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Creation refers to the idea that the whole universe is brought into being and sustained by a personal agent, God, who is beyond the universe. Since creation is an intentional act, God is usually said to envisage what will be created, and to intend that it will come into existence. Knowledge and will are thus attributes of a creator God.

Creation in various religions

Many religions have the concept of a creator God. In the late nineteenth century, the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James Frazer thought that the idea of God was in effect an early scientific hypothesis to explain why things happen as they do. They thought the hypothesis was false or superfluous, an instance of primitive science. Contemporaries, like Max Müller or the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, pointed to a more affective or experiential source of the idea of a creator in something like an intuition or apprehension of the infinite, or in a sense of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher's later term). It would not then be a scientific theory, but a primal sense of an unchanging, self-existent reality beyond the changes of the natural world.

Primal religious traditions usually contain some idea of a creator god, but often one who is remote and not particularly concerned with human affairs, delegating that to lesser gods. In the Chinese or East Asian religious stream, as represented in Daoism and Confucianism, the idea of creation is not denied, but it is not especially important. What is important is the Way of Heaven, the balance and harmony of nature itself, as reflecting in human life and society the order that obtains in the universe. The ultimate source of being, perhaps the Dao (or Way), is not seen as a personal agency. For that reason, these religious views do not have a doctrine of creation. They stress the interrelatedness and sacredness of nature, and they connect the best way of human life with insight into the natural order the universe should have. Chinese and East Asian religions tend to say, however, that questions of how the universe began or what a God might be like are both insoluble and spiritually irrelevant.

Buddhism shares with the East Asian traditions a lack of interest in, or even a rejection of, a doctrine of creation. For many Buddhists, the suffering involved in the natural world is too great to permit any thought of a good creator, and again the idea is seen as too theoretical to be of any practical use. The Buddhist way is one of disciplining the mind to overcome attachment, so that one might realize that state of wisdom, compassion, and bliss that is nirvana. In Mahayana Buddhism, there develops the idea of bodhisattvas, compassionate beings who help suffering beings, and who may even generate from themselves worlds in which sentient beings exist. This can come near to a doctrine of creation, but the emphasis is on a plurality of liberated beings, who may be of great compassion, knowledge, and power, but who are not creators of all reality.

In general, these religious traditions find the existence of suffering too great a problem to allow for a good creator. They find belief in a creator spiritually superfluous; their spiritual quest is for compassionate mindfulness and wisdom, and devotion to a personal god is seen as a lesser vehicle or lower path. They also find such belief too theoretical, regarding it as unprofitable speculation.

Most orthodox Indian traditions, however, have developed the idea of one supreme spiritual reality—Brahman—from which everything in the universe derives its existence. This reality can be described as sat-cit-ananda, or being, consciousness, and bliss. Sometimes, as in Ramanuja, the twelfth-century Indian philosopher, the one supreme reality is characterized as a supreme person. Sometimes, as in Sankara (perhaps the best-known Indian philosopher of the eighth century C.E.) it is said to be beyond personhood, though it appears as a person, and to be one undifferentiated reality of which all finite things are illusory appearances. It is a common doctrine that "all is Brahman," so that the Lord is the material cause of the universe, which is the Lord's appearance or (in Ramanuja) his "body." For Hindus in these traditions, all the gods are aspects or diverse forms of the one all-inclusive Brahman. The universe comes into being in order to work out the karma, the accumulated merit or demerit, of finite souls. Each universe has a finite, though vastly long, life. Then it dies, and after a period when all the potentialities of being exist in unevolved form in Brahman, they are realized again in a new universe, perhaps a repetition of the one before it. Universes come into being and pass away without beginning or end, and only Brahman remains unchanging, the one source of all.

