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God and Creation: a Biblical-Scientific Reflection
By Stanley L. Jaki

"The failure of the Greeks about science was a derivative of their failure to recognize a Creator who truly transcended nature. History has also served ample evidence that to have science, one first had to have a knowledge of the Creator, and history also showed that this could effectively come only from the biblical ambience."

EFFORTS to restore the unity of the Christian oikumene are based in part on the more or less explicit conviction that Christians of various denominations are at one in professing the tenets comprising the Apostles' Creed. This conviction may be at fault, but if so, one would not, in all likelihood, suspect disunity among Christians concerning their profession of the opening and concluding tenets of that Creed. Those tenets declare that God, the maker of all, has set for mortal man a destiny which is life for eternity in a risen body. It may, however, well be that our unity concerning these tenets is less solid than it appears to be.

My reasons for this suspicion are to some extent connected with the astonishment which some younger Catholic and Protestant theologians voiced on bearing me state the basic aim of a book of mine, Brain, Mind and Computers. ¹ There I tried to show that for all

This address, of which the present text is a considerably shortened form, was given at the first Catholic-Protestant Rome Seminar, June 26-July 7, 1972, where Pauls Letter to the Romans formed the general theme of discussions. The aim of the address concerns the modem ecumenical perspective of Paul's teaching on man's ability and duty to recognize the existence of a personal God who is the Creator of a universe embodying physical as well as moral orderliness. The word "modern" relates to the confrontation between the Christian oikumene and the secular oikumene which seeks its justification in science and technology. The author, a theologian and a physicist, is Professor of Physics at Seton Hall University, South Orange, N. J., and specializes in the history of physics and cosmology. He was recently selected to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1974. Among his publications axe Les tendances nouvelles de l'ecclésiologie (1956, 1963) and The Relevance of Physics (1966, 1970). A documented presentation of the section of this address on the history of science, will appear in his Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe, Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh.
¹ Herder and Herder, New York, 1969. This book received the Lecomte du Nouy Prize for 1970.

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the advances and novelties in computer theory, brain research, psychology, and theory of knowledge, the traditionally Christian definition of man as an intimate unit of body and soul, or dualism in that sense, is still the least objectionable account of man.

I

Such a thesis rates all too often a condescending smile from many a younger Christian theologian who decided to meet more than halfway the fashionable claim that the whole range of human reality and experience is the result of successive biochemical differentiation. Any intramural debate with them is of secondary importance. What really matters is that their good intentions will not appease the secular oikumene which pushes with great determination for a restructuring of life, individual and social, along purely naturalistic lines. More and more often we Christians are presented with choices which we shall be able to make, without betrayal, only if we rekindle our faith in the opening and closing tenets of the Apostles' Creed. Those tenets are a short summary of what I would call the biblical amplification of the natural knowledge of God. The latter, in the Paulinian formulation, is restricted to the recognition of a personal, supreme Being, as the source of an orderly world, both physical and moral. The biblical amplification of this, as codified in the Apostles' Creed, is a knowledge of the Creator, the source of an absolute beginning and of an absolute consummation for man and cosmos alike. Implied here is a notion of continuity which in the case of man as a person can be stated meaningfully and consistently only if that continuity transcends man's physical dissolution in death.

This continuity was equated already by the first Christian apologists with a dualistic definition of man, namely, that the continuity is secured because man as a personal identity survives physical death. Conviction and unanimity on this point were so strong as to let the concept of human soul play a decisive role in major definitions of Christological dogmas during the fifth and sixth centuries. Equally revealing should appear the fact that during the confrontation of the early church with pagan, pantheistic antiquity, the chief points to be vindicated were about a personal Creator of all, about a creation out of nothing, about the strict immateriality of the soul, and about the resurrection of the body. These four points formed one single texture in the apologetic writings of the Fathers and, therefore, their profession of the opening and closing sections of the Apostles' Creed should be seen in this light.

