In my previous two weeks I shared with you extensive excerpts from a book called The Mystery of God by Fr. Desmond Forristal. If you are interested in reading those columns you can do so by accessing our web site at www. ascensioncatholic.net. This week, I will share with you large excerpts from chapter five of The Mystery of God. The chapter is entitled: The Maker of the World Fr. Forristal writes:

In the previous chapter, our thoughts moved from the created world to God who created it. The only explanation for the existence of the things of the world is found in God the Creator, he who is and who gives being to everything else.

In this chapter and the next one, we shall look again at the world but in a new way. We shall look at it as the work of God's hands and we shall see what this tells us about the Creator and about the universe he created.

This is a subject which is dealt with by science as well as religion. The German astro-physicist, Wernher von Braun, described the different aims of science and religion in these words:

In practice, these aims can overlap. When science probes the mysteries of creation, it eventually comes to the question of the Reality which lies behind all other realities. When religion considers God's work of creation, it must answer certain questions about the nature of the world and of the human race.

In the past this overlapping has sometimes produced conflict, when religion has tried to answer scientific questions or when science has tried to answer religious questions. Churchmen have been at fault when they used the Bible as a textbook on astronomy or biology. Scientists have been at fault when they tried to restrict God's action in the universe or even to deny it altogether.

It is only by respecting each other's areas that religion and science can avoid conflict and help us to see in the wonders of the world the glory of their Maker.

The creation story

The Bible begins with a beautiful description of the creation of the world.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was a formless void,
there was darkness over the deep,
and God's spirit hovered over the water.

God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
God saw that the light was good,
and God divided light from darkness.
God called light "day" and darkness he called "night".
Evening came and morning came: the first day (Gen 1:1-5).

The story goes on to describe the making of the vault of heaven on the second day, the earth and its vegetation on the third day, the sun and the moon on the fourth day. Then came fishes and birds and animals on the fifth day and the making of mankind on the sixth day. On the seventh and last day, God rested after his labour.

This was never meant to be an eye-witness description of what actually happened or how long it took. It is an imaginative and poetic account which is intended to open our eyes to the beauties and wonders of nature and to remind us that the universe and everything it contains come from God. He made it and without him it could not have come into being.

Theologians use the word "creation" to describe the making of the world. Creation means making something out of nothing. God did not make the world out of some material that existed already: for if he did, where could the material have come from? It could only have come from God, the source of all being, the one Being who does not depend on something else for existence. The universe has always depended on God for its existence and it always will. If he withdrew his creative action from it even for an instant, everything would be reduced again to the nothingness from which it came.

The creation story in the Bible is written in the language of ancient Israel, not in the language of modern theology or science. It does not draw out the full meaning of the word "creation", though it makes it clear that everything in the world owes its existence to God. And it does not try to give us a scientific treatise on the nature of the physical world, but uses the primitive ideas of that time about the earth and sun and stars.

Many of the conflicts between religion and science have come from people who thought that the Bible was a science textbook. The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was condemned by the Holy Office in Rome when he said that the earth moved round the sun, not the sun round the earth. Because the Bible always speaks of the sun moving round the earth, Galileo was forced to withdraw his theory and was put under house arrest. The Roman officials had failed to realize that the Bible was not speaking scientifically but using everyday language; just as we ourselves still speak of the sun rising or setting although we know it does nothing of the sort.

A mistake of a different kind was made by those scientists who continued Galileo's work and plotted the different movements of the sun and the planets. They compared the universe to an enormously elaborate clock, winds it up, and then leaves it to work away on its own, only coming back occasionally to re-wind it or to adjust the mechanism. This was the view of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), a devout Christian and one of the greatest scientist of all time, who said that God must have created the heavenly bodies and then left them to move in their appointed orbits.

Newton was the first man to state the three Laws of Motion, which accounted for the movements of the heavenly bodies. But he admitted that there were "some inconsiderable irregularities" which these laws did not account for. He thought that God had to step in now and then to correct these irregularities, to curb a comet that was straying from its course or to speed up a planet that was lagging behind schedule. Apart from that, having created the universe, God left it to run on its own.

This idea of God is sometimes called "the God of the gaps", because it means using God as a stop-gap to fill up the missing parts of our knowledge. When primitive people explained rain by saying that God was weeping or thunder by saying that God was angry, they were really doing the same thing as Newton did. They were using God to explain natural events that they could not explain in any other way.

According as scientists found scientific explanations for these events, there were less things left for God to do until he was squeezed out altogether. The French astronomer, Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), gave a scientific explanation of the irregularities that had puzzled Newton, Napoleon asked him what place there was for God in his system. "Sir", he replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis." The more the gaps are filled up, the less room there seems to be for God.

But if scientists have filled up many of the gaps in our knowledge of the world, they have not told us how it came into existence. In recent years, there has been a great deal of research into the origin of the universe. This research was prompted by the discovery that the distant galaxies or clusters of stars seem to be moving away from us and from each other at enormous speeds and that the universe therefore seems to be getting larger all the time.

In the last thirty years, two different scientific theories have been put forward to account for this. The Steady State Theory says that the universe has always been in existence and always been expanding or growing larger. Why then does it not run out of material? Because new matter is being created all the time in the form of hydrogen atoms. This theory makes no attempt to explain how this new matter is being created or by whom.

The other theory, called the Big Bang Theory, is now regarded as the more likely one by most scientists. According to this theory, the universe began at a definite moment in time. By calculating the speed at which the galaxies are moving away from one another, we can work out that they must have all started from the same place between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. At that time all the matter in the universe must have been gathered together in a dense mass. It was suddenly flung apart by an enormous explosion, the so-called Big Bang, and has continued flying apart ever since. This theory does not try to explain where the matter involved in the Big Bang or what caused the Big Bang itself to happen.

This is not a criticism of science. All true scientists know that their theories may have to be revised in the light of later knowledge and that they can never go more than a part of the road to ultimate truth. Newton himself said, shortly before his death:

Religion does not help us to decide between different theories about the physical world. What religion tells us is that the universe received and still receives its existence from God. He does not act on it from outside, like a mechanic who builds a machine and services it from time to time. His action is not from outside but from inside, gentle and strong, communicating being to all the things that exist and drawing them ever towards him by his love.