Mistaken Views of Creation

Many have taken different views about the making of the universe and the creation of all things, and each has laid down the law just as he pleased. Some say that all things came into being of themselves, by chance. The Epicureans are an example: in contempt of themselves they tell us that there is no providence over the universe, speaking in the very face of obvious fact and experience. For if, as they say, everything had its beginning of itself, without any purpose, it would follow that everything had simply come into being, so as to be all alike and without distinction. It would follow, by the unity of body, that everything must be sun or moon; and in human beings, that the whole must be hand, or eye, or foot. But as it is, this is not so. On the contrary, we see a distinction between sun, moon, and earth, and again, in human bodies, between foot, hand, and head. Such a separate arrangement tells us that these things did not come into being of themselves. It shows that a cause came before them, and from that cause we can come to know God as well, the Maker and Orderer of all. [a]

Others, including Plato, who is so highly regarded among the Greeks, argue that God made the world out of matter that already existed and had no beginning. God could have made nothing, they say, had the material not existed already, just as the wood must be ready at hand for the carpenter before he can work at all. But in saying this they do not realize that they are making God weak. For if he is not himself the cause of the material, but only makes things out of material that already existed, he turns out to be weak, since without the material he cannot produce anything he makes. In just the same way it is without doubt a weakness in the carpenter that he cannot make anything he needs without his timber. On their own premise, had the material not existed, God would not have made anything. And then how could he be called Maker and Craftsman, if he owes his ability to make to some other source, namely to the material? If this is so, on their theory God will be only a workman, and not a Creator out of nothing, since he works on existing material but is not himself the cause of the material. For he could not in any sense be called Creator unless he is Creator of the material from which created things have in their turn been made. [b]

The heretics, for their part, imagine for themselves a different craftsman of all things, other than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are deeply blind, even to the meaning of the words they use. For the Lord says to the Jews: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cling to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” And then, referring to the Creator, he says, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate.” How can these men claim that the creation is independent of the Father? Or when John says, making no exception, “All things were made by him,” and “without him nothing was made,” how could the craftsman be another, distinct from the Father of Christ?