Is there any point in praying for good weather? In the late 1960s I heard a lecture by a theology professor who explained to us students that it is completely senseless to pray for good weather; since the weather is entirely determined by inner-worldly causes, God does not intervene and everything plays out according to natural laws. This is why there is no point in praying for rain or sunshine.

If a mother is sick with cancer, is there any point in her children and her husband praying for her to be healed? Suppose she is healed: has God intervened or have the forces of nature acted in a healing way? Suppose she is not healed: what kind of God is it that ignores the tears of the children and the pleading of the husband? Can God not help? Then He is impotent. Does He not want to help? Then He is cruel and merciless.

Praise of the Creator

Does God act in the world today? Our faith takes this to be an elementary truth. To believe that God exists is also to believe that He acts, and not just now and then, not just sometime back at the beginning, but constantly, since everything has its origin in Him and since He upholds everything and directs everything to its end. Is this faith just an arbitrary assumption, a kind of drug for numbing ourselves a little in this trying world, an "opium of the people," as Karl Marx (1818-1883) called religion? Does this faith have any basis that shows it to be reasonable, meaningful, beautiful, and good?

A psalm like psalm 104 is in any case beautiful, full of poetry, and expresses the entirely spontaneous feelings of many people about their experience of creation:

Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, thou art very great!
Thou art clothed with honor and majesty, who coverest thyself with light as with a garment,
who hast stretched out the heavens like a tent, who hast laid the beams of thy chambers on the waters,
who makest the clouds thy chariot, who ridest on the wings of the wind,
who makest the winds thy messengers, fire and flame thy ministers.
Thou didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be shaken.
Thou didst cover it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
At thy rebuke they fled; at the sound of they thunder they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place which thou didst appoint for them.
Thou didst set a bound which they should not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.
Thou makest springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills,
they give drink to every beast of the field; the wild asses quench their thirst.
By them the birds of the air have their habitation; they sing among the branches.

From thy lofty abode thou waterest the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy work.
Thou dost cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate,
that He may brings forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the heart of man,
oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man's heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon which He planted.
In them the birds build their nests; the stork has her home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the badgers.
Thou hast made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep forth.
The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God.
When the sun rises, they get them away and lie down in their dens.
Man goes forth to his work and to his labor until the evening.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures.
Yonder is the sea, great and wide, which teems with things innumerable, living things both small and great.
There go the ships, and Leviathan which thou didst form to sport in it.
These all look to thee, to give them their food in due season.
When thou givest to them, they gather it up; which thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things.

When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed; when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure for ever, may the Lord rejoice in his works,
who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke!
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
May my meditation be pleasing to Him, for I rejoice in the Lord.

(Psalm 104)

Is the approach of poetry less real than the approach of science?

Yes, indeed, "may my meditation be pleasing to Him," as the psalmist says. Is it just poetry when we rejoice like this in the Creator and His works? Or is this poetry, this song of praise to the Creator, is it not based on a reality lying at the foundation of everything, the reality of the efficacious acting of the Creator? Put another way: is the approach of poetry less real than the approach of science? Let us hear the witness of the great Russian philosopher of religion and theologian, Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944). He speaks of his "going home" to the faith after wandering for ten years through the desert of scientistic atheism (quoted by M.-J. LeGuillou, Das Mysterium des Vaters, Einsiedeln, 1999, pp. 20-212):

I was 23 years old, but for almost ten years the faith had been ripped out of my soul; after passing through crises and doubts a religious emptiness took possession of it. O, how terrible this sleep of the soul, which can last a whole life long. While growing intellectually and acquiring scientific information my soul sank into self-satisfaction, superficiality, and vulgarity... Suddenly the following event occurred... The evening was approaching... we were driving through the southern prairie, bathed in the spicy aroma of honey, grass, and hay and shining the in the mild light of the setting sun. Off in the distance the first of the Caucasian mountains was already blue. I saw these mountains for the first time. I gazed eagerly on them and drank in the air and the light, listening to the revelation of nature. My soul had for a long time now been used to seeing in nature nothing but a dead desert covered by a veil of beauty, worn by nature like a mask that deceives. Suddenly my soul was filled with joy and trembled with excitement at the thought: what if there were... what if there were no desert, no mask, no death, what if there were instead the mild love of the Father, all this beauty being His veil, His love... what if the devout feelings of my childhood that I had in living with Him, standing before His face, loving Him, trembling at my inability to approach Him, what if my tears and my youthful ardor, the tenderness of prayer, my childlike purity, which I had made fun of by staining, what if all of these things were true and the death-bringing emptiness in myself were nothing but blindness and lies? Was that possible? Didn't I know from my years of study that God does not exist? Could there be any doubt about this? Could I acknowledge these new thoughts in myself without feeling ashamed on account of my cowardice, without feeling panic in the presence of "science" and its court of justice? O you Caucasian mountains, I saw your ice glistening from one sea to the other, I saw your snow reddened by the morning sun, your peaks reaching up into the sky, and my soul melted in ecstasy. The first day of creation shone before my eyes. There was no life and no death, just an eternal and unchangeable Now. An unexpected feeling arose in me and surged up: the feeling of victory over death.

If this approach is not an illusion, the question arises, what kind of reality is it an approach to? Is this poetic-religious approach something leading to another realm of reality that has nothing to do with the realm that science is interested in? Karl Rahner (1904-1984) once said: "Theology and science can in principle not contradict each other, since from the outset they differ in their subject matter and in their method." ("Wissenschaft und christlicher Glaube," in Schriften zur Theologie, XV [Zurick, 1983], 26.) I too think that theology and science need not contradict each other, but not because their subject-matters are so different that they practically never come into contact. I am convinced that they must come into contact without contradicting each other. Even the poetical-mystical and religious approach that we just saw in Sergei Bulgakov must at some point come into contact with the scientific approach. Why this fear of coming into contact? If it is true that the creator constantly supports, preserves, and renews His world, if everything new that appears in the world has come and continuously comes from His plan for creation and from His creative power, then in some way it has to come into contact with the reality that forms the object of the sciences. But how is this to happen without science and theology encroaching on each other's domain but also without them simply having nothing to do with each other?

An existential approach

In the present catechesis we are concerned with the creatio continua, that is, with the ongoing creation, which has to do with the same sphere of reality that the natural sciences deal with. We cannot do without points of contact. Let us ward off the following possible misunderstanding right from the beginning: the reality of the creation that is now happening is not something that we can measure and hence reach by way of empirical methods. But in acknowledging this reality we do not contradict the scientific way of looking, for this acknowledgment is neither irrational nor unintelligible. To believe in creation as a present event that is happening even now is not only meaningful, it is not contradictory, but it is ultimately the presupposition for science having a meaningful basis. But this needs to be further clarified and justified.

First of all I want to focus more sharply the question about ongoing creation by proposing a third approach. At the beginning I referred to prayer, which is meaningful only if the Creator really acts in this world. Secondly we saw the example of the experience of beauty in creation; such beauty provides an access to the Creator. In the radiance of this beauty we can get a hint of and even have a moving experience of the active presence of the Creator.

Now I want to propose a third existential approach, one that is prominent in the proclamation of Jesus. I mean faith in divine providence, and not in an abstract and general providence but in a very concrete providence. Jesus teaches His disciples to have absolute trust in this quite concrete care, extending into the smallest details, of Him whom Jesus calls the heavenly Father. In the sermon on the mount we read:

Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O men of little faith? There do not be anxious... (Matt. 6: 25-31)

And in another place Jesus says much more clearly: "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of the will fall to the ground without your Father's will. But even the hairs of your heard are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows." (Matt. 10: 29-31)

It is crystal clear that the Christian faith presupposes that God's providence is not just general but is very concrete, reaching down to the smallest and most unlikely details, even to the point that "all the hairs of our head" are numbered. Even the death of a sparrow does not fall outside of the care of the Creator. Is He not also concerned with atoms, molecules, and matter? These are questions that we cannot evade if the proclamation of Jesus and rational investigation are not going to break entirely apart. But if faith and the scientific approach are not going to stand next to each other without coming into contact with each other, then of course we face a very considerable intellectual challenge. Intellectual laziness is certainly out of place here. We can see that faith in creation and the scientific approach complete each other very well without interfering with each other. But that involves an intense labor of thought, and I cannot promise you that what I will treat in the following will be easy.

