Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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foretold human affairs—had promoted observa-

tions and mathematical analysis. Many ancient re-

ligions associated planets with gods and found re-

ligious significance in configurations of celestial

arrangements. Egyptian temples were aligned with

specific stars and Stonehenge in southwestern Eng-

land faced sunrise at summer solstice.

Religion motivated Greek as well as Babylon-

ian cosmological studies. Plato’s fourth-century

B.C.E. conception of cosmic order was permeated

with ethical overtones and moral significance, and

during the second century

C.E. Ptolemy cultivated

cosmology particularly with respect to divine and

heavenly things. He wrote “I know that I am mor-

tal and the creature of a day; but when I search out

the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet

no longer touch the Earth, but, side by side with

Zeus himself, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of

the gods” (p. 55).

Similarly for Christians, “The Heavens declare

the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). During the early Mid-

dle Ages, cosmology was regarded as a hand-

maiden, subservient to theology, pursued not for its

own sake but for its usefulness in the interpretation

of Holy Scripture. Both Augustine of Hippo

(354–430) and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) in-

sisted that the truth of scripture is inviolable. Given

possible alternative interpretations of scripture,

however, they warned against rigid adherence to

any one of them. A hasty choice could prove detri-

mental to faith, were science later to prove that

choice untenable. Study and contemplation of the

cosmos, the perfect expression of divine creativity

and providence, were for some a way to know God.

Scientific knowledge was not precious enough

to prevent the Roman emperor Justinian (483–565),

a Christian, from closing the Academy at Athens in

529

C.E. and forbidding pagans to teach. Leading

philosophers left Athens for Persia, though some

returned after a few years and the Academy may

have continued in some form. Further impeding

cosmological inquiry was a growing inability to re-

cruit competitively against the church as a profes-

sion for bright young minds. Cosmological study

had received little patronage in ancient societies,

with the exception of the Museum at Alexandria,

and its precarious position was not altered signifi-

cantly under early Christianity.

Greek science almost disappeared from West-

ern Europe between 500 and 1100

C.E., before it

was recovered through translations of the works

of Aristotle and Plato, and in Arabic treatises and

commentaries on Aristotle. Cosmological studies

flourished within Muslim culture and civilization,

sometimes under rulers interested in astrology. A

few Islamic traditionalists criticized these practices

for leading to the establishment of schools for

heretics and the teaching of magic. The Istanbul

observatory, built in 1577, was torn down shortly

after its completion. In the wake of the famous

comet of 1577 there had followed in quick order

plague, defeats of Turkish armies, and deaths of

several important persons. These misfortunes

were attributed to the attempt, manifested in con-

struction of the observatory, to pry into the secrets

of nature.

After transmission from Islam to the West, Aris-

totelian cosmology fused with Christian theology

into Scholasticism. In this form, Aristotle’s cosmol-

ogy permeated thought in Western Europe be-

tween roughly 1200 and 1500, especially in uni-

versities. The Aristotelian position that necessary

cosmological principles can be known conjured

the specter of truths necessary to cosmology but

contradictory to dogmas of the Christian faith. For

example, the Aristotelian assertion that the world

had no beginning and no end, and thus was inde-

structible, seemingly conflicted with the possibility

of a Day of Judgment. In 1270 the bishop of Paris

condemned several propositions derived from the

teachings of Aristotle, including the eternity of the

world and the necessary control of terrestrial

events by celestial bodies. In 1277 Pope John XXI

directed the bishop of Paris to investigate intellec-

tual controversies at the university. Within three

weeks the bishop condemned 219 propositions.

Excommunication was the penalty for holding

even one of the damned errors.

Though intended to contain and control scien-

tific inquiry, the condemnation may have helped

free cosmology from Aristotelian prejudices and

modes of argument. The Scientific Revolution may

owe something to the condemnation of 1277, even

if cosmologists waited until the seventeenth cen-

tury to repudiate Aristotelian cosmology.

The condemnation of 1277 with its emphasis

on God’s absolute power undisputedly led to the

nominalist thesis. The Aristotelian position that the

necessary principles of cosmology and physics can

be established was rejected. Cosmology now was

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understood to be a working hypothesis in agree-

ment with observed phenomena. The truth of any

particular hypothesis could not be insisted upon,

because God could have made the world in a dif-

ferent manner but with the same observational

consequences. Cosmologists might come to con-

clusions, but they could not insist that their con-

clusions limited God’s power to have created the

world in another way. Tentative, but not neces-

sary, cosmological theories posed no challenge to

religious authority.

While conceding the divine omnipotence of

Christian doctrine and acceding to religious au-

thority, the nominalist, instrumentalist, positivist

thesis also freed science from religious authority. It

was a convenient stance in a time when religious

matters were taken seriously and heretical cosmo-

logical thoughts could place their adherents in se-

rious trouble with powerful ecclesiastical authori-

ties. In the new intellectual climate, imaginative

and ingenious discussions flourished.

