Creation Unfinished

On July 21, 1925, a Tennessee jury convicted John Scopes of teaching evolution. The “Scopes Monkey Trial” has gone down in American history as the caricature of the fight between “religion” and “science.”

Why a caricature? Because there is no such conflict. Except, perhaps, on the fundamentalist terms that both Scopes and his “scientific” opponents played it out.

Catholic theology long recognized that the Book of Genesis teaches that God created, not how God created. Those are two separate questions.

That said, Catholics need to be wary about the residual effects of the Scopes Trial on our thinking. Catholic theology recognizes that creation is an unfinished work. And that it is unfinished in at least five ways.

It’s unfinished, first and foremost, because God sustains His Creation. Creation is not a self-standing reality: God created, and everything just goes on. There is no necessary being in this universe other than God. There is no self-sufficient source of life and being other than God. Without God supporting and keeping things in existence, they would collapse into nothingness. No creature can give itself life. That does not take “scientific proof”—we know it.

A second unfinished aspect of creation is that God Himself did not make the world complete. He made a world in which man is called upon to “co-create” with Him. He does that in two ways: by giving personal life through procreation (in which only God can create a soul; hence, again, God’s sustaining involvement) and by work (in which raw material is transformed into more sophisticated things for human needs). Genesis itself makes this clear when, made in God’s image and likeness (1:26-28), man receives a two-fold blessing and command: be fruitful and have dominion over the world.

Such co-creation means that God’s creative work also continues through secondary causes, such as human ingenuity, which turns that piece of copper ore into the copper wire that lights and powers a wooden house made from the forest.

A third unfinished aspect of creation is that creation has its own “autonomy”; it has its own rules and laws by which it normally functions. Those rules and laws are also divinely instituted. That means two things: creation is orderly, not haphazard. Causality is generally dependable, which means science can develop because results can be replicated.

A fourth unfinished part of creation is God’s work of salvation. Creation and salvation history are not divisible. It’s not that God created, then man sinned, and God had to conclude, “I was planning to rest after creation, but now I’ve got to do something about ‘salvation,’ too!” No. Creation was always part of salvation history. When man sinned, salvation history took a different turn, but creation was never simply about making a universe because, in Genesis, God only made man in His image and likeness. Man is the only creature God wanted for his own sake. Salvation–being on proper terms with God–was always in the cards from the moment God decided “let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26).

This last idea is not my insight. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger developed it in a series of talks he gave at an Austrian monastery, which were subsequently published as The Divine Project. In it, he stresses that creation and salvation are inseparable.

That is also a telling warning to moderns who sometimes elevate creation over man and get excited about a world of babbling brooks and forests primeval, but deplore the human “carbon footprint.” That approach separates creation from salvation, and it is not what God intended.

That unfinished nature of creation and its relationship to salvation leads us to a fifth point: Providence. Judaism and Christianity are religions in which God is active in history. Human history is not closed off from God. It is not a sealed compartment, run only by its own rules, from which God is excluded.

If that were the case, God’s covenant with Israel would be senseless. And the utter absurdity would be imagining the Incarnation of God in a given moment in human history. And its ongoing absurdity would be believing in Providence–that God remains actively interested in you and me.

I mention Providence specifically because I fear some Catholics might imagine God was active back in Biblical times, but that “modern people” certainly don’t believe He does much these days or that miracles still occur.

Part of that bias comes from deism, which had no small influence on the Anglo-American mind. Deism basically maintains that God created a universe that is now self-managed by its own rules. He then removes Himself from the picture, allowing the cosmos, like a self-correcting clock, to run itself.

Deism, of course, was always a counterfeit Christianity because it inherently rejected the Incarnation. But the belief that God became man is the supreme proof that God intervened in human history. At least Thomas Jefferson was honest in his cut-and-paste New Testament when he turned Jesus into a Semitic Confucius who pronounced morally elevated sayings but never multiplied any loaves, cured any sick people, or rose from the dead.

One motive for deism was to account for apparent order and design in creation. The Divine Clockmaker built a precisely tuned device that runs according to internal rules, said the deists. Nonsense, claim many critics today, who insist that it is all happy and accidental coincidence, the entire Shakespearean opus fortuitously pounded out by monkeys at typewriters. Intricate order and harmony are happy “accidents.”

To this, I offer the explanation I used to give my undergraduates. Simply put: you did not have to be. If you were not conceived when you were, you would be a different person. But on that night, your dad could have had the flu or your mom a headache. Millions of sperm began a race, only one possibly achieving their mutual goal. And that was assuming there was an ovum to fertilize there anyway, as during most of the month, your mother is infertile. Then that fertilized ovum had to implant, a phase in which there are losses often not even known. And survive for nine months.

All those things took place for you to be you, and that’s a pretty tall miracle. So, you need to decide: are you the human equivalent of Shakespeare-by-monkey, the serendipitous result of a lucky spermatozoon? Or do you exist because there was a plan by Someone for you to exist, without which creation would be less complete? In other words, do you believe that the unfinished, intervening element in human history (including your own) is not a blind force, but Love (1 Jn 4:8)?