Before we turn for a closer look at the doctrine of ongoing creation, let me mention a phenomenon that surprises me and that has in my opinion shown itself more clearly in recent months. Just the other day one of the news agencies reported that the actor Thomas Kretschmann, 43, who played John Paul II in an American television production, is supposed to have said: "I have nothing to do with the Church. I do not believe in God, I believe in evolution, which seems to me more logical." (The Standard, Jan. 2006, p.5.) Does this mean that evolution is a matter of faith? The Christmas issue of Der Spiegel carried the title, "God vs. Darwin: a religious war over evolution."

Religious war over evolution?

How has this strange "sacralization" of a scientific theory come about? How did it happen that this scientific theory is, as far as I know, the only one whose name ends in "-ism." There is no "Einsteinism" corresponding to Einstein's relativity theory, and earlier there was no "Newtonism" and later no "Heisenbergism." Why then Darwinism? The American philosopher and historian of science, Stanley L. Jaki, has said that it is an urgent task to liberate the evolutionary theory of Darwin along with its later development in the form of Neodarwinian theory "from what is not science there," lest it turn into an ideology and cease to be real science. ("Non-darwinian darwinism," in Pascual, L'evoluzione: crocevia di scienza, filosophia e teologia [Rome, 2005], 41.)

Whoever wants to start a religious war over evolution does a disservice to science far and wide. To make the issues of evolution into instruments of war against belief in creation has nothing to do with scientific method and spirit, just as the dialectical materialism of Marxism with its allegedly "scientific" atheism had pitifully little to do with real science.

Needless to say, whoever is not satisfied with slogans and prejudices cannot avoid intense intellectual exertion. But it is worth the trouble.

In what follows I would like to invite you to take three intellectual steps that will enable you to get some idea of what ongoing creation is. Even if these steps do not prove this belief, they at least show that this belief does not contradict reason.

Before attempting these steps I would like once again to point out what ongoing creation is not. The German theologian Ulrich Luke, who has worked intensely on this subject, raises the question whether ongoing creation, when compared with the creation of the beginning of all things (creatio ex nihilo), is simply "a project of improvement undertaken by the great craftsman, the Creator out of nothing? Is the creatio continua something like a maintenance contract that is entered into at the time of the purchase of a product with a view to preserving the quality of the product, a kind of maintenance contract for the creatio originalis (beginning of creation)?" ("Creatio continua," in Theologie und Glauben 86/1996, 283.) Often people have the idea that ongoing creation means that God is adjusting and fixing His creation. If the acting of the Creator is understood as a kind of improving, then we get the idea that we only need to recognize Him where there are gaps in our knowledge, so that He can plug in the gaps that lie beyond the reach of our scientific knowledge.

The three steps that we now undertake will show us a different way. The first step is as it were a step back, a step in which we take distance to what goes on in the everyday practice of the sciences. It is a philosophical reflection on "contingency," which has in fact great existential importance for our life. There are many things about natural events that used to be un-understandable and inexplicable and that today have been explained by scientific research and thus become understandable. It is not God the Creator who appears in these scientific explanations but "only" material causal connections. The more explainable things become, the smaller the residue of the unexplainable. Is God's "space" getting "narrower"? No wonder that Der Spiegel concluded the above-mentioned article with the words: "It is getting tighter around the Creator" (p. 147). This is why it is important to remember that faith in the Creator does not start at the point at which our knowledge stops, but rather starts just where we do indeed have knowledge. The right approach is to consider all that we do know today. And that is, thank God, very much. We should not look towards that which remains inexplicable, trying to leave there some place for God, but we should look towards what we do know. And we should ask: what is the ultimate basis of this?

One thing we know with certainty, with philosophical, rational certainty: all that we observe in material beings once did not exist. The sun came to be, so did the moon, the earth, and life in all its forms, including man and reaching down to you and me. Material things that once were not, will one day pass away. What once came to be does not exist through itself. It is unstable in its existence, it can and it will pass away. And so it is meaningful and necessary to ask: what holds all of this in being? We have to try to answer this question.

Can we enter into this thought? Nothing that exists as matter exists "necessarily" but could as well not exist. The sun could have not come to be. The same holds for me. I am because I came to be. Philosophy calls this the contingency, the non-necessity of being. What then keeps us in being, why do we exist? Why do we not fall back into nothing? Psalm 104 answers: "When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed; when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust" (verse 29). Philosophy and theology call this preservation in being the continuing or ongoing creation. God holds in being everything that is. Without this support the contingent world would not be. The power of holding everything in being cannot be in turn a material power. It cannot be a material energy, cannot be a measurable reality, otherwise it too would have to be held in being by something, and this in turn by something else, and so on ad infinitum. This why the Jesuit philosopher Rainer Koltermann says: "The preserving power can ultimately only be something that is not in turn held in being by something else." It cannot be a power that has come to be, a finite and limited power, a measurable energy; it can only be a power that does not draw its power from another source. It must be an absolute power, beyond all time, infinite. "These characteristics are essential for God." (Koltermann, Grundzuege der modernen Naturphilosophie. Ein kritischer Gesamtentwurf [Frankfurt, 1994], 134.)

It is this power that we call the creatio continua, the ongoing creation. This is what "holds the world together from within." If God were to "let go" of creation, it would back into the nothingness from which it came. It does not exist through itself, it is held in being.

Our world is a world of becoming

From this follows a further thought, still within the setting of this first step. It is not only the being of all things that is preserved by this primordial source, this power of the Creator, but the capacity that all things have of acting efficaciously is also preserved by the primordial acting of the Creator. For the power of things to act is also contingent, is not necessary, could be otherwise. The ultimate cause for the power of acting on the part of creatures cannot be in turn some innerworldly acting, some finite and created energy. God acts so as to be "all in all," as St. Paul says, but not in the sense that He is one cause among others, but rather in the sense that He is the efficacious cause supporting and empowering all creaturely acting. This is the way in which we can understand the powerful line in the Letter to the Hebrews: "He upholds the universe by His word of power" (Heb. 1:3), He upholds everything that is and everything that acts.

This is the first step, which is perhaps not so hard to follow. The idea that all spatio-temporal being in creation is supported by the eternal and omnipresent being of the Creator can be rationally understood, or at least can be seen to be not absurd. But what about that creative activity which is more than just preservation? What do we make of God's creative power when something really new appears, such as life and especially man? Does the Creator bring about the "leap" from lifeless to living matter, or from animal to man? Are we back to those individual acts of creation which Darwin thought had been made superfluous by his theory of natural selection?

Let us venture upon a second step. There is no doubt but that our world is a world of becoming in which the cosmic development and the evolution on our planet has made it possible for us human beings to be alive today. In the course of this becoming some really new things break through. Can "more" arise out of what is "less"? Can what is lower produce on its own power what is higher and more complex? It would be absurd to say such a thing, even if this is often said to be the case. Nothing in our experience lends support to the idea that what is lower, acting without anything that directs and organizes it, can all by itself, and quite by accident, produce what is higher.

So then we do have to accept "particular creative acts"? But how can they be observed? How do they show themselves? Here we have to make a simple distinction that is commonly overlooked, the distinction between conditions and causes. All kinds of conditions were necessary for life to be able to arise on our planet and without these no life would be possible. But these conditions only set the stage for the emergence of life; they are not the creative cause of life. They "collaborate" with the emergence of life, but you cannot derive from them the new reality in the developing world that we call life. For life to arise there must be the creative act of God, the divine spark.

