A doctrine of creation

One way of seeing how the insights of science and those of theology relate to each other, as complementary rather than conflicting, is to consider the doctrine of creation. One difficulty that I have when I talk to my scientific colleagues about my Christian beliefs is that they almost all think that the doctrine of creation is about how things began. For example, Stephen Hawking supposes that if his highly speculative ideas about the very early universe are correct – so that time then had a very different nature and there was no dateable beginning to the cosmos – then God would be left with nothing to do. It is as if the only thing a Creator was needed for was to light the blue touch paper to set off the big bang. To think that way is to make a terrible theological mistake. God is as much the Creator today as God was fourteen billion years ago, for the real role of the Creator is to hold the world in being. Only the steadfast divine faithfulness rescues the universe from collapsing into nothingness. The doctrine of creation is not concerned with how things began but why things exist. It is the answer to the great question posed by Liebniz, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

To believe in creation means that there is a divine Mind and a divine Purpose behind what is happening in the world. To believe in creation is to believe that the universe is not just a random collection of atoms, but it is an orderly world whose patterns reflect the will of a Creator. It is to believe that history is not just a meaningless succession of one thing after another, but it is going somewhere because there is God’s purpose behind what is happening.

These are big claims. If they can be backed up, that should appeal particularly to scientists with their natural desire to gain as full and comprehensive an understanding of things as is possible. So how can one go about seeing whether the answer of creation makes sense? People will certainly not be persuaded just by authoritative assertion. Many of my scientific friends who are not religious believers, think that faith is simply a matter of shutting your eyes, gritting your teeth, and believing six impossible things before breakfast, just because some unquestionable authority has told you to do so. Of course not! If being religious involved intellectual suicide, I could not be a religious believer either. But it does not. We religious believers have reasons for our beliefs.

So what could be the motivations for believing that the universe is God’s creation? Obviously not because the world is full of objects stamped ‘Made by God’. The Creator is more subtle than that. Nor shall we find God simply lurking in the more obscure and hard-to-understand parts of the physical world. The one God who is well and truly dead – and no-one should shed a tear for him – is the so-called ‘god of the gaps’. This pseudo-deity popped up only as the explanation of last resort. When all other attempts at understanding had failed, people said ‘God did it’. This was a bad mistake. The god of the gaps was a bit like the Cheshire cat, always fading away with the advance of knowledge. Such a poor thing could not possibly be the true Creator who is, so to speak, the God of the whole show, and not just to be found in the murky bits of what is going on.

If we are to find hints of the existence of such a Creator, then it is to the whole show that we shall have to look. In other words, we have to think about the universe and its history, and that means taking seriously what science can tell us about these topics. But we shall also have to think about what science cannot tell us, because we have seen that the questions arising in our minds are not just scientific questions.