Process or Event

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NIV

Created – How are we to read the opening chapter of Genesis?  With our current cause-and-effect model of existence?  Or with the eyes of an ancient society surrounded by various gods?  Is Genesis 1 an explanation of the origin of our cosmos even if it is a simplified and antiquated explanation or is it couched in a completely different interpretative scheme?  To put it simply, “What does it mean to say that God created the heavens and the earth?”  Abraham Heschel offers a very important insight:

There is, for example, a basic difference in meaning, intention and theme between a scientific theory of the origin of the universe and what the first chapters of the Book of Genesis are trying to convey.  The Book of Genesis does not intend to explain anything: the mystery of the world’s coming into being is in no way made more intelligible by a statement such as At the beginning God created heaven and earth.  The Bible and science do not deal with the same problem.  Scientific theory inquires: What is the cause of the universe? . . . The Bible, on the other hand, conceives of the relationship of the Creator and the universe as a relationship between two essentially different and incompatible entities, and regards creation itself as an event rather than a process.[1]

It is unfortunate that modern religion adopted the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas on this matter.  As you recall, Aquinas postulated five proofs for the existence of God.  One of those proofs, perhaps the best known one, was the cosmological argument.  It asks, and answers, the question: If everything that exists is the result of a previous cause, how do we avoid the problem of the infinite regression of causality?  Let me put the question differently.  All that we know is the result of some prior cause.  And each of the steps in the causal chain is also the result of a prior cause.  There can be no effect without a cause.  This means that the causal chain must continue into the infinite past in order to produce what we see as effects today.  But this is logically impossible since there is no first step in an infinite causal chain.  Therefore, reasoned Aquinas, there must be a first cause, something that initiates the causal chain of reality.  And this first cause, claims Aquinas, is God (who, by the way, is uncaused).

As you can see, this logical argument forces us to read the Genesis text as if it were a causal explanation.  We convert the Genesis text into a quasi-scientific theory and in the process, we undo the radical amazement of the event.  You might think that this is no big deal.  After all, there must still be a cause of everything, so why not read the Genesis account as proto-scientific.  But there are hidden consequences:

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines.  Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.  Mankind will not perish for want of information, but only for want of appreciation.  The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.  What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.  Radical amazement has a wider scope that any other act of man.  While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing.[2]

Interpreting the Genesis account through our modern theories does more than remove us from the ancient appreciation of the creation event.  It dulls our astonishment at creation itself.  And that is tragic.  We no longer wonder at the very existence of the world.  Now we see it only as something to be used, something explainable rather than entirely mysterious.  We lose sight of the startling fact of creation—and we lose sight of the enormity of God’s decision.

Topical Index: Genesis 1:1, creation, cause and effect, event, science

[1] Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man (Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), pp. 15-16.

[2] Ibid., p. 46.