The Fathers were also at one in seeing the profession of the biblical knowledge of God as part of a historical process. This is a point which has a deeper ecumencial relevance than the specifi-

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cation of the exact measure in which reason, nature, sin, and grace concur in what Saint Paul called man's ability to recognize God, the author of physical and moral order in the universe. Primarily, the church of the Fathers was in this respect neither Thomistic, nor Calvinistic, but historically minded, that is, anchored in the steady contemplation of the facts of salvation history. The uniqueness of that history formed a decisive part of Christian consciousness. The ecumenical importance of this in an age of science will also be best seen in a review of that history which leads from Abraham to our age in which Christians are confronted with the future of their own oikumene and with its fate vis à vis the secular oikumene for which science is the only meaningful "faith."

II

Secular historiography has failed so far to provide a satisfactory explanation of the emergence of radically new aspects which were grafted on the typically Babylonian world-view of Abrabam's immediate descendants. These new aspects should by all probability have vanished during their sojourn in a luxuriantly polytheistic Egypt standing on a much higher cultural level than their nomadic way of life. Instead, the spark ignited in Abraham's soul grew into a powerful flame in Moses. The light of that flame showed the world as an entity totally subordinated to a transcendental, absolutely superior Being, who in the beginning made -the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1 and 2, even in their primitive phrasing, are distinctly superior to the earlier Enuma Elish in which the actual world was shaped from the massacred body of a goddess, the victim of fratricidal fight among the gods, who in turn were the products of the earth itself.

In Babylon, the interpretation of the world was locked in a vicious circle in which the earth and the gods (the heavens) traded supremacy forever in immanent, inexorable cycles. In Genesis 1 and 2 there is the transcendental God and the linear progress of a once and for all creation. The measure of clarity by which this was expressed should be of secondary concern. The point of crucial importance is that, as time went on, the rudimentary transcendence of God and the linearity of creation, as expressed in Genesis 1 and 2, grew stronger, clearer, and did so against all odds. Once in Palestine, the Israelites came to the brink of spiritual disaster in almost every generation. But in spite of the pull of surrounding polytheistic cultures, the references to a transcendental Creator, to the linearity of the process launched with the creation in the beginning, and to a unique, eternal destiny for man, kept gaining in clarity, depth, and incisiveness. Some Psalms of Davids time were impressive popular echoes of such convictions about man and the

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universe. These convictions reached another peak with Isaiah as he emphasized the transcendence of Yahweh, the Creator, over the idols of Babylon and Assyria.

By all historical likelihood, this unique conviction should have become extinguished as Jerusalem was captured and the spiritual leaders of the people were put to sword. Yet, 300 years later, the flickering flame burst into a flood of fire during the Maccabean revolt. The heroic sons of that heroic woman in II Maccabees might have been seven in number if only to symbolize the immense strength of their resolve which stemmed from their faith in the Creator of heaven and earth. If he could create out of nothing everything, then he could secure personal continuity to them by restoring to life those bodies which were soon to be cut to pieces in a cruel martyrdom. A generation or so later, in a wholly different ambience, in Hellenistic Alexandria, the Book of Wisdom was composed. Its anonymous author celebrated the Creator, the creation, and providence with ample use of Hellenistic notions, but without a taint of that hopelessness in which Greek thought had become trapped.

III

In this age of science, references are endless to ancient Greece, the birthplace and cradle of science, the land of Euclid, Aristarchus, and Archimedes. There is, however, a general reluctance to keep in mind the fact that science suffered a stillbirth not only in Greece but in all great ancient cultures, in India, in China, in pre-Columbian America, in Egypt, and in Babylon. A careful reading of their philosophical, religious, and scientific documents, many of which are available in modern language translations, indicates a common factor of those stillbirths. The factor was the belief in an eternal, cyclic recurrence of everything in a universe which was taken as the ultimate entity.

Such a world view implies a cosmic treadmill and casts the spell of pessimistic hopelessness. The classic evidence of this is the morbid preoccupation of ancient Hindus with the system of billions and trillions of years constituting larger and larger world-cycles or yugas. The Yin and Yang of the Chinese world-view expresses the same cyclic oscillation in a pantheistic universe in which man is merely a momentary ripple on dark, inexorable waves. Evidence of a hopeless world-view can also be seen in the relatively meager records which are extant from the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs. Somewhat less clear is the evidence in Egypt, but the situation is unmistakable in ancient Babylon. It was the birthplace of astrology which derived, from the cycles of stars, the cycles of human events and of all physical processes on earth.