Hypothetical cosmologies, however, were not

the stuff of revolution. It was not until the goal of

“saving the appearances,” as the nominalist en-

deavor has been called, was replaced with a quest

to discover physical reality, that Aristotelian cos-

mology was destroyed and replaced with a new

worldview. Confidence that the essential structure

and operation of the cosmos is knowable seems to

have been a prerequisite to the work of Nicolaus

Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–

1642), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Isaac

Newton (1642–1727). Some of their necessary cos-

mological principles would conflict with dogmas

of the Christian faith.

To account for the apparent daily motion of

the heavens, Copernicus placed the sun in the cen-

ter of the universe and the Earth in revolution

around the sun and rotating on its axis. An unau-

thorized foreword to Copernicus’s 1543 De revolu-

tionibus orbium caelestium (On the Revolutions of

Heavenly Spheres) presented the heliocentric the-

ory as a convenient mathematical fiction. Coperni-

cus, however, believed that he was describing the

real motions of the world.

Copernicus anticipated criticism, acknowledg-

ing in the preface to De revolutionibus “that to as-

cribe movement to the Earth must indeed seem an

absurd performance on my part to those who know

that many centuries have consented to the estab-

lishment of the contrary judgment, namely that the

Earth is placed immovably as the central point in

the middle of the Universe” (p. 137). Copernicus,

however, did not anticipate criticism from the

Catholic Church, in whose service he had long la-

bored as a canon and advised the papacy on cal-

endar reform. Indeed, Copernicus dedicated his

book to Pope Paul III, in hope that “my labors con-

tribute somewhat even to the Commonwealth of

the Church, of which your Holiness is now Prince.

For not long since the question of correcting the

ecclesiastical calendar was debated” (p. 143).

Citation of scripture against the new cosmol-

ogy was not long in coming. Even before Coperni-

cus’ book was published, the reformer Martin

Luther (1483–1546) warned that “this fool wishes

to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sa-

cred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the

Sun to stand still, and not the Earth” ( Josh. 10:13).

Literal adherence to the Bible was the foundation

of Protestant revolt against Catholic religious hege-

mony. Prior to the Counter-Reformation, the

Catholic Church was more liberal in its interpreta-

tion, and more accepting of Copernican cosmol-

ogy. It was taught in some Catholic universities

and used for the new calendar promulgated by

Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

Galileo and the Church

Revolutions in science, as in politics, often go be-

yond the limited changes that the people who start

a revolution have in mind. In Copernican cosmol-

ogy, the rotation of the Earth caused the stars’ ob-

served motion. Hence, the notion of the starry

sphere that carried the stars around was obsolete,

and soon human imagination distributed the stars

throughout a perhaps infinite space. Also, the Earth

was no longer unique; now it was merely one of

several similar objects in the solar system. And hu-

mankind was but one of possibly many intelligent

inhabitants of the universe. Soon questions arose:

If the Earth were a celestial planet, how did it dif-

fer from the divine heavens? Had each planet been

visited by an Adam and an Eve? Faith in an an-

thropocentric universe lay shattered, leaving hu-

mankind’s relationship with God uncertain. John

Donne’s 1611 poem The Anatomy of the World,

with its opening line the “new Philosophy calls all

in doubt,” and later “all Relation: Prince, Subject,

Father Son, are things forgot,” refers to Christian

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morality as well as the physical locations of the sun

and the Earth.

That the Earth was no longer unique was most

dramatically emphasized by Galileo. His telescopic

observations of the moon’s surface emphatically

demanded the revolutionary conclusion that the

moon was not a smooth sphere, as Aristotelians

had maintained, but was uneven and rough, like

the Earth. Another similarity, between Jupiter and

the Earth, was furnished by Galileo’s discovery of

four satellites of Jupiter, similar to the Earth’s single

satellite.

Galileo’s arguments in support of the new

Copernican cosmology culminated in a clash with

Catholic authorities so dramatic that it forms the

foundation of the most widely held stereotype re-

garding the general relationship between science

and religion. The conflict, however, was far from

inevitable. Initially, the primary opposition to

Galileo came from Aristotelian philosophers in Ital-

ian universities. At around the same time, a church

official remarked that the Bible tells how to go to

heaven, not how the heavens go. Wisely, the

Church was not eager to enter a scientific dispute.

As Augustine had suggested earlier, no cosmologi-

cal doctrine should ever be made an article of

faith, lest some better informed heretic exploit

misguided adherence to a scientific doctrine to im-

pugn the credibility of proper articles of faith.

