the possibility of cyclical recurrence, of an infinite number of cosmic explosions. This theory echoes James Hutton’s pronouncement in 1795 in his book The Theory of the Earth, ‘it has no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.’

A yet more fundamental question is whether science can ever establish that the universe has had an origin in time. Some say this is impossible, because science cannot study an event for which no explanation can be given. Obviously, there could be no physical causes before an absolute beginning, so scientific study could not enter such a field. Science then can never hope to establish an absolute origin for the universe, which means it cannot disprove it either. So, more clearly than Aristotle’s conclusion thousands of years earlier, modern science can really say nothing about the origin of the universe. Therefore there is no intrinsic contradiction between science and faith on the matter of the beginning of all things.

Creation in Christian thought

The ‘big-bang’ versus ’steady- state’ controversy is not restricted to the scientists. It has its echoes in Christian ideas of creation. Some theologians think of God primarily as ‘immanent’, working from within his creation. Others see him much more as ‘transcendent’, intervening in his creation from outside and beyond it. The first group understand God the Creator as eternally creative; they do not fully distinguish between God as the Creator and as the Sustainer of the universe. But the second think that God created the universe in a decisive act, and that since then all has been upheld by his sustaining providence. These different views of God’s sovereignty stem, it is worth repeating, from different ideas of the character of God.

Orthodox Christianity firmly links together two pairs of ideas: ‘creation from nothing’ with God’s act of creation, and ‘continuous creation‘ with God’s providence. It resists any attempt to merge these two sets of ideas into one. When some modern theologians do confuse creation with providence, they have a reason: they want to show that the ground of our being is God’s endless creativity. But the Bible sees no contradictionbetween God’s once-for-all creation and his continuing creativity; in fact it affirms both.

The problem with the immanent view of creation, that God is within the universe to shape it, is that it leaves a gap where God’s act of creation should be, and so leaves the believer with an incomplete vision of the universe. Only a God who reaches beyond the universe could ever have created it. Yet all the theological approaches inevitably leave some distortion of the grandeur and mystery of the doctrine of God as Creator. None can cope with all its fullness and range.

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