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Unlike the Babylonians, the Greeks did not sink to the level of astrological haruspicy. But even with Aristotle, the first cause was part of the universe which in turn was caught in the treadmill of cycles. This is why the Greeks failed to develop the idea of genuine progress. Aristotle, for instance, stated repeatedly that the arts, sciences, and crafts could reach but a certain level, and he believed that in his own time nothing was lacking to their perfection. From that level one could go only downward and hit the bottom before an upward trend could get under way again. In the finite spherical universe of Aristotle the cyclic recurrence of planetary configurations produced the physical, climatic, and cultural cycles in the sublunary realm of the four elements. In the infinite universe of Democritus, too, cyclic processes ruled supreme. Democritus did not, of course, we about a Creator. Tellingly enough, Aristotle, whose first cause was not transcendent with respect to the universe, rejected the idea that the universe or anything in the universe could come into being out of nothing. In the cyclic universe, matter and processes had to be eternal, that is, constituting one big pantheistic entity, the very opposite to the idea of a personal, transcendental Creator.

As history was to show, the failure of the Greeks about science was a derivative of their failure to recognize a Creator who truly transcended nature. History has also served ample evidence that to have science, one first had to have a knowledge of the Creator, and history also showed that this could effectively come only from the biblical ambience. The historical process which showed this was twofold. It was the testing of young Christianity in the cauldron of fierce opposition, political and cultural. The former produced the martyrs, the latter the apologetical works. As to the martyrs, they did not die for tenets which today would be classed as distinctly Christian, let alone for tenets which today separate Christians from Christians. The martyrs died for their belief in the Creator of heaven and earth beside whom no other god could exist. And they were ready to die because they believed that the process of history, individual and cosmic, was to lead linearly to the final resurrection of all without any interruption in personal continuity.

It was the same opening and closing tenets of the Apostles' Creed about which the apologetic writings of the early church were largely concerned. Very revealingly, the two greatest apologetical works of the patristic church, Origen's Contra Celsum (Against Celsum) and Augustine's De civitate Dei (The City of God), come to their high point as the discussion turns to the idea of eternal recurrence, the very backbone of the non-Christian interpretation of the world. Both Origen and Augustine point out with notice-

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able animation that there could only be one resurrection, and they brand it as sacrilegious to assume that Christ should be betrayed by Judas not once but an infinite number of times. According to both Origen and Augustine, these eternal repetitions cast on man's existence the air of complete futility, the very opposite of Christian hope. But Origen and Augustine bring in Christ only because he is the concrete image of the Father, the Creator and Consummator of all. They can also show some irony for their Hellenistic opponents. Would they want that the finest of all Greeks, Socrates, should drink the hemlock an infinite number of times? Hellenistic thinkers probably did not want this to happen. However, because their thinking was trapped in the futile circularity of eternal returns, they saw no way that this should not happen. They caught no glimpse either of the avenue leading to science as a self-sustaining enterprise. This feat was achieved only during the Middle Ages when an entire culture became rooted in faith in the Creator of all. To see this in a convincing light a brief look should first be taken at the early Muslim world.

The disciples of Muhammad fell heir to both the Bible and the Greek scientific corpus, but they read both through the unsteady glasses provided by the Koran which often attributes utter willfulness to Allah, the Creator. Because in Allah the balance between reason and will is heavily tilted toward the latter, the Arabic scholars opted for a mental dichotomy which destroyed their chances for turning the Greek scientific heritage into a self-sustaining enterprise. On the one hand, they became overzealous admirers of Aristotle and his world-view and argued, on the other band, against the possibility of strictly valid physical laws, because such laws would put a constraint on Allah's sovereign freedom of action. Thus the main service of the Arabs to science was limited to channeling Greek science to medieval Christian Europe.