This is a doctrine of creation, since every universe comes into being as the result of an act of knowledge, will, and desire of the Supreme Lord, who says, in the holy scriptures, the Upanishads, "May I become many" (Chandogya Upanishad, VI, ii, 3). It is usually held that each universe is necessarily what it is, and that everything in each universe is part of, or one with, Brahman. For that reason, some might prefer to call this a doctrine of emanation, or necessary self-manifestation of the supreme Lord. However, it is an act of will, not a sort of unconscious seepage of being. And in that self-manifestation, there are infinite souls working out their own karma, so that there is an "otherness" between each finite soul and the Supreme, even though they are ontologically one. It may be that the most obvious difference from the Abrahamic traditions—where creation is said to be a free act of the creator, and where creatures are ontologically quite distinct from the creator —is largely verbal. For in the Abrahamic faiths, freedom and necessity are often said to be compatible, so that even though the act of creation is "free," it is nonetheless an unforced yet necessary expression of the divine nature. Moreover, no creature can exist without the upholding presence of God, from which creatures can never be separated, even in hell. This doctrine of divine omnipresence is not far removed from the Indian doctrine that all things are, in a sophisticated sense, "one" with Brahman. There are divergences of doctrine, to be sure, but the conceptual differences are neither absolute nor unchangeable.

Hindu traditions deal with the problem of suffering by attributing it to the free actions of finite souls, in the sequence of rebirths, without beginning or end, which each soul experiences until it achieves release or liberation into a realm beyond suffering. So creation by a good God is ontologically necessary. God, whose essential nature is perfect intelligence and bliss, is not to blame. Moreover, Hindu traditions permit creaturely freedom and promise final bliss for all souls that choose it. And God enters into nature in many forms to help suffering beings, so that God can truly be called good.

Hindus would say that God is not spiritually superfluous, since the perfect state of intelligence and bliss is realized in one supreme being, and to know the supreme being is the greatest happiness for finite souls. Nor is God a speculative concept, since the doctrine of creation is not primarily a doctrine about the beginning of the universe (there have always been universes). It is a doctrine about the present union of all finite beings with and their dependence on the one Supreme Lord, conscious realization of which is the supreme spiritual goal.

Abrahamic faiths

In the Abrahamic faiths, mainly Judaism, Islam and Christianity, there is a shared doctrine that the universe is the creation of one supreme and perfect God. This is usually said to be a free, nonnecessitated act of bringing into being things other than God. In Christianity, creation is through the Logos, the eternal Son, who is construed as the archetype of all creation and the uncreated image of the divine Wisdom. So the universe is seen to be contingent—it did not have to be as it is—and yet supremely rational. Some have argued that such a belief made modern science possible because it encouraged the view that nature can be understood by reason, that it is ordered and unitary, having one rational creator, yet because it is contingent, observation is necessary to discern its laws. Moreover, since nature is not divine, but it is a created object, humans can investigate it without offending the spirits. It may even be held that such investigation, at first encouraged but also impeded by the excessive authority given by the Church to Aristotle in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, really began to flourish only when, after 1500, that Church authority was challenged by the Reformation. So the scene was set for the rise of the natural sciences in a European culture in which reliance on close observation, insistence on critical freedom, and belief in the rational structure of nature all coalesced in one dynamic matrix.

The word creation has usually been used to refer to the origin of the universe, but theologically it has always been clear that it more properly refers to the relationship of every time and place to God. In this sense, when and how the universe originated is not of primary importance. Some theologians and scientists have held that if the universe can be shown to have a beginning in time, this would raise the probability that it was created. For many years it was argued that if the universe had no beginning in time, the universe would not be created, since it would necessarily always be there. Medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas argued in Summa Theologica (1a; qq. 46, art. 2) that this view is a misunderstanding. If creation means that nothing can exist unless it is part of a world-system that God wills, it does not matter whether that system has existed forever or if it had a beginning. What the believer needs to know is not that God was needed to start the universe, but that the universe, whatever its age or size, could not exist at any moment without a self-existent creator. The doctrine of creation depends on the truth of the assertion that the material universe is not self-existent, and that it can reasonably be seen as the effect of a free act of a conscious being that is of supreme value—God.

