by
Damien F. Mackey
God, who lives beyond time, has made everything that is (John 1:1-2):
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made”.
God created all ex nihilo, “not out of anything”.
God and Creation
Jesus Christ has revealed God as a Trinity of Persons, a Communion or Family of Love.
According to Pope Francis: Christ “has shown us the face of God, One in substance and Triune in Persons; God is all and only Love, in a subsisting relationship that creates, redeems, and sanctifies all: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
The Son of God showed that God first sought us, and revealed that eternal life is precisely “the immeasurable and gratuitous love of the Father that Jesus gave on the Cross, offering his life for our salvation.”
“And this love, by the action of the Holy Spirit, has irradiated a new light upon the earth and in every human heart that welcomes it.”
“May the Virgin Mary help us to enter ever more, with our whole selves, into the trinitarian Communion, to live and bear witness to the love that gives sense to our existence”.
The Holy Family, Jesus (in his humanity), Mary and Joseph, is an icon of the Holy Trinity, Joseph reflecting the Father and Mary (the Immaculate Conception) reflecting the Holy Spirit (the uncreated Immaculate Conception).
God, who lives beyond time, has made everything that is (John 1:1-2): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made”.
God created all ex nihilo, “not out of anything”.
Psalm 33:9: “He spoke, and it was.” That is, its existence depended on his Word; the universe sprang into being at his command; he had only to speak, and it arose in all its grandeur where before there was nothing.
I personally do not favour the concept of a Big Bang explosion, but I might be wrong.
Can anything constructive, let alone our glorious cosmos, emerge from an explosion?
Proverbs 8:30 describes Wisdom at play, as beautifully explained here:
This song describes the dynamic of authentic play. Play is not wasting time, but
entering into time with fullness of heart. This reflects rejoicing in the birth of each new day, delighting in how we as God’s children co-create with God, bringing forth a world of beauty.
“Day after day, God’s wisdom at play in the universe,
delighting to be with us, the children of earth”.
Wondrous Wisdom, rejoicing in earth’s birth and rebirth:
majestic mountains, rolling hills, roaring waters, flowing streams.
Playful Wisdom, setting out a table of fine food;
with whole grain bread, full-bodied wine, bountiful banquet blessing with joy.
Creative Wisdom, dancing on the edge of chaos;
divine desire dwells deep within, risking passion, daring us to dream.
Gentle Wisdom, calling out with dawns’ first light;
graceful instruction, creative counsel, whispers of wisdom speak softly to our heart.
Radiant Wisdom, sparkling starlight, flame of love,
resplendent as sunlight at mid-day, fields of wildflowers bright and alive.
“Gentle Wisdom” – hard to reconcile this with a Big Bang!
We need to learn again how, like Wisdom, to make ‘work’, playful, and not a soul-destroying drudge. God’s universe is intimately known to Him, for He “telleth the number of the stars: and calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 146:4, Douay). He rolled out those mighty luminaries like a child playing with marbles, but all done with a sublime teleological purpose (Genesis 1:14), to “serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years”.
Nowhere is this fact better exemplified than in Lieutenant-Colonel G. Mackinlay,’s The Magi: How They Recognised Christ's Star (Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), in which the author demonstrates that the heavenly cycles when properly co-ordinated with the life of Jesus Christ reveal a stupendous witness of sun, moon and stars as appropriately marking sacred times.
Those billions of years posited by astronomers and physicists seem to me to be ridiculous and eccentric. Who can reasonably think in terms of such massive numbers?
The solar system is, in my opinion, geocentric.
Anyway, no one can prove this statement to be un-scientific or wrong.
Some qualified scientists, at least, have cast serious doubt upon the supposed ‘vast cosmic ocean of dark energy (matter)’.
“Religious circles embraced the idea of an expanding universe because for the universe to be expanding, then at some point in the past it had to originate from a single point, called the “Big Bang”. Indeed, the concept of the Big Bang did not originate with Edwin Hubble himself but was proposed by a Catholic Monk, Georges Lemaître in 1927, two years before Hubble published his observations of the Red Shift.
The “Big Bang” coincided nicely with religious doctrine and just as had been the case with epicycles (and despite the embarrassment thereof) religious institutions sought to encourage this new model of the universe over all others, including the then prevalent “steady state” theory. In 1951 Pope Pius XII declared that Georges Lemaître's work proved the Christian dogma of divine creation of the universe.
Then history repeated itself. Evidence surfaced that the “Big Bang” might not really be a workable theory in the form of General Relativity, and its postulation that super massive objects would have gravity fields so strong that even light could not escape, nor would matter be able to differentiate.
Since the entire universe existing in just one spot would be the most super massive object of all, the universe could not be born”.