Scientific research working along its own line does not come across this divine spark, this "let there be...and so it was," as we read in Genesis 1; with ever greater precision and nuance it tries to grasp the conditions necessary for the new reality of life to be inserted into the process of becoming. Since the research into the conditions for life has made such tremendous strides, some people think that it has unlocked the entire reality of life itself. The conditions really do enable life to appear and in this sense they are co-causes, but they are not the creators of life. Let me try by means of two examples taken from human life to make clear what I mean.

a) A great deal of reading and thinking, of gathering ideas and discussing them, goes into preparing this catechetical series. Then the ideas are written down and finally delivered to the audience. There are many conditions for all of this, conditions without which the catecheses would not be possible. My brain has to be more or less working, I have to have time for preparing the catecheses; my sense organs have to perform their service; pen and paper are needed; so is the microphone that we use here in the cathedral. These are all conditions, they lend support to the coming to be of the catecheses, but they do not produce them. The new thing that comes to be here (it is not absolutely new) requires these conditions but it is not made by them. Neither my pen nor the microphone, nor even my brain have made the catecheses. These things were in a certain sense co-causes, each of them important, but they were not the creators of the catecheses.

In a similar way we can say, indeed we have to say that the great "leaps" by which evolution climbed higher and higher had in each case necessary conditions which however could not be the creators of the new realities. They are true co-causes but not the real creative cause. The great theologian, Cardinal Leo Scheffczyck, who died on December 8, 2005, says: "Thus evolution can in a way be understood as creation that does not shut out or annul creaturely collaboration but rather gives it full play: for on this view the act of something new coming into being presupposes the presence and the activity of creaturely reality with all of its proper energy, dynamism, and causality. Thus we are speaking here of a total act shared by God and creature." ("Gottes fortdauernde Schoepfung," in Schwerpunkte des Glaubens [Einsiedeln, 1977], 200.)

b) The second example is even clearer, since it has to do with the supreme case of the coordination of creaturely conditions and divine creative act: the coming to be of a new human being. If it is true that each human being is unique, then this uniqueness is not just the genetic uniqueness which keeps one human being from being completely identical with another one; it must instead be the unrepeatability of the person, which is most clearly expressed in the irreducible dignity of the person. Each human being has this dignity and has it independently of his origin, gender, accomplishments, or state of health. We say that this dignity inheres in man as a creature made "in the image and likeness of God" (cf. Genesis 1:26).

No doubt the parents are real co-causes of the new human child. Without them there would be no child. But they do not "produce" the new person, who is not a "product" of the parents, even though the new human person would not exist without his parents. The new reality that appears in the world as a new human child comes to be, as Scheffczyck put it, by means of a "total act shared by God and creature." This act is not equally shared, but rather shared in such a way that the parents, acting as cause on their level, contribute everything proper to themselves, while God causes the new human being by creating what only the divine act can create, namely a new person with an immortal soul and with a unique calling from God and for God.

Within this perspective of divine causality God does not act as a deus ex machina, as someone who plugs holes, who is invoked to explain that which is "not yet" explained. We do not think of His acting as an occasional intervention coming from the outside, but rather as the transcendent creative activity of God who alone makes it possible for our world to "hold together" and to rise, in accordance with His plan, step by step higher, so that really new things appear in it and finally man appears in it.

Whoever wants to replace the Creator's realization of this plan by a totally autonomous evolution, inevitably either ascribes some mythic creative power to evolution, or else abandons any attempt at rational understanding and explains everything as the blind play of arbitrary chance. This is what I called the "abdication of reason" in my New York Times article of July 7th, 2005.

And now I attempt the third step that can throw a little more light on the ongoing creation. We are at the beginning of the year celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart. His creative genius stimulates me to the following perhaps somewhat light-hearted thought. For some time now I have been looking for analogies and comparisons to help make sense of the incredible variety and abundance of creation. Where does this boundless, playful abundance of life forms come from, indeed where do the forms of lifeless matter come from? Can all of this be explained in terms of means-end relations? Hardly. Some things can be explained in this way, but there is in nature far more than usefulness, there is also at work-such is the irresistible impression we get the more closely we explore nature-a lavish delight in variety, in beauty, and even in what is bizarre, frightening, uncanny, none of which conforms to the purely rational order of means and ends. The thought keeps coming to me that the Creator takes pleasure in the play of this variety.

And so I venture this suggestion: why should this variety and abundance not derive from His inexhaustible creativity? I was helped here by thinking of Mozart. All of his works are "contingent," they could as well have not come into being (which would have been very unfortunate for mankind). Most of them came to be for particular purposes, in response to commissions and orders. But many just came from the creativity of genius, including those which were commissioned. Purpose and beauty do not break apart here. A work of art may have a purpose, but it is more than its purpose. Works of art do not create something new out of nothing, they rather rely on models and in the case of music on pre-given harmonies, musical laws, the themes and melodies of other composers, they develop further what is already there; and yet each work of art is unique. The thought came to me that Mozart developed music further, and yet created unique works. No one would think that his works organized themselves. We admire and love and revere Mozart. Ideological evolutionism, hard-nosed materialism that it is, strikes me by comparison as dismal and unimaginative. Would it not be a good thing to consider one time the theory of evolution in the light of the creative power of a Mozart? Would we not draw closer to the Creator and to the way He plays His inexhaustible melodies in His creation?

But beautiful as this thought may be, in the next catechesis we have to deal with the urgent question of why there is so much suffering in creation, so much that is cruel and terrible.

In the second catechesis we dealt in general with our faith in God as creator: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth." According to this faith, all that exists owes its being to the sovereign act of the creator, who does not have to create. We profess this in the Creed when we profess our belief in the one God, the Father and Creator of heaven and earth.

But things get more difficult as soon as we try to approach the matter more closely and ask what all of this means concretely. According to Genesis 1, the first chapter of the Bible, God created everything "according to its kind." Does this mean that God performed for each kind a distinct act of creating? This was the belief for centuries, into the 18th and 19th century: the different kinds are unchangeable and each is created separately by God. The idea of a "transformation of kinds" arose in the 19th century: the kinds have gradually developed from the simplest beginnings to the highly complex mammals and to man; the kinds are not unchangeable and there are good natural explanations for the way in which they have come into being.

Darwin's main work is called The Origin of Species, which I repeat is an epoch-making work, a classic, even if there is much in it that can be criticized. At the end of the Introduction to the work Darwin sums up as follows his main concerns and the core of his theory:
I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification. (Darwin, The Origin of Species, Modern Library edition, p. 14)

After struggling honestly and intensely with his earlier, biblically-based view that, as he put it, "each kind is separately created," Darwin broke with it. In a letter to his friend, Joseph D. Hooker, he wrote in 1844 that "it is like confessing a murder" to give up the idea that the natural kinds are created as fixed and unchangeable by God, and to develop in its place the idea of the kinds emerging in a very natural way without "any particular creative acts of God."

This is the dramatic situation in which Darwin went public with his ideas and had tremendous success with them. Many say today that his theory is no longer just a theory but rather a fact. Some react in an overly sensitive and irritable way if anyone calls Darwin's theory into question or even just asks questions about it. The debate of the last months has shown clearly that there is still plenty of room for questions and that it is necessary to allow questions to surface. It has also shown that critical questions are raised not only by quarrelsome folks or "narrowminded fundamentalists," but also by serious scholars probing and searching for truth. In doing this they are performing a real service to the objective issues, for nothing is worse for science than to prohibit questioning and searching.

Today I want to make a bold attempt: I want to examine the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, searching not for its scientific teaching, for it is surely not a scientific text in the sense of modern natural science, but searching for the fundamental message that engages our critical reflection and is thus important for the dialogue with science.

A look at the message of the biblical creation account Genesis 1:11-13 has this to say about the third day of creation:
And God said, "Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

As we know, there follows the fourth day of creation on which the stars are created as "lights on the dome of heaven." (But on the first day of creation light was created according to Genesis. Let us think here of Haydn's Creation and of the wonderful moment in which the light is created.) Then follow the fifth and sixth day of creation, on which the animals in the water and on land come into being and on which finally man is created.