Galileo’s Aristotelian philosophical opponents

were eager, however, to enlist the Church on their

side in their battle against Galileo, and a few indi-

vidual priests were induced to charge that the mo-

tion of the Earth was contrary to the Bible. Galileo,

in turn, sought to win the Church to his side, and to

silence potential objections to Copernican cosmol-

ogy based on scripture. In an open letter of 1615,

Galileo appealed to the authority of Augustine in

support of the thesis that no contradiction can exist

between the Bible and science when the Bible is

interpreted correctly. But Galileo was out of step

with the times. The Counter-Reformation, following

the Council of Trent, which had met from 1545 to

1563, now demanded tight control over Church

doctrine, the better to counter Protestants. Galileo

also cited Augustine’s warning not to make cosmo-

logical doctrine an article of faith. This was espe-

cially good advice when new scientific facts from

telescopic observations were still coming in.

In 1616 Pope Paul V submitted the questions

of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the

sun to the official qualifiers of disputed proposi-

tions. It is not clear why he chose to act. Galileo

expected the qualifiers to read the Bible

metaphorically, but they read it literally and found

both the motion of the Earth and the stability of

the sun false and absurd in philosophy. They did

not rule on the truth of Copernican cosmology in

terms of its agreement with nature. The qualifiers

found the motion of the Earth at least erroneous in

the Catholic faith and the stability of the sun for-

mally heretical. Here they exceeded their author-

ity, because only the pope or a Church Council

could decree a formal heresy, and Pope Paul ig-

nored this finding. Galileo was instructed no

longer to hold or defend the forbidden proposi-

tions: the motion of the Earth and the stability of

the sun. The Congregation of the Index issued an

edict forbidding reconciliation of Copernicanism

with the Bible and assertion of literal truth for the

forbidden propositions. One passage about scrip-

tural interpretation and passages calling the Earth

a star, implying that it moved like a planet, were

ordered removed from Copernicus’ De revolution-

ibus. Catholics could still discuss Copernican cos-

mology hypothetically, and little damage was

done to the science.

Had Galileo at his meeting with Church offi-

cials resisted the instruction not to hold or defend

the forbidden Copernican propositions, the Com-

missary General of the Inquisition was prepared to

order him, in the presence of a notary and wit-

nesses, not to hold, defend, or teach the proposi-

tions in any way, on pain of imprisonment. Galileo

did not resist, but the Commissary General may

have read his order anyway. It appears in the min-

utes of the meeting, unsigned and unwitnessed.

Galileo may have been advised to ignore the unau-

thorized intervention. Subsequent rumors that

Galileo had been compelled to abjure caused him

to ask for and receive an affidavit stating that he

was under no restriction other than the edict ap-

plying to all Catholics.

In 1623, a new pope was chosen. Urban VIII

was an intellectual, admired his friend Galileo,

granted him six audiences in 1624, and encour-

aged him to write a book on Copernican cosmol-

ogy. The book, Urban hoped, would demonstrate

that the Church did not interfere with the pursuit of

cosmology, only with unauthorized interpretations

of the Bible. The Dialogue on world systems was

published in 1632, with Church approval. Urban,

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however, became angry when he found his own

thoughts attributed to the Aristotelian representa-

tive in the Dialogue, who lost every argument.

Also, the timing was unfortunate for Galileo, his

book appearing in a climate of heightened suspi-

cion, even paranoia. A Spanish cardinal had re-

cently criticized Urban for his interference in a po-

litical struggle, and Urban had responded with a

purge of pro-Spanish members of his administra-

tion, including the secretary who, coincidentally,

had secured permission for printing the Dialogue.

Galileo was called to Rome and charged with

contravening the (unsigned and unauthorized)

1616 order of the Commissary General of the In-

quisition not to hold, defend, or teach the Coper-

nican propositions in any way. Galileo produced

his affidavit, signed and dated, but nonetheless

was found guilty. He was compelled to abjure,

curse, and detest his errors and heresies. Hence-

forth even hypothetical discussion of Copernican

cosmology was heresy for Catholics.

The Galileo fiasco has long been a major em-

barrassment for the Catholic Church, and in 1978

Pope John Paul II acknowledged that Galileo’s the-

ology was sounder than that of the judges who

condemned him. Galileo’s battle with religious au-

thority is the major historical source for the stereo-

type of an ineluctable conflict between science and

religion, but the stereotype is a vast oversimplifi-

cation, as most stereotypes are. This clash between

cosmology and religion was avoidable.

The Mechanical universe

Copernican cosmology, though revolutionary in

important respects, clung to Aristotelian circular

motion, whose cause generally was attributed to

God. Kepler, using Tycho Brahe’s (1546–1601) ob-

servations, showed that planetary orbits are ellipti-

cal. Kepler also found several mathematical rela-

tionships, such as the proportionality of the cubes

of the mean planetary distances to the squares of

the periodic times. Initially he attributed planetary

motion to moving souls, but within a few years

was searching for a physical principle. Kepler’s

cosmology was strongly Christian. He was con-

vinced that the creator had used mathematical ar-

chetypes to design the universe, and this religious

belief drove his cosmological research and shaped

his results, which were “a sacred sermon, a verita-

ble hymn to God the Creator,” showing “how great

are His wisdom, power, and goodness.”