The science fiction version of cosmology with which scientists must assail us today - with its great galloping galaxies, cosmic vacuum cleaning Black Holes, microwave cooking radiation and Doppelganger (or is that Doppler?) Effect - seems to be entirely lacking in any sort of cogent Divine plan - the true structure of the universe.
It is all yet awaiting, I believe, a wiser interpretation.
There may well be, for example, a cosmic compatibility between the structure of the universe, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Garden of Eden; the Temple in Jerusalem (patterned on the Garden of Eden); and the Tent of Meeting. In the Book of Hebrews, St. Paul tells us that the Tabernacle, and all its services, were “patterns of things in the heavens” (Hebrews 9:23). The physical objects associated with the earthly sanctuary were “figures of the true” (Hebrews 9:24) — the “shadow of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5).
The Garden of Eden was, like the Temple afterwards, a micro-cosmos.
Dr. Ernest L. Martin’s “The Temple Symbolism in Genesis” is well worth reading in this regard. “Each physical item had its spiritual counterpart in Heaven”.
Early Genesis and Toledôt
The Triune God is not affected by time.
Genesis 1 has nothing to do with the time taken by God to create the universe – a ridiculous suggestion! So, Creationists and Evolutionists are free to debate the actual age of the earth.
As some have divined, Genesis 1 is (at least in part) a revelation to man of God’s work of creation. Man - and not God, who never tires nor ceases (Isaiah 40:28) - needs to retire in the evening and then to resume again in the morning.
The Six Days (Hexaëmeron) were real, 24-hour days.
Key to the structure of the Book of Genesis are the eleven colophon divisions, “These are the generations of …”.
Here is an arrangement of it:
Tablet
|
Starting Verse
|
Ending Verse
|
Owner or Writer
|
1
|
Genesis 1:1
|
Genesis 2:4a
|
God Himself (?)
|
2
|
Genesis 2:4b
|
Genesis 5:1a
|
Adam
|
3
|
Genesis 5:1b
|
Genesis 6:9a
|
Noah
|
4
|
Genesis 6:9b
|
Genesis 10:1a
|
Shem, Ham & Japheth
|
5
|
Genesis 10:1b
|
Genesis 11:10a
|
Shem
|
6
|
Genesis 11:10b
|
Genesis 11:27a
|
Terah
|
7
|
Genesis 11:27b
|
Genesis 25:19a
|
Isaac
|
8
|
Genesis 25:12
|
Genesis 25:18
|
Ishmael, through Isaac
|
9
|
Genesis 25:19b
|
Genesis 37:2a
|
Jacob
|
10
|
Genesis 36:1
|
Genesis 36:43
|
Esau, through Jacob
|
11
|
Genesis 37:2b
|
Exodus 1:6
|
Jacob’s 12 sons
|
These “generations” (Hebrew: toledôt) constitute the family histories of the various biblical patriarchs leading up to Moses. These (and not the fragmentary and confusing JEDP sources) are the documents upon which Moses drew to compile what we now call the Book of Genesis, of which he was the editor, but not the author.
The first of these toledôt, concluding Genesis 1, indicates this primary part of Genesis to be a “book” (2:4):
αυτήThis 3588ηis the 976βίβλοςbook 1078γενέσεωςof the origin 3772ουρανούof heaven 2532καιand 1093γηςearth
Moses substantially wrote the remainder of the Pentateuch, as according to tradition.
The Pentateuch would receive further editing, probably by the likes of Samuel, Solomon, Ezra.
Location of Paradise and Eden
Helpful geographical additions provided by editor Moses (Genesis 2:11-14), to elucidate for his contemporaries what had originally been a very simple account of the hydrography presented in Genesis 2 (Adam’s toledôt), enable us to identify the four rivers apparently originating from a single river in Eden. Clearly, the Tigris and Euphrates are the rivers still known today in Mesopotamia, and the Gihon is the circuitous Blue Nile of Ethiopia.
The Pishon, far more disputed, is presumably also towards the west, for reasons of symmetry. Some would place the Pishon in the region of Saudi Arabia.
These four rivers were still flowing many centuries later, in the days of Sirach, who now also included the Nile and the Jordan (Sirach 24:25-27). {Naturally, with the passing of time, and due to catastrophism and severe tectonic activity - for example, the Noachic Flood and the emergence of the Great Rift Valley - the source, courses and capacities of these primeval rivers would have altered significantly}.
Throughout this ancient riverine system stretched the well-irrigated Paradise.
The Garden of Eden, where ancient Jerusalem would later be situated, was central to Paradise.
That is why Jerusalem is said in the Scriptures to be at “the centre of the earth” (e.g. Ezekiel 38:12). It also explains why Jesus Christ could pin upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem the murder of Abel, by Cain (cf. Genesis 4:8; Luke 11:51), ‘… from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary’.
The Creation of Man
Since “… our God is in heaven: He hath done all things whatsoever He would” (Psalm 113:11, Douay), the Triune God could have, had he so wished, created humankind by using an evolutionary process, just as he could have formed the universe through the agency of a Bang.