And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens." So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day. And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds." And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:20-27)

This text clearly does not represent a document of natural science. That is not the intention of sacred scripture. Let me quote for you a beautiful passage from St. Augustine's tract against Felix the Manichean:
In the Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: I send you the Holy Spirit so that He might teach you all about the course of the sun and the moon. The Lord wanted to make Christians, not astronomers. You learn at school all the useful things you need to know about nature. It is true that Christ said that the Holy Spirit will come to lead us into all truth, but He is not speaking there about the course of the sun and the moon. If you think that knowledge about these things belongs to the truth that Christ promised through the Holy Spirit, then I ask you: how many stars are there? I say that such things do not belong to Christian teaching...whereas you affirm that this teaching includes knowledge about how the world was made and what takes place in the world. (St. Augustine, Contra Felicem Manichaeum, 1, 10 (PL 42, 525)

So we see that already St. Augustine shows that we can confidently leave to science the explanation of the "how" of things; for it is not the intention of Christ to teach us about that. Does it not then follow that we should make a clean separation between, on the one hand, faith and its documents, the Bible, the magisterium of the Church, and the reflection on faith that is theology, and on the other hand, the natural sciences with their methods, hypotheses, theories, and results? But we cannot separate these things quite so sharply. After all, both faith and science have to do with life. The great theologian Karl Rahner writing back in 1959 made a point of telling theologians that they "cannot act as if scientific questions and scientific knowledge can have no points of contact with theological questions and theological knowledge." The same holds of course for scientists. This is why I have to reject the admonishment of certain scientists who want me to keep out of these questions. I acknowledge that I have no special training in natural science, but I think that I know a little something about theology, and I think that we do well to put questions to each other, to enter into a dialogue in which we help each other. After all, the questions at issue concern all of us. This is why there should be no prohibition on any kind of inquiring, thinking, criticizing, or conversing. I am, therefore, happy that the discussion concerns these questions.

Once again: the Bible is not a scientific report and it does not offer a theory about the origin of the world and the development of the natural kinds. But the scientific way of looking at the emergence of the kinds is not our one and only access to reality. I think that we have to stress again and again that there are very various ways of approaching reality, and that these ways include philosophy, art, religion, and science. One of them is not more important than the other, for they are just different approaches to the same reality. The Bible is not a scientific textbook, but it nevertheless gives us an access to reality. Thus I will try to "draw out" of this first chapter of Genesis several statements about reality. Corresponding to the seven days of creation - six during which God worked and one on which He rested - I will want to formulate seven points and give some consideration to them with you.

1. Everything that is, is created. That is the first fundamental statement of the Bible about reality. It is the basis for everything else. Nothing that is exists "through itself." Nothing that is has made itself, nothing has created itself. The question whether there exists something like "self-organization" is much discussed in the natural sciences. There may in fact be something like the phenomenon of self-organization. Let me refer to a book by the Austrian Erich Jantsch, who taught in Berkeley; it is entitled The Self-organization of the Universe: From the Big Bang to the Human Spirit (Munich, 1979). But nothing has through itself being or the power of acting. The apostle Paul once said something that was addressed to human beings but might be addressed to all of creation: "What do you have that you have not received?" (1 Cor. 4:7) That is the first truth that the Bible teaches us. And it is a truth that is to a certain degree quite available to human reason. I do not exist through myself, and the realities that surround me do not exist through themselves. I will return to this again and again in the following catecheses.
   
   
2. We find in the world a tremendous multiplicity: of human beings, of creatures, of stars, of beings on our planet, of living beings, whether plants or animals. The basic message of the first page of the Bible is this: this multiplicity is good, it is willed by God, it comes from the will of the Creator. This is a familiar teaching for biblically trained ears, but it is not a familiar teaching in the history of human thought. We have only to look a little into this history in order to discover two basic directions of thought that arrive at entirely different results. In the intellectual history of mankind it has always been necessary to deal with the indisputable fact of multiplicity. Why does there exist a multiplicity? If we are not to rest satisfied with the obvious observation that there is in fact a multiplicity, then we have to go deeper and ask where the many things come from. One intellectual tradition says that the many is a sign of some kind of "mishap," some "primordial mishap." Originally there was unity, the One. This unity was broken by the "primordial mishap" and so there came about the multiplicity of beings. The One poured over into the many and was dissolved. We find this intellectual tradition mainly in neo-Platonism and also in what is called Gnosticism, which is widespread even today. For this tradition multiplicity is a sign of falling away, of decline and decay, and the farther we depart from unity, the weaker and the more multitudinous the world becomes, until it reaches the outer limit, which according to neo-Platonism is matter, which is taken to be something entirely negative. Multiplicity is the expression of a decadent and negative state of affairs, which really ought not to exist. This is why in this tradition the task is always to take back the multiplicity and to return to unity; the many have to be gathered together again so as to be reduced to unity.
   I think we find - but I say this with caution - a species of this tradition in the Buddhist worldview. I speak cautiously, since I surely do not know this world view well enough. But so far as I can tell this great religious tradition of Asia treats the multiplicity of the world as "maya," deception, illusion.
   
   There is another perspective that has been popularized by evolutionism and to such an extent that we feel it in our bones and take it for granted, as if it were too obvious to be questioned. I refer to the assertion, which for many people is a conviction, that the multiplicity of living beings is not the expression of rational ordering, of a will, of a plan of creation, but is the product of accident. Accident and necessary laws interact in accidental changes and in their chances of surviving in the struggle for existence, and this produces the great multiplicity that extends into all the nooks and crannies of the world - into whatever places life can develop in some way. The multiplicity of life, on this view, is the result of the endless play of accidental changes and of their equally accidental chances for survival. It sometimes happens that an accidental change has a good chance of surviving and of establishing itself. This is the way in which the incomprehensible and almost infinite abundance of life forms has arisen and has populated all imaginable corners of the earth.
   
   In his famous work Darwin constantly polemicizes against the idea that we have to have recourse to some plan of creation in order to explain the multiplicity of natural kinds. He is looking for the clearest and most natural explanation possible. He wants to find a sufficient explanation that does not require any recourse to creative acts. We have to say that this procedure is entirely legitimate. Even if Darwin thinks he is committing a "murder" by feeling obliged to overcome his inherited religious convictions, it is entirely legitimate. Scientific method seeks natural causes; it tries to give the most complete explanation of the facts by means of natural causes. This methodological restricting of attention to natural causes is the reason for the progressive success of precisely this method, which has after all accomplished tremendous things. A danger arises only when one forgets the limits of this method and thinks that through it we see everything. In reality one sees with great precision only a narrow segment of reality by means of it, and one should not take this segment for the whole of reality.
   
   The biblical view shows a multiplicity which is neither a mishap nor an accident, but rather the expression of the nature and will of God. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great doctor of creation, asks himself in one place whether the multiplicity and variety of things in the world derives from God. He discusses the doctrine of accident that was held by the atomists and materialists in the ancient world, and he says in opposition to it that multiplicity corresponds to the inmost intention of the creator, that God wanted a world full of variety. Whereas the atomist Democritus said that multiplicity is the result of the accidental play of matter, St. Thomas says that God intended just such a creation.
   
   For He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 47, 1)
   
   In other words, no one creature suffices to reflect God. It takes the whole fullness to make manifest God's abundance. The multitude of creatures is the many-sided expression of God's goodness. But this has an implication of fundamental importance: according to our faith in creation, creatures are altogether something positive. In the Book of Wisdom we read in one place: "You do not hate any of your creatures." There is no such thing as a negative creature. All creatures have their own proper value, their own proper goodness. Each creature, whether star or stone, whether plant or tree, whether animal or man, reflects in its own way the perfection and goodness of God. Each has a dignity of its own, a power of acting of its own, a fact to which we will return. Our faith in creation thus implies a positive view of creation and of all its manifestations at all its levels. We will have still to make a point of asking: if that is so, why is there in this good creation so much brutality and so much that is negative?
   