IV

What happened within a few generations, between 1250 and 1370, constitutes one of the most momentous turning points in intellectual history. Unlike the Muslim scholars, the Scholastics had the courage to criticize Aristotle because of their deep faith in the first and last tenet of the Apostles' Creed. The medieval church roundly rejected several fundamental tenets of Aristotle, among them the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul. According to the Christian faith the world had to have an absolute beginning and thus the start of motions in the world could consistently be conceived as given by God in the moment when he called the world out of nothing. Enlightened by their faith in the creation out of nothing and in time, Buridan and Oresme at the University of Paris began to speak of the imparting of impetus as

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the cause of motion, and the latter compared the beginning of all processes in the world to the winding up of a clock which is then let go. From these notions there was a short and logical road to the classical physics of the seventeenth century. The chief foundation of that physics, the idea of linear inertial motion and of the conservation of momentum, grew out of medieval conceptual breakthroughs, which in turn were prompted by an unconditional faith in the first and last tenets of the Apostles' Creed.

This perhaps unexpected and momentous claim does not rest on a novel interpretation of scientific history. Already in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, the philosopher of the new science, traced the failure of the Greeks about science to their pantheistic interpretation of the world. The Greeks, according to Bacon, failed to recognize the crucial importance of the systematic gathering of data, because for them the world was not contingent. In the Christian outlook, the world, being the product of a divine mind wholly transcending nature, could only be contingent, and, therefore, the human mind was to engage in a laborious process of experimentation and observation if some laws of nature were to be discovered at all.

Galileo, Boyle, and Newton (to mention only a few outstanding names) still found it important to note that the world was rational only because the Creator was supremely rational. A century later, the notion of the Creator began to fade into the background, largely under the impact of the Encyclopedists. Another century went by and science was already being exploited by late-nineteenth-century materialists. Yet it is true that around 1900 the large majority of leading scientists were practicing Christians with a firm belief in a personal, rational Creator. Today, scientists who believe in a personal Creator and in their own personal immortality form a distinct minority in the world of science. Similarly, we Christians are at best thirty per cent of the world population and our proportion is not increasing. What certainly has increased is the measure of human anxiety. Much of that anxiety is rooted in the awesome tools produced by science. Science, in isolation from its source, the biblical knowledge of the Creator, is unable to generate a scientific knowledge or rather recognition of the Creator. This is all the more tragic because more than ever science needs that knowledge for its own and for mankind's survival. Without the recognition of man's and of nature's dependence on a Creator, the scientific enterprise is clearly unable to impose on itself the necessary ethical norms to control its own tools.

The tragedy is compounded by those well-meaning efforts which try to vindicate human values in an age of science and technology. These efforts seem to ignore the fact that science is being used ever

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more heavily in reasserting the old pagan view in which nature is the ultimate entity. A little noticed but telling evidence of this new intellectual paganism is the vogue which is enjoyed in scientific circles by the idea of an oscillating universe. Underlying that vogue is the firm resolve, coated in the finest scientific sophistication, to find a pseudo-metaphysical escape from the notion of a universe finite in mass (and therefore in space) and also in time. Of the very long and instructive story ² of the reluctance of scientists to recognize the contradictoriness of an infinite Euclidean universe (which all too often played the role of a substitute deity), Bertrand Russell's reaction in 1925 can be mentioned. He readily admitted that a finite universe implied a metaphysical cause, very likely a personal Creator, an inference which was hardly to his liking. In order to get out of this dilemma, he played down the demonstrative proof of the scientific conclusion that the universe had to be finite. His simultaneous claim that all scientific conclusions and laws were revisable was, of course, a gross exaggeration but a very revealing one. It showed that one can, in the long run, escape metaphysics only by downgrading the value of science.

Three years later, in 1928, it became recognized that the finite universe was in a process of expansion which presumably started from a highly condensed state several billion years ago. Was the universe giving evidence of an absolute beginning as proclaimed in Genesis 1 and in the Apostles' Creed? A positive answer to this was unthinkable to the scientific community which showed an increasingly agnostic if not un-Christian outlook from the 1930's on. Thus, many scientists seized on the idea of a universe in which the expansion is followed by a contraction and so on ad infinitum. This is the idea or model of the oscillating universe in which the question about the absolute origin is conveniently ignored. Such is also the return to the ancient pagan belief in an eternal and ever-recurring order of things as the ultimate layer of existence, individual and cosmic.

