of creation; the former have been surprisingly consistent throughout Christian history while the latter, however important, have received differing philosophical explication in different epochs; for example, Platonistic, Aristotelian, rationalistic, idealistic, neoclassical, and so on.
To say, as the scriptures do, that God created all things meant to the tradition from the beginning that God is the sole source of all. Quite early, therefore, theology declared that God had not created “out of matter,” since then something—matter—would be co-eternal with God and not created by God. Nor was creation thought to be an emanation from God, a “fall” away from God, but the result of God’s deliberate and hence free action. Therefore, since God was known to be good, creation is good. To be finite, temporal, bodily, mortal, even dependent and vulnerable—as all creatures are—is therefore good and not evil. If God created all, then there is no essential, ineradicable evil; suffering is neither fated nor necessary, and redemption from it is possible. Similarly, the body, created by God as is mind or spirit, is good, not evil. Life, therefore, in its essential structure of finitude, spatiality, temporality, individuality, and sociality, is thus potentially creative and meaningful.
Creation implies the absoluteness and unconditionedness of God as the source or ground of all, and the relatedness of God as that on which the world is continually dependent. God is therefore transcendent to the world as well as immanent within it. Creation implies the eternity of God as the source of time and yet the temporality and changeability of God as related to a world in process. It even implies the passivity and suffering of God as experiencing, knowing, and caring for a vulnerable, mortal world. These paradoxes about God implied by the religious meaning of creation have puzzled and challenged Christian philosophy since the beginning; they represent a “sign” of the mystery of the divine as creator.
Creation thus both expressed and anchored firmly the monotheistic center of Christian (and Jewish) faith: As the source of all things there was God—alone, unconditioned, and eternal, and yet in continual and essential relation to a changing creation. Central to the implications of creation, therefore, was what it said about human existence, its possibilities, its dilemmas, and its destiny. One implication was that the Christian affirmation that men and women were created by God established the freedom and the dignity, the spiritual constitution, and the value of human life—all of which were represented by the crucial phrase in Genesis that humans had been created “in the image of God.” As a consequence of their creation, humans were free and responsible, that is, moral creatures, on the one hand subject to a moral law that obligated them to one another, and on the other hand capable of irresponsible and even evil action. The freedom, responsibility, and potential “fault” of human existence all appear with creation. A second implication of the symbol of creation was that God created all the essential conditions of human life: its bodily base, its material environment, its spatial and temporal parameters. In principle these parameters of finitude were also established as “good” if humans lived up to their image.
Third, since God created time, ruled the sequences of historical events, and “acted” purposefully in history, history was given a potentiality of meaning unknown in religious and cultural life before. Creation, in other words, established the basis for the glory and the personal intimacy of God, for the value and spiritual dignity of women and men, for the positive assessment of nature and life generally, and for the decisive and hopeful character of temporal existence. As is evident, not only was the religious meaning of the symbol creation central to the religious attitudes of Christians toward God, their world, and themselves in that world, but even more it provided the bases for assumptions about reality that have been central to Western consciousness generally and have continued to define that consciousness long after the latter has become “secular.” To many for whom no religious meanings at all are valid, these implications of creation remain nevertheless accurate assessments of reality and of life’s possibilities within reality.
Creation and Science. As the summary above shows, the religious meanings of creation are rich and important, even to a secular scientific and technological culture. Like all the other religious affirmations within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, these attitudes were expressed with and communicated by narratives and images, the “stories” about God and God’s actions. With regard to creation, these stories center in the first chapters of Genesis where witness is reverently and poetically given to the great events through which God brought the universe into being and established its main features. Not surprisingly, the story recorded there reflects the understanding of the natural order characteristic of the Hebrews in the seventh or the fifth centuries B.C.E. of the heavens, of the earth, of the flora and fauna of the earth, and of human history. It is therefore a relatively “archaic” view of the origins and early history of the world, laced with and expressive of these religious meanings. One important task for the modern theologian—in fact, for any modern Christian—is to separate that archaic science and archaic history into these religious meanings and to re-express the latter in terms of the cosmology and the historical consciousness of the modern world. Like the symbol of original sin, therefore, the symbol of creation has represented a fascinating, unavoidable, and yet very difficult challenge to theology to be at once “biblical” and modern.
Most of the principal Christian traditions, Protestant and Catholic alike, have recognized the historical relativity of the literal story, have assented to the authority of science and historical inquiry, and have thus sought to translate the religious meanings of creation into the terms of modern cosmology. All present Christians, however, by no means see it this way. To many the scriptures have been verbally inspired, and hence every proposition is literally as well as religiously or symbolically valid. The “science” of Genesis is as true and as important for them as are the “religious” meanings of Genesis; in fact, for them these two cannot be separated. Thus arises the familiar “warfare” between religion and science over “creation science” or “God’s science” and what they term “evolutionary science.”
One of the most unexpected novelties of the present epoch has been the appearance of “creation science,” an alternative “biblical” cosmology of origins sharply contrasted with that of contemporary evolutionary science. On the one hand, creation science is deliberately modeled on aspects of the Genesis cosmology taken literally (e.g., separate creation of “kinds,” especially human beings, a miraculous worldwide Noachic flood, and “sudden creation from nothing” of the entire universe about 10,000 years ago). On the other hand, creation science also claims to represent a genuinely “scientific” model of origins, based, as its adherents put it, on “scientific data” and “inferences from those data.”
Although fundamentalism has not accommodated itself to the conclusions either of modern scientific or of modern historical inquiry, nevertheless, in promoting creation science it has sought to co-opt scientific procedure and authority as enthusiastically as it earlier used and in part transformed on its own terms the technological, commercial, capitalistic, and nationalistic culture of modernity. In fact, creation science as a body of theory was authored by Ph.D.s in natural science who are also fundamentalists. In the creationist-evolution controversy, fundamentalism has taken the literal form of the creation story and insisted on its unchanging authority and “scientific” validity. This strange fusion of fundamentalist content with an ersatz science into creation science has received important political and social help from the alliance of right wing evangelicalism with conservative Republicanism, the latter probably unconcerned with biblical literalism, but happy to cement their liaison with significant segments of the middle and lower middle classes. As a result, a number of states have proposed laws mandating the teaching of creation science, along with evolution, whenever the question of origins is raised in science classes. To date, the federal courts have struck down these laws as violating the Constitution.
Creation and Nature. In the nineteenth century, when science and religion seemed in temporary conflict, theological reflection concentrated on nature’s processes and devised a number of evolutionary theisms. Later, from 1914 through roughly 1960, when European society was in turmoil, theology concentrated its attention on the question of the meaning