   Evolutionism as a world-view (and not as a scientific theory) has a harder time with the multiplicity of creation. It says that everything is in flux, that there are not really any kinds, any species, and that things do not really haves any being of their own. What we consider as kinds and as individuals within the kinds are said to be momentary phases in the great river of evolution. Nothing has being in its own right, nothing is there for its own sake, everything is just an event of transition occurring in the great tide of evolution. Each thing is just a lucky hit that, being fitter than other things, had the good fortune to survive. In my view this is a very inadequate view of the multiplicity of creation. We get an intimation of something more whenever we marvel at the multiplicity of nature and admire the many different kinds of things in it. Above all I think that evolutionism as a world-view cannot really explain why, if everything is temporary and transitional in the flow of evolution, anything has value in its own right.
   
   
3. A third point emerges from the biblical creation-account: the multiplicity is ordered. The question as to what exactly a "kind" of living being is, as when we speak of "each thing according to its kind," has always been a difficult question. What does this mean? While there may be certain gray areas where the boundaries between the kinds are difficult to discern, it is nevertheless easy to see the difference between the two kingdoms of living beings, the plants and the animals; these are clearly distinct. The Bible distinguishes quite clearly between plants and trees, on the one hand, and the swarming of living beings in the water and of birds in the air and of all kinds of animals, on the other hand. Each according to its own kind, all the way up to man. It is surely a certainty of experience that there are kinds: a cat is not an elephant and a dog is not a mouse. Even less is a tree a bird or a human being an ape (or an ape a human being, for that matter!). What explains these different kinds? Did God create each one of them separately, the daisy and the gingko tree, the hippo and the squirrel? We come here upon an ancient question of human thought, a question that evolutionism can also not avoid. We can always only look at individual beings, at this dog or that fir tree, but we cannot in the same way see "mankind" or "cat" or "fir tree." We touch here on the ancient debate about universals, a debate that has resounded here in the cathedral of St. Stephen: do "mankind" and "cat" exist or are they just bare names, as Umberto Eco says in the final sentence of his famous book, The Name of the Rose, that is, just linguistic designations? According to nominalism, which was once very strong here in Vienna (the famous carved stone pulpit in Stephansdom gives striking visual evidence of this doctrine in the 15th century with its portrayal of fundamental skepticism) we cannot really know anything, we just feel our way in the dark by naming things. Is there such a thing as "man" taken as a kind, a species? I have the impression that scientists do not like this question, that they avoid it as being too philosophical. It leads inescapably into metaphysics, which is something rather difficult. It is also difficult for the discussion about evolution and the origin of the different kinds. Is there any such thing as a "kind," or in other words, are there any such things as "essences"? This is not a purely academic question. We will meet it again and again, as when we ask whether man is really the "crown of creation." This is the question whether man is essentially different from the animals or whether he is simply a variant of the animals that has come about by accident. The same kind of question can be asked about the transition from lifeless matter to life and also about the transition from plant to animal.
   
   In everyday life we take it for granted that these are essential differences, our common sense tells us that a plant is not an animal. The meat that I ate today for lunch comes from an animal. You may think that eating meat is not pleasant or not healthy or is reprehensible, but the butcher can nevertheless sell meat and kill animals for this purpose. But he may not kill human beings. A vegetarian refuses to eat or kill animals, but is not opposed to eating plants. A head of lettuce cannot stay alive once it is cut off from the stem. But this is rightly regarded as a less serious way of acting upon nature than the killing of an animal. Plant, animal, man - these three kingdoms differ essentially one from another, even if there are cases in which one cannot easily discern which kingdom a living being belongs to. We need to give this attention to the essential differences if we are going to be able really to know things. I see you sitting here in the cathedral and you see me standing here. Although I do not personally know many of you, I am absolutely certain that you are human beings. That is not a laborious construction of my mind but a certainty; I grasp with certainty that you are humans and not animals or plants.
   
   When we agree with the Bible in saying that God created man in His image and likeness, then we are also saying that He created something new, something different from the world of plants and animals, even if all three are deeply related one with another. But how can we give an account of the belief that this something new is the work of the creator, that His creative will is expressed in the place that man has in nature? Does St. Francis's "Song of the Sun"express just pious sentiment or does it express reality? Is it only a language-game played by devout souls, or does an "intelligent design of God in the world," as Pope Benedict XVI put it (in his General Audience of November 13, 2005), underlie creation in its kingdoms, orders, and kinds?
   
   Darwin wanted to show that no creative plan underlies "the origin of the species," but that there is simply a genealogical tree of descent that reaches from the smallest beginnings up to man. Everything developed from the first seed. Though this view is extraordinarily fascinating and has become very popular, it remains questionable in many ways. (Cf. Darwin, The Origin of Species, ch. 14)
   
   Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science, said: "Neither Darwin nor any Darwinist has yet provided an adequate causal explanation, that is, a scientific explanation of the adaptive evolution of a single organism or organ. They have only shown that evolution is theoretically possible." (Popper, Objective Knowledge: an Evolutionary Approach.)
   
   Darwin says in one place in his great work: "Why is not every geological formation and every layer charged with such links? ...geological research...does not yield the infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species required on the theory; and this is the most obvious of the many objections which may be urged against it." (Darwin, The Origin of Species, 356.) He refers here to the famous "missing links." If it is true that everything has developed from the first seed, then there should be innumerable transitional forms, and one has to say that they have just not yet been found.
   
   
4. In the creation account we not only read of the creation of the kinds ("each according to its kind"), but also of a "movement upwards": first the plants, then the animals, and finally man. There is an "ascent" from plants to trees, from "things swarming in the water" to the birds and the land animals, and finally to man. The theory of evolution also speaks of a "movement upwards": from the first single-cell creatures to the fish, the reptiles, the land animals, from the apes to human beings. Why does biological complexity increase over time? A biologist friend of mine used to tell me that it is far more likely according to Darwin's theory that only viruses and bacteria should survive, being better equipped than higher creatures for the "struggle for existence."
   
   Why does man stand at the end of this ascending line? Only he can look back. We can look back at this line at the head of which we stand and we can see that the development leading to us is meaningful. Only we have the gift of distinguishing, of rationally understanding this development. It has a teleological direction; and yet the theory of evolution has a hard time dealing with this teleological direction of evolution. I want to speak about this in one of the next catecheses.
   
   
5. If we meditate with the Church on the Bible we are led again and again to the question whether the only alternative is either to assume the creator and ascribe all becoming to Him alone, or else to reduce everything to purely natural material causes. Darwin seems to deal with this alternative: either the creator or accident. Thus he says at the end of his work: "Very important authors seem to be entirely satisfied with the idea of an independent creation of the individual kinds. But in my view the idea that the coming to be and passing away of the kinds results from secondary causes, agrees better, given our present level of knowledge, with the laws stamped on matter by the creator." (Darwin, The Origin of Species.) So no creator of particular species or kinds, just natural causes. Do we have to accept this either-or? Let us notice something about the biblical creation-account: we read that God commanded the earth saying, "let the earth put forth vegetation" (Genesis 1:11) and so "the earth brought forth vegetation"; that God commanded the water saying, "let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures" (Genesis 1:20); and finally that God commanded the earth saying, "let the earth bring forth living creatures" (Genesis 1:24). Does this not mean that God can also work through the earth? The classical Christian teaching says that God creates not only being but also the power of acting efficaciously. We can be co-creators. We have not only received being but also the gift of acting efficaciously at our level. All of this points to something that is essential to the Christian understanding of creation: the creator gives His creatures not only being but also the power of acting. He gives being unconditionally by creating from nothing, but He makes His creatures co-creators by giving them the laws, the powers, and the capacity for acting on their own. This is without any doubt the greatness of the biblical and Christian idea of creation.
   
