IB World Religions 3.4.4. Cosmogony and Cosmology: Genesis, a Loving Creator and the Evolution Debate Notes

3.4.4. Cosmogony and Cosmology: Genesis, a Loving Creator and the Evolution Debate

Genesis 1 and 2

1. Cosmogony is an account of how the world began, and cosmology is an account of how it is ordered and where it is heading. Christian teaching draws both from the opening chapters of Genesis.
2. Genesis 1 is built on a pattern. God speaks across six days, forming three realms and then filling each of them, and every stage closes with the verdict that what was made is good.
3. The seventh day is the point the pattern is driving at. God rests, and Jewish and Christian tradition read the Sabbath back into the structure of creation itself.
4. Genesis 2 tells the story on a different scale. A man is formed from dust, a garden is planted, animals are brought to him for naming, and a woman is made from his side.
5. Christians handle the two accounts in several ways. Some read them as complementary panels on one truth, and many churches also accept the critical view that they come from different sources and periods.
6. Most Christian teaching holds that neither chapter is written as a scientific report. On that reading their interests are the goodness of the world, the place of humans in it, and the identity of the God who made it.

Creation out of nothing

1. Christians hold that God created ex nihilo, out of nothing. There was no raw material waiting to be shaped and no rival power to be defeated.
2. This marks the account off from other ancient cosmogonies. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish the world is built from the body of a defeated god, whereas Genesis has God simply speak.
3. The phrase was hammered out in argument. Writers such as Irenaeus and Theophilus of Antioch used it against teachers who held that matter was eternal, and 2 Maccabees 7 supplies the nearest biblical wording.
4. The New Testament ties creation to Christ. John 1 says all things came into being through the Logos, and Colossians 1 says everything was created in him and holds together in him.
5. Creation is also held to be continuous. Creatio continua is the belief that God sustains everything in being at every moment, so that the world would not simply run on without him.
6. One consequence matters for everything else Christians say. Because matter is made by God and called good, Christian teaching rejects the view that the physical world is a mistake or a prison.

Immanence and transcendence

1. Christians describe God as transcendent, beyond the world and not a part of it, and as immanent, present and active within it. The two are held together rather than balanced against each other.
2. Transcendence is guarded by refusing easy description. Isaiah 55 has God say that his thoughts are not human thoughts, and Orthodox apophatic theology, from Gregory of Nyssa onwards, prefers to say what God is not.
3. Immanence is stated just as firmly. Genesis 1 has the Spirit moving over the waters, Psalm 139 finds God everywhere the writer could flee, and Paul tells the Athenians that in God we live and move and have our being.
4. Holding both rules out two neighbouring positions. Deism describes a maker who winds the world up and withdraws, while pantheism identifies God with the world itself.
5. Some Christian writers use panentheism, the view that the world is in God while God is more than the world. Jurgen Moltmann and some Anglican and process theologians defend the term, and many other theologians reject it as blurring the difference.
6. Orthodox theology makes the pairing precise. Gregory Palamas distinguished God's unknowable essence from his energies, so that God can be genuinely present and shared in without ever being comprehended.

A good and personal creator

1. Christians hold that God created freely rather than from need. The world is described as a gift, and nothing in Genesis suggests that God was completing himself by making it.
2. The refrain of Genesis 1 sets the tone. Each stage is called good and the whole is called very good, which Christian teaching uses to rule out contempt for the body or the material world.
3. Humans are said to be made in the image of God, the imago Dei of Genesis 1:27. Christians have read the phrase as rationality, as the capacity for relationship with God, as responsibility for the world, or as all three together.
4. The creator is described as personal. God speaks, commands, questions and walks in the garden, and Jesus extends the picture in Matthew 6 by pointing to a God who clothes the grass and notices sparrows.
5. The claim raises the sharpest objection Christians face. Suffering, extinction and waste in nature sit awkwardly with a loving maker, and the responses range from Augustine's account of the Fall to Orthodox writing that puts less weight on inherited guilt.
6. The word dominion in Genesis 1:28 is now contested. The historian Lynn White argued in 1967 that it licensed exploitation, and churches have answered by reading it as stewardship and, in Pope Francis's Laudato Si', as kinship with other creatures.

Creationism and evolution

1. Since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Christians have taken a range of positions on evolution. The disagreement runs inside denominations at least as much as between them.
2. Young-earth creationists read the six days as ordinary days and date the earth in thousands of years, following Archbishop Ussher's calculation of 4004 BC. Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's book The Genesis Flood in 1961 revived the position, and Answers in Genesis promotes it today.
3. Old-earth creationists accept the geological timescale while rejecting common descent for humans. Day-age and gap readings of Genesis 1 support them, and Hugh Ross and the group Reasons to Believe argue the case.
4. Intelligent design holds that some biological structures are better explained by design than by unguided processes. Michael Behe and the Discovery Institute make the argument, and critics reply that it is not testable in the way scientific claims must be.
5. Theistic evolution, also called evolutionary creation, holds that God creates through evolutionary processes. The geneticist Francis Collins founded BioLogos to argue this, and the botanist Asa Gray was making a version of the case in Darwin's own lifetime.
6. Many churches read Genesis without literal chronology at all. Augustine warned in the fifth century against using the text to contradict what people can observe, and Catholic teaching has moved from permitting evolution as a hypothesis in 1950 to Pope John Paul II calling it more than a hypothesis in 1996.
7. Participants disagree about what is at stake. The arguments turn on the authority of scripture, the uniqueness of humans, and whether death in the natural world can precede the Fall.

Creation in worship and ethics

1. The doctrine is sung before it is argued. Harvest festivals thank God for the produce of the land, and the hymn All Creatures of Our God and King rewrites Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Creatures.
2. The seventh day shapes the week. Sunday rest is grounded in Genesis 2 and the Sabbath commandment, and Orthodox and Catholic teaching still presents rest as a creation ordinance rather than a convenience.
3. Water and bread carry the belief into liturgy. Orthodox churches bless water at Theophany, and the Catholic offertory prayers present bread and wine as fruit of the earth and work of human hands.
4. Creation doctrine now drives environmental teaching. Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si appeared in 2015, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has campaigned on the environment for long enough to be called the Green Patriarch.
5. Protestant bodies have moved the same way. Evangelical creation care networks read stewardship as a gospel duty, and many churches now keep 1 September as a day of prayer for creation.
6. Churches teach the doctrine early. Creation is presented as the first article of Christian faith, and catechesis usually frames it as an answer to who made the world and why rather than to how it happened.