Eternal/Necessary Creation
The first problematic understanding of creation is also the most complicated to fully understand. It is important to note that the idea of an eternal creation finds its intellectual roots primarily outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition in Greco-Roman philosophy. As has already been mentioned, such philosophy rejected that God could become Creator in any sense. However, many philosophers still maintained that God did indeed create the universe. How can those two ideas be reconciled? The solution was to maintain that God has always been Creator, that creation is just as eternal as God is. As long as God has been around, creation has been around. In this sense, creation exists because God is Creator as a necessary part of the essence of God. That is, God is not God without being Creator (a view radically called into question by the doctrine of creation out of nothing). God was not able to choose to not create the universe, but was under ontological (having to do with being what he is) compulsion to create.
If we suspend our affirmation of creation out of nothing, this view seems to be plausible at first, but we must consider its implications. If creation is indeed necessary, it means that it is not one of many options, but is what it is and could not have been otherwise. If this is the case, how should one go about understanding nature? The answer was seen to be found in Euclidian geometry, one of the first pure and rigorous forms of mathematics. Euclid’s geometry began with five statements, called postulates, that were taken to be self-evident. From those five postulates, rigorous logic was applied to prove simple theorems. These were then used to prove more complicated theorems. This process continued on, developing into the entire body of geometrical knowledge of the ancient world and, until the development of non-Euclidian geometries in the twentieth century, the modern world.
What is important to note about this is that all of Euclidian geometry is to be seen as already latent in those first five postulates. All geometrical activity is simply a development and exploration of the implication of those ideas. Any theorem can be traced back to those five fundamental statements and can be shown to flow directly from them. One problem that regards any system like this is that there is no guarantee that those basic postulates are all necessary nor is there a guarantee that there are no more that are needed. This is exactly what happened with the development of non-Euclidian geometries. It was discovered that four of the postulates could create a coherent system without the fifth (though it required some redefinition of terms). The result is that, even though these other geometries share four-fifths of the basic ideas of Euclid’s, they are radically different.
As it turned out, in the ancient world, the search began to discover and articulate what were known as “first principles,” which would serve the same purpose for understanding the world as the postulates in Euclid’s geometry. This leads to two main problems. The first of these, in light of what was just said about the precarious nature of selecting these principles (or postulates), is that there is a need to be extremely careful about what basic ideas are chosen, as a slight change can have very far ranging results.
The second main problem is that this practice establishes a method of understanding nature that is fundamentally a priori. This means that conclusions about nature are deduced with logic rather than investigated critically. This means that nature itself is never actually engaged experimentally to allow it to shape our questions and to provide the answers. This poses two problems. The first is that, in light of what experimental science has actually disclosed about the universe, such a method of understanding has proved to be woefully inadequate. Nature has turned out to be far more rich, complex, and unexpected than any kind of prediction could have accounted for. The second problem is that it is unbelievably arrogant. It presupposes that knowledge is simply a construct of human reason and that nature is simply a logical unfolding of core ideas that we assume that we can determine. The need to actually investigate creation in a critical way will be unpacked further below in an investigation of a view of creation that is more commensurate with Christian faith and revelation.
Creation as Illusion
In a world of modern science, the idea that creation could be seen as simply an illusion seems humorously inappropriate. How can one maintain that the world in which we live is simply an illusion and bears no verifiable relation to anything real that underlies it? This way of understanding creation has both ancient and modern forms. In pre-Socratic philosophy, there were two major schools of thought about the world. The first view is associated with a thinker named Heraclitus. His view was that absolutely everything was in a state of flux; everything was always changing. If this is true than the stability that we think we see in the world around us must be an illusion, because nothing, according to this view, is finally stable.
Opposite to this are the views of another philosopher Parmenides. Parmenides lived just after Heraclitus and held that everything is One, that is, there is not finally any differentiation or change (even change in location). Any change or any differentiation between people, places and things that we think we observe is held to be an illusion. What is interesting about both of these views is that they assert that what actually is or exists is of a certain character. Experience, however, clearly does not support either extreme in its totality. The philosophy is left with nothing else to say but that experience is wrong. Many ancient thinkers wrote about the untrustworthiness of human experience.
Neither of these philosophers were trying to undermine our ability to know the truth. Indeed, they were hoping to do quite the opposite, to affirm that we actually can know truth, even when our experience makes it harder to do so. Both were trying to get down to the very most basic concept of what really exists. What is more basic, being (Parmenides) or becoming (Heraclitus)? We see both of them, but they can’t both be equally basic (or so it is presupposed). Therefore it is concluded that either change or stasis must be more basic to existence and the other must be interpreted accordingly.
