Here are five more of my 20 Theses on the importance of the Christian doctrine of Creation. Parts One and Two can be read here and here.
11. The Doctrine of a Creation to be explored and understood encouraged the modern scientific process, which was begun in the Renaissance and made explicit in the Reformation, with its insistence that daily work, however menial, was to be done to God’s glory. This dignified and legitimated many areas including many scientific pursuits. It followed from this that man’s significance is wrapped up in this teaching of creation. All of the fundamental questions of man; Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? Where am I going after I die? Why is there something rather than nothing? are given concrete answers within a creational worldview.
12. Creation ex nihilo (as opposed from Creation ex materia) is unique to the biblical-Christian tradition and is consonant with the doctrine of God’s aseity, or Self-sufficiency. Even Unitarian versions of this teaching falter because a Unitarian “God” needs something beyond himself to display or actualize his attributes and communicate with. Biblical Trinitarianism teaches that God is perfectly “Self-actualized” through the mutual bond of love of each of the three Persons of the Godhead.
13. Because all things were made by and for God only God can tell us about the world as it really is. He has to tell us about first things and about last things. God has to tell us who we are and why we are not what we ought to be. Therefore, revelation is necessary to a creational worldview, but because of man’s waywardness it can only be understood by faith in that revelation.
14. Any other cosmogony, whether it be materialistic or pantheistic, always runs into open contradictions. Whereas the Doctrine of Creation ex nihilo is surefooted, comprehensive, coherent, and contains great explanatory power, a philosophical, naturalistic view of the world has to posit the eternity of matter and then has to reify that matter in order to make it do anything. It also has to go against established laws of science such as, something cannot come from nothing; life cannot arise from non-life; matter’s tendency toward entropy not evolution; the necessity for complex, specified information, etc. The pantheistic viewpoint is just a more outwardly mystical expression of former.
15. Non-creational models cannot explain the existence and prevalence of evil, let alone properly define it. Evil did not inhere within the original creation. God is not the author of evil. God, for His own reasons, allowed evil to enter and pervade this world, but not forever. Evil and sin are truly definable as, “a contradiction of the divine will and perfection.” (J. Murray). From this we can say that evil is not a part of the fabric of reality in the way that goodness and righteousness is. Evil is not eternal and will one day be no more. Within the biblical world-picture it makes sense that God would send His Son into the world to redeem it and point it toward its Telos.