   So it is entirely compatible with our faith in creation that the "secondary causes" of Darwin, that is the natural causes, are an expression of the activity of the creator. There is a very well known case of this compatibility, a case to which we all owe our existence. I refer to the collaboration of our parents, who generated us, with the creator, who created us. Each human being is created immediately by God. And yet the indispensable condition for our coming into existence is the fact that our parents generated us. Here we see how the "secondary causes" of Darwin work together with the activity of the creator. Is it not meaningful to assume that this happens at all levels of creation, even at the lowest, so that there is a working together of God and creature even in the most elementary particles of matter? We believe and profess that every human being is immediately created by God, that his "I" and his "self," his being a person comes from the creator, who calls him into being for his own sake. This definitely happens, however, through the "secondary causality" of the parents generating a child. I realize that we are here probing deep and mysterious relations, which cost us no small intellectual effort.
   
   
6. The creation-account says something else: through the one Creator, by whose creative hand all creatures have come forth, all of them are united among themselves. The bond of creaturehood binds together all creatures. For He created everything, the stars and the mountains, the seas and the rivers, life in all its forms. Since everything is created, everything is also united. An indissoluble solidarity of creatures prevails in creation. Even man is "only" a creature and has creaturehood in common with a fly and with water. The pathos of the Darwinian model is strongly animated by this fundamental feeling of solidarity with the whole of creation. We are a part of creation. Darwin speaks of the "shared descent that forms the invisible bond that all students of nature have unconsciously sought" (The Origin of Species, ch. 14.) He thought that he could find this bond without a creator and that he could show this solidarity better without acknowledging any activity of a creator. He saw in the fact that all living beings belong to the same genealogical line an idea that fired his imagination, and in this we can only agree with him. It is indeed wonderful and uplifting to realize what all creatures have in common.
   
   I have the suspicion that modern philosophy since Descartes has radically separated man from the rest of nature, opposing him as a spiritual being to nature. Darwin takes man back into nature, saying that man is a child of the same nature that has brought forth everything else. But Darwin took a step in the wrong direction insofar as he went too far and lost sight of what distinguishes man.
   
   
7. The creation account points us in the right direction when it speaks of the seventh day, the day of rest. Creation has a goal. In man creation gains knowledge of its creator. It can recognize Him and praise Him. The sabbath rest brings out the goal of creation. This is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church says simply and clearly: "The world was created for the glory of God" (293-294).

There is much that we might say on this great subject. Let us make just one point, which will also serve to conclude this catechesis and to introduce the next one. The great Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann, whom I regard as one of the most intellectually stimulating opponents of ideological Darwinism, agreed with Darwin about many of his observations, but he also pointed out clearly Darwin's deficiencies, especially "Darwinism's obsession with means-end relations," as Joachim Illies put it in his biography of Portmann. Illies also wrote that the world of organic life is "full of non-purposeful beauty, patterns without practical value, essence that presents itself without any survival value - inexplicable and hence meaningless and offensive for the well-ordered mechanistic interpretation of reality." This beauty free of all practical purpose, these splendid patterns that are never visible and have no usefulness but are simply a manifestation of beauty, "selflessly" pouring themselves out: we understand their meaning only when we see creation in terms of its goal of praising the creator.

Perhaps it will help in the debate about "intelligent design" to remember that there is in creation something like "artistic design." Perhaps by considering this purpose-free profusion of beauty we will better realize what is at issue in the critique of evolutionism as a materialistic metaphysics. Perhaps music, which is like science in being strictly mathematical, will help us to transcend the horizon of materialism and so to become open for the melody of the creator.

(© Kardinal Christoph Schönborn)

"In the Beginning God Created..."

Second Catechesis: "In the Beginning God Created..." on November 13, 2005, St. Stephan's Cathedral, Vienna.

(Provisional) Translation from the German by Prof. John F. Crosby

I hear that "March of the Penguins" is a wonderful film. Unfortunately I haven't yet seen it. In just a few weeks it has become a worldwide hit. In a fascinating way it portrays how these waddling animals live, care for their young, and survive in extreme climates. And yet we have once again a dispute over evolution. Some Christian commentators in the United States are impressed by the virtues of the penguins; they think that the ability of these animals to withstand extreme temperatures, the ocean, and their natural enemies among the animals, as well as to be exemplary and sacrificial monogamous parents, is evidence against the theory of Darwin and in favor of "intelligent design." It is evidence for a creator and against Darwin, as some have recently said. The director of this film, a French director, emphatically resisted being co-opted like this; he says that he was "raised on the milk of Darwin" and simply wanted to make an animal movie, nothing more.

It seems to me that this controversy is typical for the state of affairs today. People get worked up over the issue, they are ready to quarrel about it, to call each other names. The controversy reminds us of something like a "culture-war." Thus Salman Rushdie, writing in the New York Times as well as in Die Zeit, sharply attacks those religions with which no peace can be achieved and no compromise can be reached. He says, "Moslem voices all over the world declare that the theory of evolution is incompatible with Islam." For him the theory of "intelligent design" is "the theory that wants to project into the beauty of creation the antiquated idea of a creator." He even thinks that this theory deserves to be treated with scorn.

Just recently in Die Zeit one could read much polemic and aggressiveness against "those who say that they have been created by God." Those who think this way are stamped as fanatics. Maybe some of them really are, or at least act fanatically, but just because people think that they are created by God does not yet justify such a fanatical rejection of their belief. In this article in Die Zeit we read that in Darwin's time "most people accepted crude religious creation myths," whereas this is no longer the case today. Leaving aside all polemics one might respond by asking whether the people who take delight in Haydn's wonderful oratory, The Creation, accept "crude myths."

It seems to me that the rude tone and the aggressive attitude in this debate, especially on the part of those who hold out against any criticism of Darwinism, is not a good sign. But let me add right away that religious fanaticism is also not a good sign.

Are all who believe that they were created by God blind fanatics? Or is delight in Haydn's Creation just a romantic swelling of feeling? Can rational people still believe in a creator and see the world as created? That is the theme of today's catechesis. I promise to listen without any polemical spirit to all that faith and reason have to say on this subject and to listen to all that is said about it. A scientist wrote me in response to my article in the New York Times that he would like to believe in a creator but just cannot believe in an "old man with a long white beard." I answered him saying that no one expects him to believe this. On the contrary, such a childish conception of a creator has nothing to do with what the Bible says about the creator and with the article of the creed that says, "I believe in God, the father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth." In my response I wrote him that it would be a good thing if his religious knowledge would not lag so far behind his scientific knowledge and if his vast knowledge as a scientist did not go hand in hand with what is after all childish religious conceptions. For an old man with a long white beard is certainly not what is meant by the creator. I recommended that he simply read what, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says on this subject.

Now there is another misunderstanding that is constantly found in the ongoing discussion, and I have to deal with it right here at the beginning. I refer to what is called "creationism." Nowadays the belief in a creator is automatically run together with "creationism." But in fact to believe in a creator is not the same as trying to understand the six days of creation literally, as six chronological days, and as trying to prove scientifically, with whatever means available, that the earth is 6000 years old. These attempts of certain Christians at taking the Bible absolutely literally, as if it made chronological and scientific statements - I have met defenders of this position who honestly strive to find scientific arguments for it - is called "fundamentalism." Or more exactly, within American Protestantism this view of the Christian faith originally called itself fundamentalism. Starting from the belief that the Bible is inspired by God, so that every word in it is immediately inspired by Him, the six days of creation are taken in a strict literal way. It is understandable that in the United States many people, using not only kinds of polemics but lawsuits as well, vehemently resist the teaching of creationism in the schools. But it is an entirely different matter when certain people would like to see the schools deal with the critical questions that have been raised with regard to Darwinism; they have a reasonable and legitimate concern.

The Catholic position on this is clear. St. Thomas says that "one should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous." It is simply nonsense to say that the world is only 6000 years old. To try to prove this scientifically is what St. Thomas calls provoking the irrisio infidelium, the scorn of the unbelievers. It is not right to use such false arguments and to expose the faith to the scorn of unbelievers. This should suffice on the subject of "creationism" and "fundamentalism" for the entire remainder of this catechesis; what we want to say about it should be so clear that we do not have to return to the subject.

And now to our main subject: what does the Christian faith say about "God the creator" and about creation? The classical Catholic teaching, as we find it explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or more compactly presented in the Compendium of the Catechism, contains four basic elements.