An explanation of how the planets continue to

retrace the same paths forever around the sun be-

came a central problem of seventeenth- and eigh-

teenth-century cosmology. Newton showed math-

ematically that Kepler’s elliptical orbits as well as

several mathematical relationships, including the

proportionality of distances and times, were con-

sequences of a universal inverse-square law of

gravity. For Newton, the medium conveying action

must be immaterial. The omnipresence of God, an

immaterial ether, pervaded the Newtonian cosmos,

offering no resistance to bodies, but moving them.

Theological implications of Newton’s cosmol-

ogy were criticized in 1715 in a letter to Caroline,

Princess of Wales, from the philosopher and math-

ematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz

was a rival of Newton in the invention of the cal-

culus, each accusing the other of plagiarism. New-

ton’s friend Samuel Clarke answered in a letter to

Caroline, which she forwarded to Leibniz. In the

course of the debate Leibniz wrote five letters and

Clarke five replies, which were published in 1717.

Newton thought that his discoveries provided new

evidence of the existence and providence of God.

Irregularities in planetary motions caused by the

disturbing influence of other planets would in-

crease until the system wanted reformation. Leib-

niz charged that Newtonian views were contribut-

ing to a decline of natural religion in England. The

implication that God occasionally intervened in the

universe, much as a watchmaker has to wind up

and mend his work, derogated from God’s perfec-

tion. Clarke admitted that God had to intervene in

the universe, but only because intervention was

part of God’s plan.

Eighteenth-century belief in the orderliness of

the universe made determination of that order an

important theological, philosophical, and scientific

endeavor. William Whiston (1667–1752), Newton’s

successor at Cambridge University in 1703, argued

that the system of the stars, the work of the creator,

had a beautiful proportion, even if frail humans

were ignorant of the order. In 1750 the English as-

tronomer Thomas Wright (1711–1786) proposed a

model for the Milky Way (a luminous band of light

circling the heavens). Inspired by an incorrect

summary of Wright’s book, Immanuel Kant

(1724–1804) explained the Milky Way as a disk-

shaped system viewed from the Earth, which was

located in the plane of the disk. Thoroughly im-

bued with a belief in the order and beauty of God’s

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work, Kant went on to suggest that nebulous

patches of light in the Heavens are composed of

stars and are other Milky Ways, or island universes.

In the absence of large telescopes and revealing

observations of distant stars, philosophical and

theological speculations dominated cosmology.

This situation began to change after the English as-

tronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) proposed

a cosmological model rooted in observations.

From the 1780s onward, the heavens, penetrated

by Herschel’s large telescopes, increasingly were

understood as an expanded firmament of three

dimensions.

The universe was also thought of as a clock,

which Newtonians had argued required God’s oc-

casional reformation. But in 1786 the last major

problem in celestial mechanics was solved when

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) demonstrated

that the gravitational interactions of Jupiter and Sat-

urn were self-correcting, not in need of divine in-

tervention. Laplace also proposed a plausible

mechanism for the formation of the solar system,

which Newton had cited as reason for belief in di-

vine providence, given the small likelihood that

random chance could have been responsible. Re-

flecting the atheistic approach to nature of the

French Enlightenment, Laplace attempted to re-

place the hypothesis of God’s rule with a purely

physical theory that could also explain the ob-

served order of the universe. He was successful, at

least in his own mind. According to legend, when

Napoleon asked Laplace whether he had left any

place for the creator, Laplace replied that he had

no need of such a hypothesis.

Changing status of cosmology and religion

Cosmology and Christianity, formerly joined in

Western thought, were now estranged. Further-

more, science, flush with triumphant reductions of

all known phenomena of the system of the world

to the universal law of gravity, was replacing reli-

gion as the source to which people turned to for

inspiration, direction, and criteria of truth. The di-

vorce of God from the physical universe may well

have been inevitable with the rise of modern cos-

mology, however convinced were its founding fa-

thers that they were exploring and demonstrating

God’s wonders.

Christian conceptions increasingly were rele-

gated to aspects of cosmology not yet susceptible

to scientific observation and analysis. They con-

tinue to play a powerful role in debates over the

question of intelligent life elsewhere in the uni-

verse, in which extraterrestrials are potential evi-

dence of God’s omnipotence and benevolence. The

idea of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe also

challenges the conception of God as redeemer. Ac-

tual contact with extraterrestrials could well prove

devastating; anthropological studies of primitive so-

cieties confident of their place in the universe find

them disintegrating upon contact with an advanced

society pursuing different values and ways of life.

