1. “Thus shall ye say unto them: The gods that have not made the heavens
and the earth, these shall perish from the earth, and from under the
heavens. He that hath made the earth by His power, that hath established
the world by His wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by His
understanding ... the Lord God is the true God.”(432) With this
declaration of war against heathenism, the prophet drew the line, once for
all, between the uncreated, transcendent God and the created, perishable
universe. It is true that Plato spoke of primordial and eternal matter and
Aristotle of an eternally rotating celestial sphere, and that even
Biblical exegetes, such as Ibn Ezra,(433) inferred from the Creation story
the existence of primeval chaotic matter. Yet, on the whole, the Jewish
idea of God has demanded the assumption that even this primitive matter
was created by God, or, as most thinkers have phrased it, that God created
the world _out of nothing_. This doctrine was voiced as early as the
Maccabean period in the appeal made by the heroic mother to the youngest
of her seven sons.(434) In the same spirit R. Gamaliel II scornfully
rejects the suggestion of a heretic that God used primeval substances
already extant in creating the world.(435)
2. Of course, thinking people will ever be confronted by the problem how a
transcendental God could call into existence a world of matter, creating
it within the limits of space and time, without Himself becoming involved
in the process. It would seem that He must by the very act subject Himself
to the limitations and mutations of the universe. Hence some of the
ancient Jewish teachers came under the influence of Babylonian and
Egyptian cosmogonies in their later Hellenistic forms, and resorted to the
theory of intermediary forces. Some of these adopted the Pythagorean
conception of the mysterious power of letters and numbers, which they
communicated to the initiated as secret lore, with the result that the
suspicion of heresy rested largely upon “those who knew,” the so-called
Gnostics.
The difficulty of assuming a creation at a fixed period of time was met in
many different ways. It is interesting to note that R. Abbahu of Cæsarea
in the fourth century offered the explanation: “God caused one world after
another to enter into existence, until He produced the one of which He
said: ‘Behold, this is good.’ ”(436) Still this opinion seems to have been
expressed by even earlier sages, as it is adopted by Origen, a Church
father of the third century, who admitted his great debt to Jewish
teachers.(437)
The medieval Jewish philosophers evaded the difficulty by the Aristotelian
expedient of connecting the concept of time with the motion of the
spheres. Thus time was created with the celestial world, and timelessness
remained an attribute of the uncreated God.(438) Such attempts at
harmonization prove the one point of importance to us,—which, indeed, was
frankly stated by Maimonides,—that we cannot accept literally the Biblical
account of the creation.
The modern world has been lifted bodily out of the Babylonian and
so-called Ptolemaic world, with its narrow horizon, through the labors of
such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lyall, and Darwin. We live in a
world immeasurable in terms of either space or time, a world where
evolution works through eons of time and an infinite number of stages.
Such a world gives rise to concepts of the working of God in nature
totally different from those of the seers and sages of former generations,
ideas of which those thinkers could not even dream. To the mind of the
modern scientist the entire cosmic life, extending over countless millions
of years, forming starry worlds without end, is moved by energy arising
within. It is a continuous flow of existence, a process of formation and
re-formation, which can have no beginning and no end. How is this
evolutionist view to be reconciled with the belief in a divine act of
creation? This is the problem which modern theology has set itself,
perhaps the greatest which it must solve.
Ultimately, however, the problem is no more difficult now than it was to
the first man who pondered over the beginnings of life in the childhood of
the world. The same answer fits both modes of thought, with only a
different process of reasoning. Whether we count the world’s creation by
days or by millions of years, the truth of the first verse of Genesis
remains: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In our
theories the whole complicated world-process is but the working out of
simple laws. This leads back as swiftly and far more surely than did the
primitive cosmology to an omnipotent and omniscient creative Power,
defining at the very outset the aim of the stupendous whole, and carrying
its comprehensive plan into reality, step by step. We who are the products
of time cannot help applying the relation of time to the work of the
Creator; time is so interwoven with our being that a modern evolutionist,
Bergson, considers it the fundamental element of reality. Thus it is
natural that we should think of God as setting the first atoms and forces
of the universe into motion somewhere and somehow, at a given moment.
Through this act, we imagine, the order prevailing through an infinitude
of space and time was established for the great fabric of life. To earlier
thinkers such an act of a supermundane and immutable God appeared as a
single act. The idea of prime importance in all this is the free activity
of the Creator in contradistinction to the blind necessity of nature, the
underlying theory of all pagan or unreligious philosophy.(439) The world
of God, which is the world of morality, and which leads to man, the image
of God, must be based upon the free, purposive creative act of God.
Whether such an act was performed once for all or is everlastingly
renewed, is a quite secondary matter for religion, however important it
may be to philosophy, or however fundamental to science. In our daily
morning prayers, which refer to the daily awakening to a life seemingly
new, God is proclaimed as “He who reneweth daily the work of
creation.”(440)