ANCIENT
BIBLICAL CULTURES
In
the ancient Hebrew culture there was a literary codification of the concept of
a Creator and of a creation out of nothing, the teaching from the book of
Genesis. The Old Testament gives factual evidence of this world view
throughout. Christians today take this for granted, but this concept was a
radical break from Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek thought. The Israelites knew
they must trust the faithfulness of God because they knew God orders the day
and night and that the law of God extends to all things moral, societal, and
natural. Isaiah points to the order and measure of physical objects, i.e. what
Jaki defined as “exact science,” as contributing proof of God’s omniscience,
literally translated to mean having all knowledge.
“Who was it measured
out the waters in his open hand, heaven balanced on his palm, earth’s mass
poised on three of his fingers? Who tried yonder mountains in the scale,
weighed out the hills?” Isaiah 40:12
The
Old Testament people saw nothing that happened in nature as vain, even the rain
that falls from the sky makes the land fruitful.[1] “Yahweh
alone, who created nature, can bring nature to an end and final judgment of
all.” (Isaiah 23:10-11) Genesis 1 is much more rational than the Enuma
elish creation myth of
Babylon. This mind-set permeated the thought of the Israelites, the Jews, and
the early Church.
There
are also detailed references in the books of the prophets and the psalms to the
faithfulness of the regular and permanent structure and function of nature,
offered repeatedly as the basis for believing in the trustworthiness of God.
“A message from the
Lord, from him, the God of hosts, the same who brightens day with the sun’s
rays, night with the ordered service of moon and star, who can stir up the sea
and set its waves a-roaring.” (Jeremiah 31:35)
The
naturalness of the universe, the predictability and order, the power of God as
Creator and Lawmaker are all emphasized, indicating a view of the cosmos that
was sustained leading up to the birth of modern science. The absolute certainty
of the faithfulness of God is invoked to give credibility to the belief that
Jerusalem will be rebuilt:
“It was I framed the
earth, and created man to dwell in it; it was my hands that spread out the
heavens, my voice that marshalled the starry host.” (Isaiah 45:12, 19)
In
the psalms is found a poetic conviction regarding the work of Creation and its
relevance to everything man thinks or does.[2] The
monotheistic outlook on the world is unmistakable and uncompromising,
enthusiastic even. This striking confidence is abundantly evident, and shows the
belief in Creation of the entire cosmos out of nothing as well as a belief in
the miraculous Creator who could accomplish the former obviously could produce
the latter. Even in the earliest psalms, there is a most confident vision of
nature, a precursor of the science to come.
The
universe of the Old Testament is good, complete, and ordered. The universe is
not a creature of unpredictable volition, but the creation of a personal and
loving Creator. There is no conflict between reason and revelation, and the
order, stability, and predictability of the cycles of the cosmos testify to the
faithfulness of God.
“Give thanks to the
Lord for his goodness, his mercy is eternal; give thanks to the God of gods,
his mercy is eternal; give thanks to the Lord of lords, his mercy is eternal.
Eternal his mercy, who does great deeds as none else can; eternal his mercy,
whose wisdom made the heavens; eternal his mercy, who poised earth upon the
floods. Eternal his mercy, who made the great luminaries; made the sun to rule
by day, his mercy is eternal; made the moon and the stars to rule by night, his
mercy is eternal.” (Psalm 136:?)
God
is not just a dispassionate creator; He is eternally merciful and faithful to
His people, and that faithfulness is evidenced in the stability of creation.