But what has this done? It has established a sharp epistemological dualism (as discussed in chapter three). Reality and our experience of reality have been utterly separated, have been declared to be incompatible. We say to Heraclitus that we experience some things as stable and to Parmenides that we experience change. Both have no option but to say that our experience is wrong. It is clear that our experience is sometimes flawed and misinterpreted, but is it necessarily the case that our experience is always so flawed as to bear no relation whatsoever to reality as it actually is? Again, neither thinker made skepticism the core of their system, but, if we push their views to their logical conclusions, we must see that this is where they end up.
This idea that reality is nothing more than an illusion has gained a new lease on life with the rise of post-modernity. The realization that the communities in which we inhabit play a role in what we know has also tended to cast doubt that our experience is commensurate with reality. This time, it is not because we have decided ahead of time that the world is one way while our experience is another. Instead, it is under the guise of humility, saying, “I only know what is in my experience which is shaped by my environment and community. How can I know that this experience is universally valid? Even if there is an objective reality, I only ever experience it in a subjective way.”
I say that this argument is under the guise of humility, because it is actually not very humble at all. It not only says that their experience might be wrong, it also asserts that the experience of everyone else can have no more claim to objectivity. In fact, if those other views presume to have an insight into how reality actually is (and not just as it seems to them), they are dismissed as paternalistic and arrogant. And yet, how can this condemnation be made? The only way that one can state so clearly and authoritatively that no one group has access to universal truth is to implicitly claim that the statement, “all experience and knowledge is relative” bears universal authority. According to this view, how can we know this to be the case? Is not such a statement just as called into question by our limited experience as any other, and would that not open the door to a possibility of actual knowledge? Pluralism as is often practiced in the Western world is not true pluralism. Instead, it is dogmatic pluralism; a pluralism that marginalizes every claim to absolute authority except its own assertion of relativism. “Relativism is true” is a self-contradiction.
The point is that, for both of these ancient and modern views, our world of experience does not bear any relationship with objective reality (if there is such a thing). Both make the leap from the reasonable admission that our experience is not always reliable to the conclusion that our experience is, by definition, untrustworthy. The question that needs to be raised is, “Granted that our experience cannot always be trusted and so there is not a necessary relationship between our experience and reality, is there not a possible relationship between them?” If the position taken by this work is that of critical realism, a view that considers creation as an illusion will take a decidedly non-realist approach.
Creation as Emanation
The last remaining views of creation will require very little treatment. This view, that creation is simply an emanation from the divine nature has a strong similarity for our purposes with the necessary creation above. However, in this case, creation is not only necessary, that is, could not have been otherwise and had no option of not coming into existence, it is also fundamentally divine in its nature. Creation and God are not finally distinguishable. This view is close (if not identical to) a view called Pantheism where everything is God and God is everything. If this were the case, not only would all the problems of the necessary creation be present here, but also creation loses its distinctive character. To study God is the same as to study creation and vice versa. Truly, in this view, creation is no longer really creation, but God. Theology is the only science.
Creation as Product of Polytheism
Though the dominant religions in the Western world have been monotheistic, there have indeed been polytheistic religions, that is, religions that recognize more than one god. There is not one overarching ruler that has created the universe, but many sources of deity. In polytheistic worldviews, the gods often are doing battle with one another. They argue, have wars, and stab each other in the back. What kind of world would result from this kind of community of deities? Why should there be only one overarching order in the universe? Why should not there be as many orders as there are gods? Further, why shouldn’t those orders be just as conflicting as those gods are? In this world, science cannot even begin, as it has no reason to assume that it can actually come to know or understand the created order for there is no reason to believe that any kind of consistent answer can be found.
Creation as Contingent
Christian faith has always affirmed a doctrine of creation out of nothing. If this is the case, it means that creation is something that is other than God, but that it is dependent on God. Further, this creation might have been different. Why could God not have created in a different manner than he did? Why could not the laws of nature been different? There is no reason to assume that things might not have been different. Further, there is no reason to assume that the creation had to be at all. God was fully able to choose not to create. This is very important. God’s choice to create was just that; a choice. It was chosen freely and out of God’s good pleasure. Not because he had to do it, but because he chose to do so.
Since creation was brought into existence by a single God (though this one God is a community of Persons), there is one overarching order. Since creation is not necessary, it cannot be explained exclusively by logical and deductive reasoning. Since creation is not an illusion, it actually can be explored and tested to obtain actual (if partial) information about it. Since God and creation are not identical, theology and natural science are not identical and need to be separate, even if they are in dialogue with one another. Finally, the contingent nature of creation affirms that we cannot make an overly strong link between creation and Creator. The relationship between God as Creator and creation is external to God. It is not part of who God is, as Fatherhood is. These basic ideas, which are found in the Judeo-Christian (and primarily Christian) tradition, are the basis of all natural science, which will be explored a bit below.
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