1. The doctrine of creation says that there is an absolute beginning - "in the beginning God created heaven and earth" - and that this absolute beginning is the free and sovereign act of establishing being out of nothing. This is the main theme of today's catechesis: the absolute beginning.

2. The doctrine of creation also says that there are various creatures. This is the distinction of creatures, "each according to its kind," of which we read in the first chapter of Genesis. This is the work of the first six days as related on the first page of the Bible. I will speak on this subject in the next catechesis, in which I will ask what it means to say that according to our faith in creation God has willed a multiplicity of creatures.

3. We come now to a point of fundamental importance for the Christian belief about creation. It is also a point about which we will be speaking later today. We believe not only in an absolute beginning of creation but in the preservation of creation; God holds in being all that He has created. We refer here to His continuing work of creation, which in theology is called the creatio continua, the ongoing act of creation.

4. And finally, the doctrine of creation most definitely includes the belief that God directs His creation. He did not just set it in motion once at the beginning and then let it run its course. No, the divine guidance of creation, which we call divine providence, is a part of the doctrine of creation. God leads His work to its final end.

There you have the basics of this year-long catechesis. I will not only be concerned with the doctrines of the faith, but will try with each aspect of my subject to enter into dialogue with the natural sciences, at least as far as my limited scientific knowledge permits. What I am of course especially concerned with is the question of how the belief in creation is related to the theory of evolution.

Let us begin today with the question of the absolute beginning. The scientific theory of the beginning of the universe that is now generally recognized is the theory of the big bang. 75 years ago the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, discovered that our universe is expanding at an unimaginable speed, the speed of light. In the meantime it has come to be assumed that the universe is expanding even faster.

It must, therefore, have once begun to expand at the big bang from a highly concentrated and compact point of beginning. It began explosively to expand. This theory is supported by observations and especially those concerning the "background radiation" in the universe, which is taken to be a kind of fallout from the big bang. Of course many questions remain wrapped in mystery and probably cannot be answered at all by the theory itself, but they surely remain as questions that invite the rational inquiry of scientists.

There is first of all the quite simple question: where did the universe expand to? Did it expand into space? But there is no space "outside" of the universe, beyond the gigantic dimensions of the cosmos, which is 14 billion light-years in extent, as is generally assumed (light travels 186,000 miles per second). Some very recent research seems to indicate that the expansion has been going on for 46 billion light years; but with these huge magnitudes it does not make much difference, since they are absolutely unimaginable. Our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years across. Who can imagine such a thing? Well, beyond these gigantic dimensions of the cosmos there is no space. I recently read in Spectrum der Wissenschaft that the space in which we live "emerged with the big bang and has been expanding ever since." There is no space outside of the universe.

The question of time is no less puzzling. For the big bang means that the universe had one beginning and moves towards an end. We are strongly tempted to ask what there was before the beginning. The answer can only be: just as there is space only because of the expansion of the universe - there is space wherever it expands - so it is with time. There is no time before time; it comes about with the big bang, just like space does. There is time only with the cosmos and within the cosmos.

In recent decades the natural sciences have tried to approach this origin of the universe. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prize laureate in physics, wrote in 1977 a famous book called The First Three Minutes, which dealt with the first three minutes of the universe. It is fascinating to learn what the science of today says about the decisive first moments after the big bang. Everything that developed later, the galaxies, stars, planets, life on our earth, all of it was decided in the very first moments.

Our well-known physicist, Walter Thirring, wrote in a book of his that came out last year and was called Cosmic Impressions: Traces of God in the Laws of Nature: "Had the big bang been too weak and had everything collapsed, we would not exist. Had it been too powerful, everything would have dissipated too quickly," and again we would not exist. He compares the origin of the world with starting a rocket that is supposed to put a satellite in orbit around the earth. He says, "If the rocket has too little push, it falls back to the earth, but if it has too much, it escapes into space." He then adds that with the big bang the precision needed for bringing about our world was incomparably greater than for launching a satellite into orbit. The precision of this event is "so far beyond man's power to conceive" that Prof. Thirring exclaims, "What an absurd idea that this should have happened by chance!"

Do we have here the point at which we should insert our belief in a creator? Do we introduce Him as it were at the limit reached by science? Does the creator begin to act beyond this threshold? Let us be careful! We must not be too quick to assume that God produced the big bang, as if in the smallest fraction of the very first second we come up against the wall behind which we find the creator, or reach the point where only the creator can explain what happened. This idea flits around in many scientific and even in some theological discussions. It is defended vigorously by some and attacked by others. Is God at work at the beginning in the sense that He gave the signal for the great game of the universe to begin?

I now invite you - and I promise you that it will not be entirely easy - to take a look at what the faith really teaches about these things. We will see that the Church's teaching on creation is at once quite simple but also very deep and demanding, and that we have to get beyond many of our ideas and images if we are going to enter into the mystery of creation and to approach it by faith and also by reason. Let us begin again with the first sentence of the Bible: "in the beginning God created heaven and earth" (Gen. 1:1). "Bereschit bara," says the Hebrew text. "Bara" is a word used in the Bible only for God. Only God creates. The Hebrew word is used exclusively for the creative activity of God. The Catechism (290) says that in these first words of scripture three things are being affirmed:

1) The eternal God has called into existence all that exists outside of Him. He has created everything, heaven and earth. The first sentence of the Bible does not say that God gave a signal or a push in the beginning, but that He called into being everything that in any way exists.

2) He alone is the creator. "Bara" always has God as its subject. He alone can call into being.

3) All that exists, heaven and earth, depends on God who gives it being.

In order to understand these three affirmations we have to clear away three misunderstandings.

1) The first and most usual misunderstanding is that God is seen as the first cause. He is indeed the first cause of all causes but He is not as it were at the beginning of a long chain of causes, like a pool player who hits a ball which rolls and hits another ball which in turn hits yet another - as if God were just the first cause in a long series of causes.

Here is another analogy that has been eagerly used since the Enlightenment: the analogy of a watchmaker, who produces a watch which then runs on its own until it has to be wound up again or occasionally repaired; the little thing runs as soon as it is made. The fact that Richard Dawkins sees no use for such a watchmaker in explaining our world, is not the point that makes him an atheist. Steven Weinberg, whom I cited above, formulates as follows the usual assumption about scientific method: "The only possible scientific procedure consists in assuming that no divine intervention takes place and then in seeing how far science gets on this assumption" (Dreams of a Final Theory). The scientific method, as understood by Weinberg and many others, is thus a conscious rejection of any "divine intervention." They want to see how far we can get with this method without having to posit a watchmaker or a pool player or a starter at the beginning of the game.

Sometimes the way in which the scientific method excludes any divine intervention is called "methodological atheism." I do not see it that way; this excluding is simply authentic scientific method and has nothing to do with atheism. The scientific method should not assume a watchmaker who intervenes; it searches for the explanation of mechanisms, connections, causal relations, and events.

We believe in a creator, not in one cause among others, one which occasionally intervenes when the limits of all other causes have been reached. God does not intervene like a mother who intervenes when her children fight but who otherwise lets them play with each other. Of course there are wonderful interventions of God, as we will see later. God is sovereign in relation to His creation and He can heal a cancer with His sovereign creative power. This is what we call a miracle. But at present we are talking about the act of creating the world, and this is not just the first push in a long chain of causes but is rather the more fundamental thing of sovereignly conferring being. "God spoke and it came to be." All that exists owes its being to this call, to this word, to this creative act of God. He created everything, heaven and earth, and there is nothing that was not created by Him. He created everything in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible (for we believe that there are also invisible creatures, namely the angels). Everything is created reality. This is the first and most important affirmation to be made; later on we will inquire more exactly into how it is to be understood. But before going further, let us raise the following question: is this affirmation a pure article of faith, or can each human being understand it with his reason? The Catechism answers (286): "Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through His works, by the light of human reason, even if this knowledge is often obscured and disfigured by error. This is why faith comes to confirm and enlighten reason in the correct understanding of this truth."