There is an abundance of such praises in Psalms 35, 80, and 120 of the
stability of nature as a work of the Creator. Psalm 73, for example, praises
God’s hold on creation: “Thine is the day, thine the night; moon and sun are of
thy appointment; thou hast fixed all the bounds of earth, madest the summer,
madest the cool of the year.” (Psalm 73: 16-17) Psalms 118 praises
God for the stability of the moral law as well as nature: “Lord, the word thou
hast spoken stands ever unchanged as heaven. Loyal to his promise, age after
age, is he who made the enduring earth.” (Psalm 118: 89-90) Passages
such as these demonstrate the naturalness of order and stability in creation.[3]
The
Hellenistic Jews held a sacred respect for the Two Books of Maccabees where the
first biblical appearance of the phrase creation ex
nihilo is found.[4] It
is the story of the mother who was martyred after watching her seven sons be
tortured and martyred first. The sons were tortured as she watched because they
refused to break God’s command and eat the flesh of swine. Their tongues were
cut out, scalps torn off, hands and feet mutilated, while the mother and
remaining brothers stood by. Then each one was roasted alive, maimed and
suffering as they were. The brothers comforted each other as they died bravely,
“God sees true,” they said, “and will not allow us to go uncomforted.” (2
Maccabees 7:6) As they died, the mother continued to hearten her sons:
“Into this womb you
came, who knows how? Not I quickened, not I the breath of life gave you, nor
fashioned the bodies of you one by one! Man’s birth, and the origin of all
things, he devised who is the whole world’s Maker; and shall he not mercifully
give the breath of life back to you, that for his law’s sake hold your lives so
cheap?” (2 Maccabees 7:22-23)
Outraged
at the defiance of his authority, the king turned to the youngest and only
still-living son whom the mother counselled in her native tongue:
“Nine months in the
womb I bore thee, three years at the breast fed thee, reared thee to be what
thou art; and now, my son, this boon grant me. Look round at heaven and earth
and all they contain; bethink thee that of all this, and mankind too, God
made out of nothing. Of this butcher have thou no fear; claim rightful
share among thy brethren in yonder inheritance of death; so shall the divine
mercy give me back all my sons at once.”(2 Maccabees 7:27-29)
Jaki
tied this story to the history of science because it demonstrates the radically
different view of creation held by the Old Testament cultures. He explains, “No
martyrdom with a hope of bodily resurrection was ever inspired by a Demiourgos whose ‘creative’ power consisted in
the ability to manipulate the already existing ‘formless’ matter into actual
shapes.”[5]
EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The
facts are in the writings of the Church Fathers. St. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165
A.D.) rejected pantheism in favor of the Creator in his First
Apology.
“Stoics teach that even
God Himself shall be resolved into fire, and they say that the world is to be
formed anew by this revolution; but we understand that God, the Creator of all
things, is superior to the things that are to be changed.”[6]
In
his Second
Apology to the Roman Senate, he explained why the Stoic morality did not
hold under the doctrine of eternal cycles.
“For if they say that
human actions come to pass by fate, they will maintain either that God is
nothing else than the things which are ever turning, and altering, and
dissolving into the same things . . . or that neither vice nor virtue is
anything.”[7]
Athenagoras
(ca. 133–190 A.D.) taught that Christians, not the pagans, were the ones “who
distinguished God from matter, and teach that matter is one thing and God
another, and that they are separated by a wide interval, for the Deity is
uncreated and eternal, to be beheld by the understanding and reason alone,
while matter is created and perishable.”[8] He
also taught that the world was “an instrument in tune, and moving in
well-measured time,” and that the Deity is the only one who deserved worship
because He gave the world “its harmony, and strikes its notes, and sings the
accordant strain.”[9] Athenagoras
noted that the failure of philosophers to realize this distinction led them
into inconsistencies about the origin and permanence of the world.
“Neither, again, is it
reasonable that matter should be older than God; for the efficient cause must
of necessity exist before the things that are made.”[10]
As
Christianity spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, Christian thought and
fundamental characteristics of Greek science achieved a sophisticated awareness
crystallizing in Alexandria where the first school of Christian thought emerged.[11] Clement
of Alexandria (died A.D. 215) was an intellectual who studied with Christian
teachers elsewhere before coming to Alexandria to teach at the school and
refute paganism and pantheism.[12] One
of his students was Origen (c. A.D. 182–251). Clement and Origen had a “double
task,” to articulate the Covenant to the faithful and serve as apologists to
the pagans, which required them to address cosmology.[13]
In
his Exhortation
to the Greeks, Clement taught that a result of idol worship was the mental
chaining of the intellect to the blind forces of nature.
“Why, in the name of
truth, do you show those who have put their trust in you that they are under
the dominion of ‘flux’ and ‘motion’ and ‘fortuitous vortices’? Why, pray, do
you infect life with idols, imagining winds, air, fire, earth, stocks, stones,
iron, this world itself to be gods?”[14]
Clement
urged for a more confident attitude toward nature, a view of a world created by
a rational Creator. Not only did he exhort the Greeks to view the world as
creation, a robust confidence in human and cosmic existence, but he exhorted
them to have faith in Christ who generated that confidence.
