“It would seem…” from the traditional Judeo-Christian perspective that the universe was created by God “[i]n the beginning” and consists, fundamentally, of “the heavens and the earth” (see Genesis 1:1). You may be surprised to learn how difficult it is to say much more than that without stepping into highly contested theological territory. Below we’ll let the Bible speak for itself about creation, but it’s important first to introduce just what kind of world the ancients looked to their religions for an explanation of.
A three-tiered cosmology
The biblical authors seem to have understood the world with respect to a three-tiered cosmology, “with the earth sandwiched between the firmament of God’s dwelling place above, and the underworld controlled by evil powers below” [1, 39]. New Testament scholar Gregory Riley elaborates:
The physical universe as the ancients perceived it was small, much like a sphere half filled with water, upon which floated the flat disk of the earth. There was water everywhere else–above the heavens, around the earth, and below, flowing around the underworld … The whole universe was immersed like a giant bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of saltwater. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Egypt or Greece or Mesopotamia and its neighboring lands; in the center stood the city of Babylon for the Babylonians, Nippur for the Sumerians, Delphi for the Greeks, and and Jerusalem for Israel. [2, 27]
You can see a beautiful artist’s rendering of this cosmology here.
Once you have the ancient conception in view, you start to notice traces of it throughout the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, pronounces the following fate for the doomed prince of Tyre:
They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas. (Ezekiel 28:8)
The writers of the psalms also espouse this worldview, envisioning God as a Cosmic Orderer who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” and “still[s]” its rising waves (Psalm 89:9). In the Book of Job, God is even said to “walk[] on the dome of heaven” (Job 22:14).
Whether or not this cosmology served for the ancient Hebrew people as “a prescientific attempt to understand the universe” or as something more purely poetic and evocative, the biblical writings bear its stamp. This is especially true of the creation narrative itself, to which we now turn our attention.
The days of creation
Take a moment to read Genesis 1:1-19, either in the New Revised Standard Version text below or in a translation of your choosing. This passage comprises the first four of the six days of creation–seven if you count the following day, on which God rested. We will examine the latter days, and the alternative creation account in Genesis 2, in the next lesson.
In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:1-19)
What do you notice about the passage? Well, hopefully the making of the “dome in the midst of the waters” on the second day jumped out at you for starters, not to mention the emergence of “dry land” on day three. There’s our ancient cosmology at work.
More importantly, note that the various aspects of that cosmos come into being at God’s command. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” This is obviously a key aspect of the theistic account of the universe: it has a finite existence that depended on God’s providential sustenance. The Gospel According to John in the Christian New Testament makes this point rather more explicitly when it says “without him, not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The “him” is Christ, “the Word” who “was with God” and who “was God” (John 1:2). (If you haven’t read the prologue to John’s gospel, 1:1-18, treat yourself and do so now. There’s probably no more concise or beautiful summary of Christian doctrine anywhere.) So our religious picture is one where God wills creation into being. (NOTE ABOUT CREATIO CONTINUA?)
And then there are those momentous words that usher in both Genesis in John: bereishit in Hebrew, en archē in Greek, “in the beginning” in English. As we shall see, much hinges in our conversation between science and theology on what we make of these words. At face value, though, their implication is simple enough. The world, the universe, the cosmos–it had a beginning, a starting point. The idea of a finite universe puts Judeo-Christian thinking in fairly marked contrast with the idea, long popular in philosophy, that matter is eternal. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas addresses Aristotle’s objections to that effect in his famous teaching on creation. It is to another point in that teaching that we go to finish our brief gloss on the religious understanding of the cosmos.
Creatio ex nihilo
Before considering whether the universe indeed had a beginning, Thomas asks a set of questions related to just what creation even means. His conclusion is one we might not expect based on what we read above in Genesis. Thomas says that the universe was created ex nihilo, “from nothing.” But recall what we read above, that “2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.” What earth? What face? What deep? What waters? This description doesn’t sound very much like nothing.
What do we make of this? Well, the going is difficult, partly because that first phrase, “a formless void” is enigmatic in the original Hebrew: tohu wa bohu. Tohu is reasonably straightforward and has meanings associated with waste, desolation, and nothingness elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. Bohu, on the other hand, appears only three times, all of them in conjunction with tohu. (COMMENTARY)
Summary
To tip our hand a little bit, we hope you’re getting the message that to put forward a religious position on cosmology and creation theology is actually no simple task–and is certainly not so easy as merely quoting the relevant portions of scripture. But we believe it’s reasonably accurate and faithful to summarize the traditional Christian account of the universe as follows:
The universe has a certain structure, which was created over a certain period of time, and at the beginning of time, by God, who willed it into being and continues to will its sustained existence.
We will next describe the scientific account. As we do so, be thinking about what we’ve discussed here, and try to anticipate for yourself some of the contested, or at least apparently contested issues.