Once theology was king of the disciplines, au-

tonomous, the supreme principle by which all else

was understood, its fundamental postulates and

principles derived from divine revelation, inter-

preted and formulated within the tradition, and

producing knowledge of ultimate value. Cosmol-

ogy was a handmaiden, neither controlling funda-

mental knowledge nor ways of getting at it, its

truths holding a lower logical status and value. The

relationship between cosmology and religion is

now largely reversed; both religion and politics

now direct appeals for legitimacy to science.

An example is found in Georges Lemaître

(1894–1966), an early proponent of an expanding

universe. Lemaître was a Belgian astrophysicist and

a Catholic priest, and from 1960 until his death he

was president of the Pontifical Academy of Sci-

ences. He offered a second chance for the Catholic

Church to embrace and be embraced by a second

Galileo. Also, in 1952, Pope Pius XII argued that

modern Big Bang cosmology affirmed the notion

of a transcendental creator. At the same time, Fred

Hoyle (1915–2001), a leading creator and propo-

nent of the rival steady state cosmology, was using

it to further his anti-religious polemic, arguing that

there was no room in his theory for a creator.

In politics, also, cosmology is appealed to

for validation. Another early proponent of an

expanding universe, the Russian mathematician

Alexander Friedmann (1888–1925), was hailed as

an example of great Soviet science, no matter that

difficult conditions in revolutionary Russia in the

early 1920s and Friedmann’s early death from ty-

phoid fever severely limited his scientific output.

During Stalin’s rule, Soviet cosmologists were ex-

pected to serve the party by providing a cosmol-

ogy congruent with official party ideology.

After serving for many centuries as hand-

maiden to religion, science, including cosmology,

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now commands supreme status among intellectual

disciplines. When appeals for validation and legit-

imacy are made, now it is more often to cosmol-

ogy than to religion. Once intertwined, cosmology

and religion have become estranged. Relative to

cosmic time and space, human concerns approach

insignificance. Much of modern cosmology has be-

come “naturalized,” shorn of its former human

connections, particularly religion.

See also ARISTOTLE; AUGUSTINE; COSMOLOGY,

HYSICAL ASPECTS; EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE;

ALILEO GALILEI, KANT, IMMANUEL; NEWTON,

SAAC; PLATO; THOMAS AQUINAS

Bibliography

Alexander, H. G. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, To-

gether with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and

Opticks. Manchester, UK: Manchester University

Press, 1956.

Copernicus. On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres. In

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Plane-

tary Astronomy in the Development of Western

Thought. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1957.

Crowe, Michael J. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate

1750–1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from

Kant to Lowell. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986.

Drake, Stillman, trans. and ed. Discoveries and Opinions

of Galileo. New York: Doubleday, 1957.

Gilkey, Landon, “The Structure of Academic Revolution.”

In The Nature of Scientific Discovery, ed. Owen Gin-

gerich. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution

Press, 1975.

Grant, Edward. “The Condemnation of 1277, God’s Ab-

solute Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Mid-

dle Ages.” Viator 10 (1979): 211–244.

Hetherington, Norriss S. Cosmology: Historical, Literary,

Philosophical, Religious, and Scientific Perspectives.

New York: Garland, 1993.

Kragh, Helge. Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical

Development of Two Theories of the Universe. Prince-

ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Lindberg, David C., and Numbers, Ronald L. God and Na-

ture: Historical Essays on the Encounter between

Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1986.

Odum, Herbert H. “The Estrangement of Celestial Me-

chanics and Religion.” Journal of the History of Ideas

27 (1966): 533–548.

Olson, Richard. “Science, Scientism and Anti-Science in

Hellenic Athens: A New Whig Interpretation.” History

of Science 14 (1978): 179–199.

Ptolemy. “Epigram to the Almagest.” In Owen Gingerich,

The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler. New

York: American Institute of Physics, 1993.

White, Andrew D. A History of the Warfare of Science with

Theology in Christendom (1897). New York: George

Braziller, 1995.

NORRISS HETHERINGTON

CREATED CO-CREATOR

A dynamic theological anthropology with the con-

cept of the created co-creator in its core is elabo-

rated by theologian Philip Hefner: Humans are cre-

ated by God to be co-creators in the creation that

God has purposefully brought into being. The

word created thus relates to being created by God

as part of the evolutionary reality (a view some-

times criticised for demeaning humans understood

as imago dei). The word co-creator reflects the

freedom of humans to participate in fulfilling God’s

purposes (a view sometimes criticised for super-el-

evating humans to the same level as God). The

paradigm of the created co-creator is Jesus Christ

who reveals that the essential reality of humans

has never been outside God.