V

It is not an accident that this return asserts itself at a time when science is approaching the point of turning into a runaway enterprise threatening itself and mankind alike. Herein lies the crucial issue which is facing both the world, the secular oikumene and our own Christian oikumene. As to the world, it most likely will go through great agonies before its thinking and attitude will improve in the crucible of suffering. We Christians shall be, in turn, under increasing pressure on the part of a world which openly wants a return to paganism. The beginning of that return was signaled in

² Told for the first time in my book, The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).

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Ficino's school of Neoplatonism in Florence around 1470, celebrating with Plato a natural or scientific knowledge of God which had no room for a revelation as understood in the Bible. In 1470 and afterwards, few were aware of this big difference between the proud a-priorism of Plato and the humbling story of the Bible. Worse even, some successors of Peter were more drawn to Plato than to the Bible. Councils (Lateran V to be specific, which defended the Christian doctrine on human soul against Plato) were not effective in stemming the sad drift toward paganism. No wonder that embittered and frustrated Reformers took into their own bands, for better or for worse, the cause of reform, that is, the reassertion of the biblical knowledge of God over the natural knowledge of God. For the ultimate spiritual issue in the Reformation concerned not particular doctrinal points but the reassertion of the Bible and the Cross over Plato and nature.

Two hundred years went by and reformers as well as counterreformers should have seen at long last that their real challenge was not with one another, but with a world which allegedly still wanted a natural knowledge of God, but hardly its biblical amplification. The Encyclopedists, a motley lot, were at one in rejecting everything supernatural, and they were singularly effective in weakening confidence in the natural knowledge of God. It is in this light that one should see the proclamations of Vatican I on man's ability to recognize the Creator from the evidence of the visible world. ³

The need for such a single voice will only increase in the future. There is in the making an attack on Christ and Christianity, an attack more sweeping and more thorough than any other before. As was the case with the members of the early church we shall not be attacked on the particulars of our dogmatics. The world could not care less what we bold about the Trinity, grace, real presence, indulgences, apostolic succession, the number of sacraments, and the like. The world is ready to tolerate our skirmishes on finer points of doctrine. The world might look even benignly on our liturgical practices because man, so the wisdom of the world has it, should project himself in symbolic rituals. But the world will not be impressed by the efforts of latter-day Christian Neoplatonists who are, in order to gain the world, busy recasting the Christian message in the subtle inconsistencies of Whiteheadian process philosophy and in the poetical vagueness of Teilhardian evolutionarism. Most importantly, the world is not going to tolerate sincere attachment to the first and last tenets of the Apostles' Creed. The

³ Vatican I is, of course, far better remembered as the place and moment where the primacy of Peter's successors was reasserted and their infallibility solemnly proclaimed. I believe that the events of the next hundred years showed that Christianity was well served when its tenets were restated through the distinctness of a single voice.

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world is not going to tolerate the belief that the universe is the product of a personal Creator, that the universe has a beginning and will have a supreme consummation, and that every man has a personal destiny for eternal happiness or for its very opposite. The world is not going to tolerate such a concrete and controversial expression of the Christian concept of man as the current discussion of abortion. Such concrete faith the world shall never tolerate and against its progress it will throw all possible roadblocks.

VI

A great clash is indeed in the making in which the only comforting aspect is the clarity of the choice available. On the one band, there will be the ideology best presented by Monod and Skinner, the ideology of naturalistic chance and its iron-tight necessity which puts man beyond freedom and dignity. On the other side, there will be the foolishness of the cross which presents man with the appeal of redemption. There will be no escape from the ensuing clash into which we shall be drawn by the inner logic of the Christian stance. Let us hope and pray that Christians will be loyal witnesses, that is, martyrs worthy of that name. Let us hope and pray not only because loyalty is a crucial factor in life, but also because of the decisive impact of that loyalty on the prospects of unity. The cause of that unity is too great to be purchased by mere discussions, important as these may be. The church, as the Fathers liked to point out, was born on the cross from the pierced heart of the Son of God. Our unity will not be reborn except through our readiness to be crucified with him. Our unity will, indeed, be reserved to those of us who are ready to become part of that remnant gathered under his cross. Its horizontal arms stretch from "in the beginning" to the final consummation of all. Its vertical beam connects heaven with earth and forms that channel along which the biblical knowledge of God keeps alive the natural knowledge of the Creator.