Pope Pius XII (Humani Generis, 1950) did not entirely discount the possibility of man’s having evolved from a lower form, but with an important qualification:
36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.
I personally find the theory of evolution to be un-scientific and against common sense.
The most pertinent comment about it, I believe, came from the witty pen of G. K. Chesterton: “The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing”. And again: “Anthropologists … have to narrow their minds to the materialistic things that are not notably anthropic. They have to hunt through history and pre-history something which emphatically is not Homo Sapiens, but is always in fact regarded as Simius Insipiens”.
The “Cambrian Explosion”, that sudden appearance in the fossil record of complex animals with mineralized skeletal remains, is one sort of ‘explosion’ that I would accept. And it appears to be disastrous for the theory of evolution, which really likes things to happen very slowly.
Whilst, according to Genesis 1:27, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”, the evolutionists promote a bestial origin for humanity. And they pitch back the origins of man with the increasing additions of a zero. Mungo Man (Australia), a relative youngster in the anthropological scheme of things, went from a 60,000 years old estimate to a 40,000 years old estimate in the space of a week.
No one batted an eyelid.
Skeletal remains must be force-fitted into a pre-conceived evolutionary matrix.
Those fine Neanderthals, for instance, have apparently been thus ‘doctored’. Dr. Jack Cuozzo, examining the skull of a ‘teenage Neanderthal’ in Germany, ‘found once again that the replica skull on display was made to look apelike, but a color slide purchased at the museum showed that the lower jaw was dislocated, positioned 30mm out of its socket! This brought the upper jaw 30mm forward, looking more like a muzzle, and very apelike’.
The Neanderthals, who were physically far superior to us, and who lived much longer than we, were the long-lived antediluvian peoples, some of these also continuing on for a time after the Noachic Flood until this Divine decree was fully realised (Genesis 6:4): “Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years’.”
A great ‘sin’ of certain scientists today is to imagine that they are fully equipped and entitled to pontificate philosophically and theologically. Most of them are not qualified to do this. Whilst science and technology have brought immense material benefits to our modern world, philosophy itself does not benefit at all from science speak.
We need a return to the pursuit of realism and common sense.
David Collits has well explained it (“Opening up to being – learning to trust ourselves again”):
“An air of unreality pervades current day discourse. Focus on identity rights, same-sex ‘marriage’, unisex bathrooms, safe spaces, the mendaciously called ‘Safe Schools’ and so on bespeaks not only a divorce from tradition and custom, but more fundamentally a divorce from reality itself. Something unreal persists in political agitation for a panoply of rights not rooted in human nature or the cosmos itself, and which in fact denies the existence of human nature as such.
Such campaigning is based upon the liberal conceit constitutive of modernity that meaning and identity flows from an ever-expanding assertion of the will and not who we are as human beings. On this view, there is no human nature: I choose, therefore I am. This disconnection from reality is not confined to political issues but permeates our technology-saturated culture. Restoring contact with the real is vital for our culture to convey authentic meaning, as well as how we form our children, use technology and even how we worship.
… the further we are from an unmediated experience of reality, the further we are from God. It is not possible even to think of God philosophically or theologically if one has not first been exposed to the creation that God has put in front of us.
We come to know Being itself through exposure to created being. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” so wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. God, transcendent but immanent to creation, is revealed in the beauty and order of the natural realm perceived in the senses and apprehended in the mind. …. because we are body-soul beings, truth is known to our minds because it is first known to our senses.
Catholicism is not a gnostic religion or philosophy in which knowledge is mediated directly to the mind apart from ‘evil’ matter. Knowledge of God comes first through sensory perception. It is not for nothing that Christ uses parables and lessons based on everyday contact with the earth: the mustard seed and the big tree it becomes, employment in the vineyard, the lilies of the field, the fig tree, the pearl, the field, and so on. Man’s first home was a Garden. The Prince of the Apostles’ occupation was to fish. The Church’s liturgy and sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist, incorporate and elevate basic human and earthly realities: flowing water, bread and wine, oil. Authentic culture arises from liturgical cult fostered on humus, work with the soil that humbles us and can yet be offered to God. Genuine education grows around liturgical cult and is fostered by immersion in the Western canon, whose own roots are in that liturgical culture.
Centuries of rapid technological development, and decades of material wealth and relative peace in the West have inured generations of people to the vicissitudes and hardships that have been the common lot of humanity. Underappreciated perhaps is the negative effect that this material wealth has on the capacity for us to perceive created being and through that God himself. Especially is this acute in the case of the millennial generation, about which much has been written, from issues of housing affordability to its members’ apparent sense of entitlement and ‘flakiness’. ….