“How great is the power
of God! His mere will is creation; for God alone created, since He alone is
truly God. By a bare wish His work is done, and the world’s existence follows
upon a single act of His will. […] Let none of you worship the sun. Let no one
deify the universe; rather let him seek after the creator of the universe.”[15]
Origen
tried in his De Principiis (On
First Principles) to synthesize Christianity with pagan and Eastern ideas
of the cosmos, and he sought understanding of the eternal cycles.
“So therefore it seems
to me impossible for a world to be restored for the second time, with the same
order and with the same amount of births, and deaths, and actions . . .”[16]
Origen
noticed the impossibility of eternally repeating worlds and that such an idea
was in conflict with revelation. He recalled the events of biblical and
salvation history, noting that if the world repeated itself over and over
again, there would be more than one of all biblical events. He also noted there
could be no free will because souls driven in an endlessly repeating cycle are
all predetermined.
“For if there is said
to be a world similar in all respects (to the present), then it will come to
pass that Adam and Eve will do the same things which they did before: there
will be a second time the same deluge, and the same Moses will again lead a
nation numbering nearly six hundred thousand out of Egypt . . . a state of
things which I think cannot be established by any reasoning, if souls are
actuated by freedom of will, and maintain either their advance or retrogression
according to the power of their will.”[17]
Origen
reiterated a firm conviction that the cosmic vision was not predicated on
eternal cycles but on the fusion of truth and benevolence, the recognition that
Jesus Christ is the Incarnate Word of God.[18] There
is no place for the resurrection in the doctrine of cosmic cycles, and the
early Christian Fathers recognized this clearly.
“For we know that even
if heaven and earth and the things in them pass away, yet the words about each
doctrine, being like parts in a whole or forms in a species, which were uttered
by the Logos who was the divine Logos with God in the beginning, will in no
wise pass away.”[19]
Origen,
like many of the early Church Fathers, demonstrated the depth of his conviction
by martyrdom.[20]The worldview of the Bible and of
Christianity was not merely a philosophical outlook; it was a pervasive
conviction that was kept pure and protected at any price because the faithful
held it as
true.
In
his work The
City of God, St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430) addressed questions
about the destiny of man, which hardly made sense in the doctrine of eternal
cycles.[21] Augustine
taught that the physical universe had its origin in the sovereign act of
creation by God. It was baffling to Augustine that anyone would believe that
good is not the source of all things.
“But it is much more
surprising that some even of those who, with ourselves, believe that there is
one only source of all things, and that no nature which is not divine can exist
unless originated by that Creator, have yet refused to accept with a good and
simple faith this so good and simple a reason of the world’s creation, that a
good God made it good; and that the things created, being different from God,
were inferior to Him, and yet were good, being created by none other than He.”[22]
When
other scholars tried to interpret biblical references as evidence of eternal
cycles, Augustine strongly rejected such an interpretation, just as his
predecessors had, on the grounds of the impossibility of more than one Savior:
“At all events, far be
it from any true believer to suppose that by these words of Solomon those
cycles are meant, in which, according to those philosophers, the same periods
and events of time are repeated. . . far be it, I say, from us to believe this.
For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising from the dead, He dies no more.
Death has no more dominion over Him; (Romans 6:9) . . . The wicked walk
in a circle, not because their life is to recur by means of these circles,
which these philosophers imagine, but because the path in which their false
doctrine now runs is circuitous.”[23]
For
another thousand years, the writings and wisdom of Augustine remained a
principal source of instruction that held consequences for the coming new phase
of human history immersed in scientific enterprise. It was under the stronghold
of faith in a Creator from Old Testament times and strengthened through the
first millennium of Christianity that the European scholars received the Greek philosophical
and natural works from the Arabs.
< About the Author
STACY TRASANCOS is a joyful convert to Catholicism, with a Ph.D. in
Chemistry from Penn State University and a M.A. in Dogmatic Theology from Holy
Apostles College and Seminary.