With our reason we can in principle know that the things of the world are created, even though it is only revelation that fully illumines our mind about creation. What can reason know? It can know that the world and all of reality does not exist through itself. All is dependent. Nothing made itself. I set aside for the moment the much-discussed question about the self-organization of matter. At least this much can be said: matter does not exist through itself. We have made neither the world nor ourselves. Our very limited powers suffice only to change what already exists, sometimes for the better, but unfortunately sometimes for the worse. But we always work with something that is already given. Given is first of all the fact that this world exists at all and we exist in it. It may pain us to be so dependent and it may offend our pride, but the teaching about creation tells us that there is no humiliation in acknowledging our dependency. It is no humiliation to be dependent on the creator, this rather opens for us undreamed-of possibilities. The other side of this dependency is the very positive fact that the creator holds everything, bears everything, encompasses everything, sheltering us in His hand.

2. And so I come to the second affirmation about the creator and His act of creating. For a start let me say it like this, surprising and perhaps provocative as it may sound: from the side of God the act of creating involves "no movement." Why? All making and producing and acting that we observe in the world is a moving or changing of something that already exists. A carpenter makes a table out of wood, he changes the wood, he forms it, giving a new shape to some pre-given material. Someone at home takes a bunch of ingredients and makes a wonderful meal out of them, shaping pre-given elements into something new. But it is not something absolutely new, it is not a real creating, it is only a shaping. Things are changed so that they become edible. It is the same way with the artist, with the technician, even with intellectually creative people. Even my best ideas are not absolute novelties. They always presuppose that others have already done some thinking and that I have already done some thinking. My ideas come from the exchange of ideas with others, and when I get some special insight, it is only the forming of what is already at hand and already exists. Perhaps something really new sometimes comes about. This raises a question that we will treat later on in this catechetical cycle: what about the emergence of novelty in the world, especially when new kinds of being emerge in the course of evolution?

Now we see what is decisively different about the creative act of God: it is without movement. It does not change that which already exists. It does not form some pre-given material. In most of the creation myths that we find in the world religions the gods create by transforming something that already exists. They are demi-urges, they form the chaos or some primal matter that is already there, they fashion worlds; but only the God who encounters us in the Bible is really a creator. The early Christian writers oppose the many ancient creation myths, or rather the many ancient myths about the emergence of the world. Thus St. Theophilus of Antioch, writing around the year 180, says: "If God had drawn the world out of some pre-existing stuff, what would have been so special about that? If you give to a human worker some material, he makes out of it whatever he wants. But the power of God shows itself in the fact that He starts from nothing to make anything He wants." This does not mean that "nothing" is something out of which He produces things, but that God's creative act is a sovereign act of bringing into being. We can also say: it is a pure act of "calling into being." God spoke and it came to be. That is what is so wonderful and so unique about the biblical belief in creation.

3. We have now to mention a third difficulty. The doctrine of creation says that God did not create in time, at some point on a time line. His creative act is not a temporal act. I know that this is hard to understand. All that we experience is experienced on the time line of yesterday, today, tomorrow (there is the beginning of this catechesis and the end of it). The creative act of God is not the first act in a long stretch of time, it is not once done and then over with, as if God has, as it were, done His job and can now put His hands in His pockets.

No, "in the beginning God created..." This beginning is always in God's eternity. For us creatures it is a temporal beginning. Once I began to be 60 years ago. For God there is no temporal beginning. Once the universe began to be 14 billion years ago, but God's creative act is not in time, He rather creates time. He is eternal. And His act of creating is not accomplished in this or that moment, but He calls the world into being and holds it in being. Creation takes place now, in the now of God.

In the Letter to the Hebrews we read: "He upholds all things by the word of His power" (Heb 1:3). This is why we have to say that if God would let go of us and of creation even for a second, we would fall back into the nothingness from which we came and from which He called us. I grant you that this is not easy to grasp. It requires us to try to transcend our temporal and spatial ways of thinking. Then we enter into a wonderfully coherent view of the world.

In conclusion I want at least to touch on two important points, and this for the sake of completing what has been said, or providing further background for it.

1. God creates in absolute freedom - nothing forces Him to it, nothing requires it of Him. He does not act out of need, as we do. We are always in need of something that we lack, like food or sleep, because want to realize something, to realize ourselves. God does not have to realize Himself. By creating He does not complete His being. Creation is not a part of Him nor are we a part of Him, but we are freely set in being by Him, freely created. This means that we are willed by Him.

2. This has immense consequences for our understanding of our world and our ourselves. Since God has created in sovereign freedom, He has given His creatures real independence of being. Creatures are themselves, they really have their own being, their own power of acting, the gift of their autonomy. This reaches all the way to the freedom of human beings, to the fact that God has created freedom, which is the greatest marvel of all in creation.

Before we look at the consequences of this, let us distinguish the Christian position from three other interrelated accounts of the relation between God and the world. a) There is the emanationist account according to which the world is an emanation of God, a "piece" of Him that is of lesser value, an inferior form of God. b) The pantheistic account sees everything in God an as God. God is in everything but in such a way that everything is God, even the trees and the animals. c) The monistic account says that there is only one substance or being and that is God; all else either does not exist or is God. All three of these accounts, which even today have many defenders in the esoteric literature, commit this one fundamental mistake: they keep God from being God and they keep creatures, which are only "parts" of God, from having any being of their own. These three accounts seems to be very "devout" and so they are always deceiving people. They seem to exalt the creature, raising it to a divine level, but the truth is the very opposite, as we will now try to see.

I said that creation has a real being of its own as a result of the fact that God creates in sovereign freedom without having any compulsion or urge to create, that He gives creatures their being and power of acting as a gift. If creatures were an "emanation" of the divine being, then they would not be independent in being, they would not have their own being and reality. It is just because we are created by God in complete freedom that we can really "be ourselves."

In the next catechesis I want to explain the far-reaching consequences that this has. We will see that in evolutionism (remember that I distinguish the scientific theory of evolution from the inflation of evolution into the metaphysics of "evolutionism") one has a hard time acknowledging the "being of their own" that creatures have. Everything is blurred in the stream of evolution, nothing has a basis, nothing stands in itself, nothing has its own reality. Everything is just a transitory image in the flow of time. How different is the belief in creation, according to which all creatures have their own being, their own form, their own power of acting, and, in the case of human beings, their own freedom. More about this in the next catechesis.

We have to draw the very important and essential conclusion that creatures have their own being because God is utterly free in creating them. They stand in themselves and exist on their own, for they are willed by God. St. Thomas puts it like this: God gives things not only being but also their own power of acting efficaciously. This principle finds its supreme realization in man: we are creatures who have not only received being but have also received spirit, will, and freedom. I know of no other teaching that combines in such an intelligible and convincing way the dependency of all creatures on their creator with the independence of these creatures. And the reason is simple: since God creates in sovereign freedom, He gives His creatures the sovereign freedom to be themselves. Since He has no other reason for creating than His own goodness, He gives His creatures a share in His goodness: "And God saw that it was good."

I hope that I have been able to show a little that the Christian belief in a creator is something entirely different from the belief in a deistic watchmaker who only sets things in motion at the beginning with a push from without. To be created means to have received being and existence. It means to be supported by the giver of all being, of all motion, of all life. It means to have received everything from His goodness and to remain encompassed and held fast by His goodness. This faith in a creator takes nothing away from creatures, as many fear. It is a faith that unites both dependency and freedom, paradoxical as that may sound. For to be dependent on God is not to be degraded or to be treated like a child. God is not an arbitrary dictator nor is His action as creator the whim of a tyrant. It is the very dignity of the creature to have received everything from Him. Belief in the creator is thus the best way of guaranteeing and protecting the dignity of His creatures. If everything is just a product of accident and necessity, then we have to wonder why creatures should merit any special respect or dignity.

But is there a dignity proper to creatures at all, "each according to its kind"? This will be the question we ask in the next catechesis: are there different kinds of creatures, as implied in "each according to its kind," and are they willed by the creator?

(© Christoph Cardinal Schönborn)