KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 September
And God saw that it was good
It is a wonderful phrase which acts as a recurring refrain in the first chapter of The Book of Genesis read in Chapel this week. It confronts us with certain powerful ideas and ways of thinking that contribute to our lives as students and teachers and, especially, it seems to me, in the climate of our current culture.
Creation is an orderly affair that proceeds from an intellectual principle. It is not exactly science though it provides the essential foundation for the possibilities of science in the idea that the natural world is, in principle, intelligible. Creation is really about the relation of all things to the Creator who by definition is not the same as that which is made. Creation here is about distinction and separation, itself the intellectual activity of ordering and distinguishing one thing from another. The chapter challenges our assumptions about time and our literal ways of thinking. After all, what does it mean to speak of light or one day or a second or a third day before the Sun and the Moon were created on the fourth day? It is more about the intellectual order of reality.
“God is the beginning and end of all things especially rational creatures”Thomas Aquinas notes. “The Originator of heaven and earth,”the Qur’an states,“when he decrees a thing, he says ‘Be’ and it is.” Such ways of thinking reflect the opening chapter of Genesis as informed, too, by the Prologue to John’s Gospel about the Logos or Word of God, the intellectual principle through which all things are intelligible. All this, we might say,is the great gift of the Jews. It is the idea of beginning, not with chaos or the sexual congress of divine beings, but with God.
Like modern science, Genesis utterly discounts the idea of the divinity of nature or of natural bodies, especially the idea of the heavenly bodies as gods. Humans, left to their own devices, default to the worship of nature, attributing supernatural powers to natural forces. Like modern science, too, Genesis argues for the distinctions between different things in the created world. Darwin’s great work is entitled “The Origin of Species,” implying the same idea that things are distinct from one another.