See also EVOLUTION, BIOLOGICAL; EVOLUTION, HUMAN

Bibliography

Hefner, Philip. The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and

Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993.

Klein, Ralph W. ed. Philip Hefner: Created Co-Creator.

Currents in Theology and Mission 28, no. 3–4 (2001).

HUBERT MEISINGER

CREATIO CONTINUA

The term creatio continua refers to God’s continu-

ing creative activity throughout the history of the

universe. In a sense, most theologians accept cre-

atio continua, since creation is the dependence of

the whole of space-time on God. But more tradi-

tional views hold that because God is timeless and

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immutable, there is only one divine creative act,

which originates the whole of space-time from first

to last. Those who speak of creatio continua think

of creation taking place in many successive acts,

partly in response to events in time. Thus, at any

particular time God’s creation has not been com-

pleted, and the future is partly open, in some the-

ological views, even for God.

See also CREATIO CONTINUA

KEITH WARD

CREATION

Creation refers to the idea that the whole universe

is brought into being and sustained by a personal

agent, God, who is beyond the universe. Since cre-

ation is an intentional act, God is usually said to

envisage what will be created, and to intend that it

will come into existence. Knowledge and will are

thus attributes of a creator God.

Creation in various religions

Many religions have the concept of a creator God.

In the late nineteenth century, the anthropologists

Edward Tylor and James Frazer thought that the

idea of God was in effect an early scientific hy-

pothesis to explain why things happen as they do.

They thought the hypothesis was false or superflu-

ous, an instance of primitive science. Contempo-

raries, like Max Müller or the theologian Friedrich

Schleiermacher, pointed to a more affective or ex-

periential source of the idea of a creator in some-

thing like an intuition or apprehension of the infi-

nite, or in a sense of absolute dependence

(Schleiermacher’s later term). It would not then be

a scientific theory, but a primal sense of an un-

changing, self-existent reality beyond the changes

of the natural world.

Primal religious traditions usually contain some

idea of a creator god, but often one who is remote

and not particularly concerned with human affairs,

delegating that to lesser gods. In the Chinese or

East Asian religious stream, as represented in Dao-

ism and Confucianism, the idea of creation is not

denied, but it is not especially important. What is

important is the Way of Heaven, the balance and

harmony of nature itself, as reflecting in human

life and society the order that obtains in the uni-

verse. The ultimate source of being, perhaps the

Dao (or Way), is not seen as a personal agency.

For that reason, these religious views do not have

a doctrine of creation. They stress the interrelated-

ness and sacredness of nature, and they connect

the best way of human life with insight into the

natural order the universe should have. Chinese

and East Asian religions tend to say, however, that

questions of how the universe began or what a

God might be like are both insoluble and spiritu-

ally irrelevant.

Buddhism shares with the East Asian traditions

a lack of interest in, or even a rejection of, a doc-

trine of creation. For many Buddhists, the suffering

involved in the natural world is too great to permit

any thought of a good creator, and again the idea

is seen as too theoretical to be of any practical use.

The Buddhist way is one of disciplining the mind

to overcome attachment, so that one might realize

that state of wisdom, compassion, and bliss that is

nirvana. In Mahayana Buddhism, there develops

the idea of bodhisattvas, compassionate beings

who help suffering beings, and who may even

generate from themselves worlds in which sentient

beings exist. This can come near to a doctrine of

creation, but the emphasis is on a plurality of lib-

erated beings, who may be of great compassion,

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CREATION

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knowledge, and power, but who are not creators

of all reality.

In general, these religious traditions find the

existence of suffering too great a problem to allow

for a good creator. They find belief in a creator

spiritually superfluous; their spiritual quest is for

compassionate mindfulness and wisdom, and de-

votion to a personal god is seen as a lesser vehicle

or lower path. They also find such belief too theo-

retical, regarding it as unprofitable speculation.

Most orthodox Indian traditions, however, have

developed the idea of one supreme spiritual real-

ity—Brahman—from which everything in the uni-

verse derives its existence. This reality can be de-

scribed as sat-cit-ananda, or being, consciousness,

and bliss. Sometimes, as in Ramanuja, the twelfth-

century Indian philosopher, the one supreme real-

ity is characterized as a supreme person. Some-

times, as in Sankara (perhaps the best-known

Indian philosopher of the eighth century

C.E.) it is

said to be beyond personhood, though it appears

as a person, and to be one undifferentiated reality

of which all finite things are illusory appearances. It

is a common doctrine that “all is Brahman,” so that

the Lord is the material cause of the universe,

which is the Lord’s appearance or (in Ramanuja) his

“body.” For Hindus in these traditions, all the gods

are aspects or diverse forms of the one all-inclusive

Brahman. The universe comes into being in order

to work out the karma, the accumulated merit or

demerit, of finite souls. Each universe has a finite,

though vastly long, life. Then it dies, and after a pe-

riod when all the potentialities of being exist in un-

evolved form in Brahman, they are realized again

in a new universe, perhaps a repetition of the one

before it. Universes come into being and pass away

without beginning or end, and only Brahman re-

mains unchanging, the one source of all.

