Clarifying creatio ex nihilo

I’ve had a few queries—mostly friendly, mostly polite and restrained, but nonetheless frustrated—about my article in the latest issue of Christianity Today about the doctrine of creation. The title is “Creation From Nothing is Not the Big Bang.” That title suggests, and the opening three paragraphs appear to confirm, that the article is (a) primarily about the Big Bang and (b) meant to be a refutation of the consonance between Christian teaching about the origins of the universe and scientific theories about the same. In other words, an intervention in debates about, or the “war between,” science and religion.

As readers have also realized, however, that’s not at all what the article is about. The Big Bang is a relatively minor topic compared to my real focus in the piece. Why then the title and the opening? And what am I saying about the relation between Genesis 1 and the Big Bang anyway?

One friend in particular reached out to express his shock that I was (at least rhetorically) siding with young earth creationists against Christians who believe in an old universe. I replied that I didn’t even know what he was talking about! He pointed to the article. I cocked my head. Why would anyone think that? I asked. At which point he reminded me of the creationist debate among evangelicals and, against that backdrop, explained why a title and argument like mine would look and feel a certain way even if its substance wasn’t about that at all.

So! Some points of clarification.

1. I am not a young earth creationist. I have never, in all my years, inhabited an ecclesial, academic, or institutional context where that is a live claim or even a debate, and so I honestly forget its continuing imaginative power as a point of active contention for many Christians. “Ken Ham” was a name I had to Google.

2. I affirm the Big Bang! By which I mean that I see no reason why it could not be true and presuppose that the best scientific evidence points in the direction of something like its being true—also assuming that, as a theory, it may not be true and that, even if it is, there are surely details to be worked out in the future by physicists and others.

3. My shorthand summary of the Big Bang in the second paragraph of the article was and is meant to describe (what I there call) “popular” and “common” ideas about it—not how an actual scientist or expert would understand it in technical terms, or even present it to the public.

4. I remain ambivalent about the way physicists describe the initial or primordial singularity in terms of a point of such infinite density that it amounts to “nothing.” That seems to me a kind of asymptote in reverse—reachable in theory but not in fact. And given the rise and fall of alternative or complementary theories like “bounces” and “inflation,” it seems reasonable to me, at a philosophical and metaphysical level, to retain a degree of ambivalence about claims such as a literal “nothingness” “prior” to the Big Bang—though I recognize that the question, however theoretical, is also empirical in its own way.

5. As readers discover by the latter two-thirds of the article, my argument is not even about whether the Big Bang is true or whether Christians ought to believe in it. Instead, the fundamental thesis of the article is this: “The Christian doctrine of creation from nothing” and “the scientific theory of the Big Bang as a theoretical explanation of the origin of the known universe” are not identical claims. They are not references to the same event albeit in different discursive registers. They are not both pointing at X while describing it with distinct disciplinary vocabularies. That is what I assert, it’s what I defend with reasons, and I stand by it.

6. Here was the original title I submitted to my editor: “Why Creation From Nothing is Biblical, Ancient, True, and Good News.” Authors rarely choose their own titles. But that original title (which became the subheading) is a good summary of what I’m up to.

7. Those who affirm the Big Bang are not, therefore, my opponents in the piece. My opponents are critical scholars who believe that a properly historical interpretation of Genesis 1:1-4, especially with attention paid to the Hebrew grammar and syntax and the original context of the text’s composition and revision, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the opening chapter of the Bible (a) does not teach creation from nothing and (b) teaches something contradictory of creation from nothing.

8. Furthermore, when these scholars make such a case, they tend (if they are Christians) to assert that this settles the larger case of whether the Bible itself teaches creation from nothing—i.e., they conclude that it does not do so.

9. Part of the reason, then, that I begin with the Big Bang is that these scholars, besides making a theological mistake, also make a metaphysical one. They mistake the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as a claim about the temporal origins of the universe—as if one were to roll back the tape to one infinitesimal moment “after” or “when” the universe “began,” then the question would be “what was there ‘before’?” Answer: nothing. But that is not what the doctrine is about; that is not what it claims, at least not directly, and certainly not logically.

10. As I say in the article, Saint Thomas Aquinas holds that creation from nothing would be true even if Aristotle were right and the universe were eternal. In that case, the Big Bang would be wrong, but God would still have created the world from nothing. How can that be? Because the doctrine is a denial as much as it is an assertion. It denies that God “made” the world “from” anything at all: no (independent, self-existent, coeval) raw materials. More than this, the doctrine affirms (in the words of Ian McFarland) that the sole antecedent condition of there being anything at all is the omnipotent will, word, and work of the one God. “Whatever is, comes from God and God alone” is what the doctrine means. Which is why it is about more than this universe or even an infinite set of universes. Creation from nothing also includes in its scope heaven, angels and demons, and whatever other immaterial creatures there may be.

