Creation Points to Its Maker

But perhaps those who have advanced beyond these things, and who stand in awe of creation, being put to shame by this exposure of abominations, will join in rejecting what is easily condemned and refuted on every side. Yet they will think that they hold a well-grounded and unanswerable opinion: the worship of the universe and of the parts of the universe. For they will boast that they worship and serve, not mere blocks of wood and stones, and forms of men and unreasoning birds and creeping things and beasts, but the sun and moon and the whole heavenly universe, and the earth again, and the entire realm of water. And they will say that no one can show that these, at any rate, are not divine by nature, since it is plain to all that they lack neither life nor reason, but surpass even the nature of humankind, since the one kind lives in the heavens and the other on the earth. [a]

It is worth looking into and examining these points too; for here also our argument will find that its proof against them holds true. But before we look, or begin our demonstration, it is enough that creation almost raises its voice against them. It points to God as its Maker and Craftsman, who reigns over creation and over all things, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The would-be philosophers turn from him to worship and make gods of the creation that came from him; and yet creation itself worships and confesses the Lord whom they deny because of it. For if people are so awestruck at the parts of creation that they think them gods, they might well be rebuked by the way those parts depend on one another. This dependence also makes known, and bears witness to, the Father of the Word, who is the Lord and Maker of these parts too, by the unbroken law of their obedience to him. As the divine law also says: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.”

But the proof of all this is not obscure; it is surely clear enough to anyone whose mind’s eyes are not wholly disabled. For if someone takes the parts of creation separately and considers each by itself, for example the sun by itself alone, and the moon apart, and again earth and air, and heat and cold, and the essence of wet and of dry, separating them from their union with one another, he will certainly find that not one is sufficient for itself. All of them need one another’s help, and they exist by helping one another. For the sun is carried around with the whole heaven and is contained in it, and can never go beyond his own orbit, while the moon and the other stars bear witness to the help the sun gives them. The earth, again, plainly does not yield her crops without rains, and the rains in turn would not come down to earth without the help of the clouds. But the clouds would never appear and hold together by themselves, without the air. And the air is warmed by the upper air, but it is lit and made bright by the sun, not by itself. Again, wells and rivers will never exist without the earth. But the earth does not rest on itself; it is set upon the realm of the waters, while this in turn is kept in its place, bound fast at the center of the universe. And the sea, and the great ocean that flows around the outside of the whole earth, is moved and carried by the winds wherever their force drives it. The winds in their turn do not arise from themselves. According to those who have written on the subject, they arise in the air, from the burning heat of the upper air, which is hotter than the lower, and they blow everywhere through the lower air. As for the four elements of which the nature of bodies is made up, that is, heat and cold, wet and dry, who is so twisted in his understanding as not to know that these things do exist in combination, but that if they are separated and taken alone they tend even to destroy one another, according to which of them is more abundant and so prevails? For heat is destroyed by cold if the cold is present in greater amount, and cold in turn is driven out by the power of heat; and what is dry is moistened by what is wet, and the wet is dried by the dry.