CREDIT - Maurice Williams
Our culture is fascinated with creation, which seems strange when our scientists have come up with a seemingly better explanation of how everything came to be. The whole world is enamored with evolution, and that word is used to describe the development of everything, including human beings and the entire physical universe, and cognitive thought, as well as all physical life. But creation as revealed by God has an even broader application. I would like to describe the whole view of spiritual creation and physical evolution. Maybe that would make it easier for you to decide which seems most correct to you.
In the beginning, there was nothing, not a single thing except God. God made light before He made anything else. “Light” in this sense should not be understood through our primary understanding of light as a form of physical radiance because “light”, in its primary definition, did not yet exist before God created the physical universe. There existed no stars and no sun to provide “light” in its primary meaning.
Consider, rather, a secondary definition of light: perception, cognition, illumination, not the luminosity of the physical universe but something non-material. Consider it as something spiritual, like thought. We all have a spiritual capacity to think, to perceive, to “catch on,” to “see the light.”
Creation of the Spiritual World
The first thing God created was the spiritual world, containing uncountable angels, purely spiritual beings brought into existence out of nothing, having no mass, no size, occupying no space, suddenly appearing before the physical universe was made. They came into existence fully mature: no infancy, childhood, or adolescence like we experience. They were fully able, immediately and clearly, to perceive that God made every one of them instantly in one act of creation, very much different from human perception of our own origins.
But there is more to this story. God made each angel an autonomous person able to choose to love and serve God or to refuse and pursue their own ambitions. To be able to freely choose what God offers, without compulsion – what an immense honor! Also, what a risk: being capable of rejecting what Gods offers and choose differently. That would lead to chaos.
Who, other than God, would know what each sovereign person must choose in order for everyone’s choice to be in complete harmony? Choosing against God would bring chaos, disorder, not the “light” that was omnipresent to begin with, but darkness, blind darkness, night.
Creation of the Physical Universe
After separating darkness from light, God created the physical universe, consisting of matter and energy. He positioned it in four-dimensional space and time. Who can say how long ago it happened? It started at the beginning of time, when darkness was separated from light.
This is the first occurrence of matter and energy, the physical universe. Humans have always been interested in unravelling the secrets of the universe. Some have spent their whole lives trying to understand the universe. Some have postulated bizarre ideas: for example, that the universe is eternal, that it always was and always will be. Some have postulated parallel universes co-existing together.
However, in 1931, Father Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest postulated that the universe had a beginning when all matter started off compressed into an infinitely small space. The origin of the universe occurred when this small space exploded. This is the theory I like best because it postulated a beginning, and therefore agrees with God’s revelation, which He did reveal as happening “in the beginning….”
The Laws of Nature
Physical bodies, especially living plants and animals, change with evolution, but the laws of nature – such as gravity, electro-magnetism, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force – do not change. They are found to be absolute and stable throughout the universe and time. Gravity on a planet in a distant galaxy behaves exactly as gravity on earth.
Likewise, the small atoms of matter do not change through evolution. If one compares a newly-made atom of carbon, a result of nuclear fission, for example, it would be identical in all properties with a carbon atom that were present in the original formation of the universe.
When Creation Occurred
Scientists say the physical universe began 13.7 billion years ago. What a long time that is for us who are locked in the dimension of time! I wonder how long it seems to God, who exists outside of time, or for the spiritual beings who were made before time and who, like the spiritual souls animating our bodies, will never cease to exist.
How illustrative the Big Bang Theory is concerning the origins of the physical world, then. An unimaginably huge explosion from an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense, origin at the beginning of time, exploding and expanding with immense force and power, seemingly ordered but filled with chaos, collisions, explosions, perils at every quarter; and, for us, accidents, sickness, sadness, and physical death, for us and every other living, physical being. (Read A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking for more on this.)
Comparison of Creation and Evolution
Doesn’t it seem possible that the angelic spirits who chose against God would perceive, through the physical universe, the consequences of disharmony with God? It starts with the stars and planets, with the cataclysmic way the universe began: horrendous explosions, unimaginable temperatures, colliding bodies, matter forming stars, blowing up, condensing, colliding, forming planets, some re-igniting into new stars, continuing until our own day. It all seems ordered, but there is much chaos and uncertainty, ruin and sometimes destruction in the universe.
The same chaos continued when living organisms appeared on our planet. Although organisms are seemingly ordered and in ecological balance, but together with these organisms chaos and destruction reign on an individual basis, especially with animals. Strong animals hunt down and devour weaker animals, in some cases their own offspring. Frightening as the animal world is (the world of dinosaurs, for example), the insect world is even more brutal. Surely, intelligent persons ought to get the point that the physical universe mirrors the chaos that follows from choosing for self, regardless of what God chooses.
Then human beings appeared, the first physical life forms able to think, to realize that they exist (.e., self-awareness). They are persons. God’s Word reveals that the first human beings were enticed to disobey and do what God did not want them to do. From that first disobedience, the human race plunged into the same darkness and disorder that the whole physical universe is in.
In Archangel Michael we have a gift of Mercy from our ever loving Creator God. He created us to spend an eternity of Love in His Kingdom. We have an adversary though, who constantly bombards us with seemly attractive notions that lead us down the wrong path. If we make a habit of asking for Archangel Michael's help daily, then slowly, slowly, we will be made aware of the tools we need to reject demonic inducements and choose good over evil. This is our challenge, St Michael the Archangel help us.