Creation and science

All the great religious traditions formulated their views of the universe long before the rise of modern science, and they incorporate theoretical beliefs that need to be reconstructed if the findings of science are to be fully accepted. East Asian traditions in practice embody many quasi-magical practices—Feng Shui and astrology, for example—that would be regarded by most scientists as superstitious, and based on misunderstanding of or simple errors about how the laws of nature work. In the Indian traditions, the ideas of rebirth and of the soul as distinct from matter create tensions with evolutionary biology, neurophysiology, and genetics in particular. The Abrahamic faiths have traditionally believed in six-day creation, in a primal paradisal state without suffering or death, and in a very short history for the universe, with earth at its center, all of which is rendered obsolete by evolutionary cosmology, with its fifteen billion year history for the universe, and belief in the principle of natural selection as at least a major driving force of biological evolution.

If religious belief in creation is not primarily a speculative hypothesis, but an existential apprehension of dependence on a transcendent reality, these traditional beliefs can be revised without much difficulty. They can simply be said to express spiritual insights into the limited terms of their understanding of the universe. Their creation stories can be seen as myths, as primarily symbolic attempts to depict the human situation of alienation from a supreme transcendent reality, and the way to overcome that alienation.

It will remain important, and it is part of the drive to understanding that motivates science, to have some view, however provisional, of how the universe relates to the transcendent spiritual goal of religion. The scientific investigation of nature is important to religion because it reveals the sort of universe there is, and therefore by implication the way in which the universe could be related to a transcendent reality. If this is an evolutionary universe, in which consciousness and freedom evolve from a simple primal singularity as emergent properties of matter itself, and if this happens through the interplay of mathematically ordered laws and processes of random variation and natural selection, a number of questions need to be asked before a doctrine of creation could seem plausible. One will need to ask whether the system is well-designed, whether it shows signs of rational order or of creative freedom, whether it can be seen as purposive or directional, and whether it could be willed by a being who can be termed good.

Since humans will in all likelihood continue to give different answers to these questions, the "religious transcendent" will not always be interpreted in terms of a creator god. Many in the renouncing traditions will continue to focus on an "impersonal" state of wisdom, compassion, and bliss which has no causal role in the universe, but which can be attained by humans. In the Western Christian tradition, the element of design has been so strongly emphasized that sometimes the universe has been seen as a quasi-machine, with the creator as a cosmic clockmaker. However, some contemporary theologians, like Arthur Peacocke, have preferred to picture God as an artist, expressing the divine being in creation. Process theologians have adopted an even more organic view of the relation between the universe and its creator. In this respect they have drawn nearer to the dominant Indian traditions, which speak of the creation as "one" with the creator—meaning that the universe realizes elements of the divine nature that are in some way essential to its being what it is.

Often a contrast is drawn between Indian cyclic view of time and Semitic linear views. It is true that the Indian tradition speaks of vast repetitive cycles of creation, and the Semitic tradition speaks of this universe as having a definite beginning, end, and purpose. But it needs to be remembered that even the early Christian theologian Augustine acknowledged in Book 11 of City of God that God could create many universes, and for Indian thinkers each universe can be said to have the purpose of expressing the creative play of Brahman, of working out the destiny of souls, and of making liberation possible. Both these traditions agree that, however finite or infinite time may be, however repetitive or creatively new, it is wholly dependent on the intentional act of a being of supreme value that is supra-temporal. That is the heart of the idea of creation. It is widely shared between Semitic and Indian religious traditions. And while some revision of the original creation myths of these traditions is required by science, the new understanding of the cosmos that science brings may well be felt not to challenge a basic belief in creation, but to increase a sense of the wisdom, power, and infinity of the creator.

See also CREATIO CONTINUA; CREATIO EX NIHILO; DESIGN; GENESIS; LIFE, ORIGINS OF

KEITH WARD