The Purpose of Creation

The Purpose of Creation | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | May 14, 2011

"God made the world so that there could be a space where he might communicate his love and from which the response of love might come back to him."
— Pope Benedict XVI, "The Day of the New Creation" (Homily at the Easter Vigil, 23 April 2011, L'Osservatore Romano, English, April 27, 2011)

"It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it."
— Pope Benedict XVI, "The Day of the New Creation."

I.

After the blessing of the new fire at the Easter Vigil, we heard the reading of the creation from Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Leo Strauss pointed out that this account has its own internal order according to the nature of the motion of the creatures on each day of creation. The account of Genesis is not, as it sometimes seems, "irrational." The heavens and the earth were not God. He is before they were; they came to be from nothing. God is not part of the universe; He is complete in His inner being without the universe. It was not created to supply a deficiency in God, as some of the ancient writers thought.

In other words, before the cosmos was, God is. The tense of the latter verb is correct, not "was" but "is."

In his homily for the Easter Vigil, Benedict XVI asked whether, as some say, it would not be better to omit this supposedly outmoded cosmological reading: just proceed immediately to things more pertinent to us. The fathers of the Church, Benedict told us, never understood the days of creation cosmologically. But they did understand that the Genesis account provided the foundation for thinking of what this creation means in its very essence. Why did God not leave the void alone? Why did He cause what is to be?

"The Church wishes to offer us a panoramic view of whole trajectory of salvation history, starting with creation, passing through the election and liberation of Israel to the testimony of the prophets by which this entire history is directed ever more clearly towards Jesus Christ." The Scriptures do not offer a "scientific" description of sidereal events. They do present an overall understanding of why these events happened. The overall understanding of the cosmos is shot through with intelligence, from beginning to end.

In other words, revelation gives intelligibility to history. History is the accurate explanation of what happened, including divine events in the world. We can eventually find out the scientific details of cosmic events by ourselves. Revelation was not needed for what men could eventually discover by themselves. In fact, the general principles of the scriptural account of creation and the scientific knowledge of what happened are becoming in our time more and more in agreement. If we look at what Scripture intends and what we can judge to have happened, we find remarkable agreement. Revelation and science are not as opposed as was once claimed.

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