This is a doctrine of creation, since every uni-

verse comes into being as the result of an act of

knowledge, will, and desire of the Supreme Lord,

who says, in the holy scriptures, the Upanishads,

“May I become many” (Chandogya Upanishad, VI,

ii, 3). It is usually held that each universe is neces-

sarily what it is, and that everything in each uni-

verse is part of, or one with, Brahman. For that rea-

son, some might prefer to call this a doctrine of

emanation, or necessary self-manifestation of the

supreme Lord. However, it is an act of will, not a

sort of unconscious seepage of being. And in that

self-manifestation, there are infinite souls working

out their own karma, so that there is an “other-

ness” between each finite soul and the Supreme,

even though they are ontologically one. It may be

that the most obvious difference from the Abra-

hamic traditions—where creation is said to be a

free act of the creator, and where creatures are on-

tologically quite distinct from the creator —is

largely verbal. For in the Abrahamic faiths, free-

dom and necessity are often said to be compatible,

so that even though the act of creation is “free,” it

is nonetheless an unforced yet necessary expres-

sion of the divine nature. Moreover, no creature

can exist without the upholding presence of God,

from which creatures can never be separated, even

in hell. This doctrine of divine omnipresence is not

far removed from the Indian doctrine that all things

are, in a sophisticated sense, “one” with Brahman.

There are divergences of doctrine, to be sure, but

the conceptual differences are neither absolute nor

unchangeable.

Hindu traditions deal with the problem of suf-

fering by attributing it to the free actions of finite

souls, in the sequence of rebirths, without begin-

ning or end, which each soul experiences until it

achieves release or liberation into a realm beyond

suffering. So creation by a good God is ontologi-

cally necessary. God, whose essential nature is

perfect intelligence and bliss, is not to blame.

Moreover, Hindu traditions permit creaturely free-

dom and promise final bliss for all souls that

choose it. And God enters into nature in many

forms to help suffering beings, so that God can

truly be called good.

Hindus would say that God is not spiritually

superfluous, since the perfect state of intelligence

and bliss is realized in one supreme being, and to

know the supreme being is the greatest happiness

for finite souls. Nor is God a speculative concept,

since the doctrine of creation is not primarily a

doctrine about the beginning of the universe (there

have always been universes). It is a doctrine about

the present union of all finite beings with and their

dependence on the one Supreme Lord, conscious

realization of which is the supreme spiritual goal.

Abrahamic faiths

In the Abrahamic faiths, mainly Judaism, Islam and

Christianity, there is a shared doctrine that the uni-

verse is the creation of one supreme and perfect

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God. This is usually said to be a free, nonnecessi-

tated act of bringing into being things other than

God. In Christianity, creation is through the Logos,

the eternal Son, who is construed as the archetype

of all creation and the uncreated image of the di-

vine Wisdom. So the universe is seen to be contin-

gent—it did not have to be as it is—and yet

supremely rational. Some have argued that such a

belief made modern science possible because it

encouraged the view that nature can be under-

stood by reason, that it is ordered and unitary, hav-

ing one rational creator, yet because it is contin-

gent, observation is necessary to discern its laws.

Moreover, since nature is not divine, but it is a cre-

ated object, humans can investigate it without of-

fending the spirits. It may even be held that such

investigation, at first encouraged but also impeded

by the excessive authority given by the Church to

Aristotle in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, re-

ally began to flourish only when, after 1500, that

Church authority was challenged by the Reforma-

tion. So the scene was set for the rise of the natu-

ral sciences in a European culture in which re-

liance on close observation, insistence on critical

freedom, and belief in the rational structure of na-

ture all coalesced in one dynamic matrix.

The word creation has usually been used to

refer to the origin of the universe, but theologically

it has always been clear that it more properly refers

to the relationship of every time and place to God.

In this sense, when and how the universe origi-

nated is not of primary importance. Some theolo-

gians and scientists have held that if the universe

can be shown to have a beginning in time, this

would raise the probability that it was created. For

many years it was argued that if the universe had

no beginning in time, the universe would not be

created, since it would necessarily always be there.

Medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas

Aquinas argued in Summa Theologica (1a; qq. 46,

art. 2) that this view is a misunderstanding. If cre-

ation means that nothing can exist unless it is part

of a world-system that God wills, it does not mat-

ter whether that system has existed forever or if it

had a beginning. What the believer needs to know

is not that God was needed to start the universe,

but that the universe, whatever its age or size,

could not exist at any moment without a self-exis-

tent creator. The doctrine of creation depends on

the truth of the assertion that the material universe

is not self-existent, and that it can reasonably be

seen as the effect of a free act of a conscious being

that is of supreme value—God.

