The Idea of Creation and Modern Science
The Western idea of creation is often associated with the question of ultimate beginnings: “Why is there a world at all, and not just nothing”? This speculative question, however, does not stand in the centre of the Biblical tradition. Here two other questions prevail, “Why is there order in the universe at all?”, and “Why do the prosaic mechanisms of life result in such a manifold and poetic world?”
It is argued that both these ideas of divine creation – of orderliness and of historical fertility – have been formative for the natural sciences of Western modernity. In 17th century physics and chemistry the understanding of God as lawmaker inspired the idea of “laws of nature”. But not until the 19th and 20th century did the idea of nature’s historicity come into the centre of attention in thermodynamics and evolutionary theory. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into life by God”, as Charles Darwin ended his revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species.
The lecture aims to show these historical lines in some detail while finding interesting parallels to the great Chinese traditions of cosmology.
Niels Henrik Gregersen is Professor and Chair of Contemporary Theology at Copenhagen University, Denmark. He is also Co-director of the newly established Centre of Naturalism and Christian Semantics at Copenhagen University
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