11. The upshot of clarifying the real import of the doctrine is twofold. On one hand, it turns down the temperature on any perceived discrepancies between scientific theories and Christian teaching about creation. If it turns out to be the case that the Big Bang, however refined, is true, then wonderful!—the resonance between the two is fitting, simple to grasp, and aesthetically pleasing. But if it doesn’t, then the doctrine of creation from nothing is affected not one whit. We Christians will continue to uphold it irrespective of the science, because it was never about the science in the first place.

12. On the other hand, the implications of the doctrine are radical in their moral and ontological reach. It’s about far more than the first moment in time when the universe began, when the first motion was initiated or the first domino was pushed over. It’s about all of creation across all time and space, considered as a singular whole—viewed, by the doctrine, from God’s own eternal perspective. God doesn’t “experience” or “see” creation sequentially, bounded by time’s linear arrow. He sees all of it at once, and at all times, from all times, present equally as he wills to each and every time, without interruption or limitation, just as he is (or is free to be) to each and every place, without exception or restriction. He is the playwright, and the script is not only already written; from God’s perspective, it has already been performed. God stands to the whole as to a completed story. He can turn to any page he likes; he can turn to all of them at once.

13. In this respect God’s creation “from nothing” is, from our perspective in time, a continuous action, rather than something God did “once” long ago. I have been created and I am being created, inasmuch as I am being sung by the greater Singer, who—contrary to fact—could stop singing at any moment, at which point I would cease to exist. (NB: This fact will not cease to be true in the resurrection or new creation!)

14. And so, in sum: All things exist in perpetual, total, and radical dependence upon God at every moment of their existence: from angels and aardvarks to ants and the Andromeda galaxy. Humans share in this dependence completely, because it is definitional to creaturehood. God is the Creator, and we are the creation. No creature is more or less dependent upon God; the equality among us and between us is absolute. That is what creatio ex nihilo means. And that is what I was hoping, in five hundred fewer words than this blog post, to say in my original article.

Incomplete theses on God's will, providence, and evil

Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!

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Affirmations

1. God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.
2. God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
3. God is Lord of creation.
4. God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.
5. God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.
6. God conducts creatures and creation as a whole toward their proximate and final ends, in this world and the next.
7. Nothing exists or happens outside the scope of God’s will.
8. Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will; sinful deeds and evil events occur.
9. God does not will sin, nor is God the author of evil.
10. When and where sin and evil are found in creation, God permits it.
11. God is able to bring good from evil and sin, including when they are intended by creatures to obstruct God’s purposes.
12. In the end, God will triumph over all sin and evil, and they will be no more in the new creation.

Implications

1. We do not know why God permits sin and evil.
2. On its face, a sinful deed or evil happening is a surd: meaningless in itself; neither sin nor evil is ever (really, deeply, ultimately) good.
3. The experience of suffering or loss is not itself necessarily sin or evil.
4. God may therefore actively will (rather than permit) our suffering in this world.
5. “Everything happens for a reason” is either true in an incomprehensible way (where that “reason” is Christ, who will reveal all to us only in glory) or false in a facile and pastorally disastrous way (where the starvation of children has a readily intelligible reason we can grasp in the moment).
6. The relationship between God’s will (as primary cause) and my will (as secondary cause) when I engage in sin (say, lying) is mysterious and inscrutable: somehow my willing as a free agent in bondage to sin possesses some deficiency (or, rather, lacks something necessary) that keeps it from fully performing righteous activity in full in accordance with God’s will and command.
7. So that: 
1. We may say that God wills in all my willing, but...
2. ...we may not say that God wills the sin I invariably will.

Ian McFarland on the doctrine of creation from nothing

"In short, if the doctrine of creation from nothing means ... that even prior to being created, creatures are not absolutely nothing insofar as they are grounded in the Word, it also implies that creatures, as created, are absolutely nothing apart from God. The richness of divinity not only lies behind creation's diversity as its presupposition (nothing but God), but also is an active presence that underlies and sustains every feature of that diversity at every moment of its existence (nothing apart from God). Not can this perspective be charged with compromising the integrity of creatures' relationship with God, as though that which has absolutely no existence part from God is reduced to the status of a puppet. Once again, the Trinitarian framework of the Christian doctrine of creation is crucial here, since the existence of creatures is rooted in the Word, whose very being establishes, within the divine life itself, a set of relationships whose constituent terms (viz., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) also have no existence apart from God. From this perspective, the idea that ontological independence from God is a necessary condition of genuine relationship (and more particularly, of love) fails to reckon with the character of God's own being as relationship."

—Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (WJK Press, 2014), p. 94