E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
Jaeger Ordinary Splendor
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68359-700-1
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-68359-700-1
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Lydia Jaeger (PhD, Sorbonne University) is lecturer and academic dean at Nogent Bible Institute (IBN) in Nogent--sur--Marne, France, and author of What the Heavens Declare and Einstein, Polanyi, and the Laws of Nature.
Weitere Infos & Material
RECOGNIZING GOD AS THE ABSOLUTE ORIGIN
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The opening line of Genesis ranks among the most well-known words in Holy Scripture, and even of all human literature. From the very beginning, the Bible presents us with the sovereign Lord, who by his word creates all that exists. Scripture does not start with a rational proof of God’s existence. Nor does it start with humans thinking about the divine, giving their imagination free rein to come up with different hypotheses about reality before finally arriving at the concept of the Creator God. No, right from the start, we are presented with God’s power to create—the God who, without starting from any pre-existent thing, brings into being the entire cosmos in which we live.
The familiarity of the words can hinder us from realizing just how distinctive, indeed even strange, they are. In fact, this short sentence at the beginning of Genesis constitutes a remarkable summary of what distinguishes the biblical worldview from all other ideas that people have devised concerning reality. The philosopher Claude Tresmontant compares it to God’s calling of Abraham, father of the people of Israel, to set out on the adventure of leaving his kinsfolk and going to live as a foreigner in the Holy Land (Genesis 12:1): “As Abraham left his family and the land of his ancestors, so from this first step, biblical metaphysics leaves the metaphysics of the nations.”2 Abraham had to make a clean break with the customs and traditions of his homeland; in the same way, Scripture reveals, right from its very first sentence, a worldview that is radically different from anything we might find elsewhere.
Humans have always pondered the question of origins and have come up with widely differing explanations. At the time of Genesis’s first readers, the most common answer was polytheism. This is why ancient cosmogonies not only recount the origin of the world, but also how the gods were born. The Babylonian creation story provides a striking example. Known as Enuma Elish, after its opening words, this impressive mythological text was probably written in the twelfth century BC; the whole work is in praise of Marduk, Babylon’s principal deity. Here, water is presented as the origin of all that exists. Fresh water is the male primal being (called Apsû), salt water the female (called Tiamat). The gods come into being in successive generations, from the mixing of these primeval waters. However, the parents are vexed by their turbulent offspring; first the Father, then the Mother, attempt to do away with them. But in the ensuing battles, it is Apsû who is first to be slain. Thereafter, Marduk, their great-great-grandson, comes to the help of the gods and kills Tiamat. It is from the goddess’s corpse that Marduk creates the visible universe.
Some elements of the Babylonian epic are also present in the biblical account: the essential role of water, and the placing of the heavenly expanse, for example. After all, both stories come from the ancient Near East and pertain to the formation of the world, of which sky, sea, and dry land are elements that no one can miss. But one does not need to be a specialist in ancient texts to recognize that the Babylonians’ conceptual universe is so far removed from the atmosphere we detect in the biblical origin accounts. Rather than recounting the genesis of a multitude of gods, Scripture presents us with the eternal God who has no rivals. Instead of narrating a struggle between feuding deities, Genesis shows God establishing order in his creation; nothing and no one can stand in his way: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Instead of forging the world out of a deity’s remains, the Bible avoids any confusion between God and creation: the world, in its entirety, is brought forth by God’s word, without incorporating any element of divine nature. Even when Genesis 2 speaks of God breathing into the man the breath of life, it carefully avoids the common term for “spirit” (rûah.), in order to rule out any confusion between God’s Spirit and the human spirit (Genesis 2:7).
Admittedly, ancient creation myths no longer function as the framework for understanding the origin of our world. Science has, for many people, taken their place as an explanatory framework. It is therefore not uncommon to see scientific theories about the origin of life and the universe invested with a quasi-religious function: not only are they supposed to tell us how different forms of existence have evolved; they are expected to be able to disclose their absolute origin, reveal the meaning of life, and suggest norms for human behavior.
Using—or should we say abusing—science in this way is to forget, however, that the true aim of science is more modest. It seeks to study the workings of the natural order, precisely by assuming its existence and the laws it comprises. For this reason, science is unable to answer the time-worn metaphysical question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” because science always studies that which exists, the latter having already been assumed as a premise of scientific inquiry.
Marduk creates the heavens and the earth
When the heavens above did not exist,
And earth beneath had not come into being—
There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter,
And demiurge Tiamat, who gave birth to them all;
They had mingled their waters together …
When not one of the gods had been formed
Or had come into being, when no destinies had been decreed,
The gods were created within them …
Bel rested, surveying the corpse,
In order to divide the lump by a clever scheme.
He split her into two like a dried fish:
One half of her he set up and stretched out as the heavens.…
He put her head in position and poured out …
He opened the abyss and it was sated with water.
From her two eyes he let the Euphrates and Tigris flow.
ENUMA ELISH3
In the same way, we are going beyond the legitimate bounds of scientific research when we ponder the validity of the laws of nature themselves: one should not expect science to produce, as one of its results, an explanation of these laws, since any scientific practice is already founded on the postulate that nature is structured and unified by these laws.
Science is even less qualified to inform us about the meaning of life or morality: judging the aims or norms of human existence is not part of what science is equipped to do. Science seeks to describe what is; it is not competent to decide what should be. Thus, it can help us to discern if a given event did indeed take place and the precise way in which it occurred. But it is incapable of saying anything about the event’s moral significance. The simple fact that an event occurred does not decide its value: in the court of science, crimes and virtuous acts are considered in exactly the same way, as simply factual events.
Too often the limits of the scientific method are forgotten, such that science is expected to provide an all-encompassing explanation of reality. This kind of inflated trust in science’s power grants the universe an absolute autonomy: this world must provide its own explanation, by means of theories that never appeal to any reality that is beyond scientific description. This sort of dogmatic scientism rejects the very idea of imagining anything that falls outside the interpretative perspective imposed by science. As a result, the world takes on quasi-divine status: it has no transcendent foundation, but rather owes its existence to itself. This is perhaps not so far removed from the ancient myths in which the world emerged out of divine debris.
The Bible’s first sentence constitutes a powerful rebuttal of any conception, be it ancient or modern, that fails to make a clear distinction between God and the world. Of course, affirming that the world is created is in no way opposed to the scientific approach; in a certain sense, the latter finds its foundation in the concept of creation, since God creates an ordered world that is amenable to human exploration. In fact, the notion of creation demythologizes the world in a way that is conducive to doing science: a world that is infused with the divine encourages an attitude of passive contemplation and hinders the active approach that experiments require. So while science and creation are in no way opposed to each other, the Genesis account nevertheless rules out any quasi-religious use of science: the world does not explain itself, but has its origin and foundation in God. God alone is eternal and self-sufficient. Nothing and no one can ever rival him, since everything owes its existence to him.
The biblical prohibition of idolatry must be understood in this context, for this foolishness, according to the apostle Paul, is to worship and serve “the creature instead of the Creator” (Romans 1:22, 25). Revering something other than God himself, praying to someone other than God alone, would only serve to perpetuate the confusion between God and his creation. But let us remember that idolatrous worship can take many forms. It is not just metal idols we need to watch out for; mental ones are perhaps even more dangerous. For whatever is most important in our lives is, in reality, serving as a god. Not only can science take on a quasi-religious role, as we have seen,...