Ours is a technological age predicated … on the Modernist idea that reality itself is to be rejected and replaced with artificial constructions of our own, not simply technological but philosophical and ethical as well. The eclipse of religion, gender ideology, and the deconstruction of marriage and the family in the West are the end result of centuries of philosophical and cultural unrealism”.
Metaphysics, which has been replaced by bankrupt modernism and scientism, sorely needs to be revived. But, this time, metaphysics needs to be firmly established upon biblical (Hebrew) foundations, and not as a product of the ancient pagan Greeks.
The Father of Philosophy is God the Father, who created the human mind.
“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2)”, wrote pope John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio.
The Fall
The real existence of Adam and Eve, and of Noah (and his posterity), though almost universally doubted today (including some church leaders, it seems), may find a scientific ally in science. Do not geneticists refer to the maternal ancestor of all living humans as “Eve”?
The mitochondrial Eve, they call her, to whom our species is robustly and genetically linked.
The ‘crafty serpent’ in Eden (Genesis 3:1), the Devil, Satan the accuser, the “great, fiery red Dragon” of the Apocalypse (12:3), cunningly masterminded the Fall of Adam and Eve.
Whilst this has been catastrophic for humanity, and for the whole created world, nevertheless, “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Roman 5:20). God, as has been famously remarked, is able to take a discordant note (such as the Fall) and write a whole new symphony.
Always a one better than the first.
He may use a ‘rival operation’. Thus the serpent seduced the woman, but now the new Woman, Mary, will crush the serpent’s head.
Saint Louis de Montfort in his Treatise on True Devotion to Mary, wrote of this marvellous cosmic bouleversement:
“God has established only one enmity — but it is an irreconcilable one — which will last and even go on increasing to the end of time. That enmity is between Mary, his worthy Mother, and the devil, between the children and the servants of the Blessed Virgin and the children and followers of Lucifer. Thus the most fearful enemy that God has set up against the devil is Mary, his holy Mother. From the time of the earthly paradise, although she existed then only in his mind, he gave her such a hatred for his accursed enemy, such ingenuity in exposing the wickedness of the ancient serpent and such power to defeat, overthrow and crush this proud rebel, that Satan fears her not only more than angels and men but in a certain sense more than God himself”.
Revelation 12:1-3: “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labour and in pain to give birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads”.
The Triune God, a Family of Love, is the all-seeing Creator.
But, in our age, the Devil is furiously leading a campaign of ‘sin against God’s creation’, particularly against the family. This is the final onslaught.
Such, indeed, was the firm view of Fatima seer, Sister Lucia:
“… the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue”. And then she concluded: “However, Our Lady has already crushed its head”.
Dr. Ernest L. Martin presented a strong case for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden to have been a fig tree – a view supported by tradition. Commenting on Jesus’s somewhat enigmatic and ‘out of season’ cursing of the barren fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22), Martin wrote (Secret of Golgotha, p. 260):
“It [the withered and dead fig tree] signified that NO LONGER would that symbolic tree be in the midst of humanity TO ENCOURAGE MANKIND TO SIN IN THE MANNER OF OUR FIRST PARENTS. But there is even more teaching. It meant that when Christ went to that miraculous tree looking for some figs to eat (like Eve did), CHRIST WOULD NOT FIND ANY WHATSOEVER! This signified that there was NOT going to be a REPETITION of what Eve (and later Adam) did in regard to the fig tree that they partook of. One fig tree [in the Garden of Eden] was the instrument to bring 'sin' into the world, BUT THE SON OF GOD COULD NOT FIND ANY FIGS ON HIS FIG TREE (the miraculous tree on the Mount of Olives that was typical of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Christ cursed THAT symbolic tree at the top of Olivet SO THAT NO MAN WOULD EAT OF IT AGAIN. And to COMPLETE his victory over sin, four days later Christ was going to be SACRIFICED FOR THE SINS OF THE WORLD JUST A FEW YARDS AWAY FROM THIS WITHERED AND DEAD TREE”.
That ‘rival operation’ again: Since Satan had used a tree to engineer the Fall, so would God use a Tree to undo Satan’s work. Galatians 4:4-5: “God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons”. And Colossians 2:13-15:
“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the Cross”.
Christ’s agonising journey to Calvary and to his immolation upon the Cross was, in fact, a triumphal parade, thereby ending the reign of Satan - a foe forever now with ‘a crushed head’.
Dr. Martin’s interpretation of the fig tree might well explain why Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together to hide their shame immediately after the fruit-eating incident (Genesis 3:7).
Adam and Eve were no longer permitted to live in the Garden or to have access to the salutary Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24): “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life”.
Although Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden, they still remained in the territory of Eden. It is important to note that the “Garden” and the country of “Eden” were not synonymous.
The Garden was in Eden.
According to some traditions, only Enoch and (later) Melchizedek were ever allowed after that to dwell in the Garden of Eden.