Creation and science

All the great religious traditions formulated their

views of the universe long before the rise of mod-

ern science, and they incorporate theoretical be-

liefs that need to be reconstructed if the findings of

science are to be fully accepted. East Asian tradi-

tions in practice embody many quasi-magical prac-

tices—Feng Shui and astrology, for example—that

would be regarded by most scientists as supersti-

tious, and based on misunderstanding of or simple

errors about how the laws of nature work. In the

Indian traditions, the ideas of rebirth and of the

soul as distinct from matter create tensions with

evolutionary biology, neurophysiology, and genet-

ics in particular. The Abrahamic faiths have tradi-

tionally believed in six-day creation, in a primal

paradisal state without suffering or death, and in a

very short history for the universe, with earth at its

center, all of which is rendered obsolete by evolu-

tionary cosmology, with its fifteen billion year his-

tory for the universe, and belief in the principle of

natural selection as at least a major driving force of

biological evolution.

If religious belief in creation is not primarily a

speculative hypothesis, but an existential appre-

hension of dependence on a transcendent reality,

these traditional beliefs can be revised without

much difficulty. They can simply be said to ex-

press spiritual insights into the limited terms of

their understanding of the universe. Their creation

stories can be seen as myths, as primarily symbolic

attempts to depict the human situation of alien-

ation from a supreme transcendent reality, and the

way to overcome that alienation.

It will remain important, and it is part of the

drive to understanding that motivates science, to

have some view, however provisional, of how the

universe relates to the transcendent spiritual goal

of religion. The scientific investigation of nature is

important to religion because it reveals the sort of

universe there is, and therefore by implication the

way in which the universe could be related to a

transcendent reality. If this is an evolutionary uni-

verse, in which consciousness and freedom evolve

from a simple primal singularity as emergent prop-

erties of matter itself, and if this happens through

the interplay of mathematically ordered laws and

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processes of random variation and natural selec-

tion, a number of questions need to be asked be-

fore a doctrine of creation could seem plausible.

One will need to ask whether the system is well-

designed, whether it shows signs of rational order

or of creative freedom, whether it can be seen as

purposive or directional, and whether it could be

willed by a being who can be termed good.

Since humans will in all likelihood continue to

give different answers to these questions, the “reli-

gious transcendent” will not always be interpreted

in terms of a creator god. Many in the renouncing

traditions will continue to focus on an “imper-

sonal” state of wisdom, compassion, and bliss

which has no causal role in the universe, but

which can be attained by humans. In the Western

Christian tradition, the element of design has been

so strongly emphasized that sometimes the uni-

verse has been seen as a quasi-machine, with the

creator as a cosmic clockmaker. However, some

contemporary theologians, like Arthur Peacocke,

have preferred to picture God as an artist, express-

ing the divine being in creation. Process theolo-

gians have adopted an even more organic view of

the relation between the universe and its creator.

In this respect they have drawn nearer to the dom-

inant Indian traditions, which speak of the creation

as “one” with the creator—meaning that the uni-

verse realizes elements of the divine nature that are

in some way essential to its being what it is.

Often a contrast is drawn between Indian

cyclic view of time and Semitic linear views. It is

true that the Indian tradition speaks of vast repeti-

tive cycles of creation, and the Semitic tradition

speaks of this universe as having a definite begin-

ning, end, and purpose. But it needs to be re-

membered that even the early Christian theologian

Augustine acknowledged in Book 11 of City of

God that God could create many universes, and for

Indian thinkers each universe can be said to have

the purpose of expressing the creative play of

Brahman, of working out the destiny of souls, and

of making liberation possible. Both these traditions

agree that, however finite or infinite time may be,

however repetitive or creatively new, it is wholly

dependent on the intentional act of a being of

supreme value that is supra-temporal. That is the

heart of the idea of creation. It is widely shared be-

tween Semitic and Indian religious traditions. And

while some revision of the original creation myths

of these traditions is required by science, the new

understanding of the cosmos that science brings

may well be felt not to challenge a basic belief in

creation, but to increase a sense of the wisdom,

power, and infinity of the creator.

See also CREATIO CONTINUA; CREATIO EX NIHILO;

ESIGN; GENESIS; LIFE, ORIGINS OF

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Müller, F. Max. Introduction to the Science of Religion

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Peacocke, Arthur. Creation and the World of Science. New

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York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

KEITH WARD

CREATIONISM

The meaning of the term creationism has varied

greatly over time. In the history of Christian theol-

ogy it once designated the idea that God creates a

new soul for each person born, in contrast to tra-

ducianism, which envisions the soul as propagating

in a manner similar to the way bodies propagate.

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