by  J. H. TEMPLETON

 

Formerly it was theology which was responsible for directing attention to the subject of creation; the Christian doctrine of a single world order that began at a particular point in the past, and will end at some future date has a rather special place in the history of cosmological speculation.  At present the origin and destiny of the universe is being widely discussed in intelligent circles, but now it is science that is raising the question.  The aim of this note is to emphasize what creation properly means, and then to look briefly at the latest theories of the cosmologists.

The root idea in the conception of creation in the Christian sense is that of dependence, the resting of the visible, temporal order on the invisible, eternal order.  It means that nothing whatever other than God has existence by itself and in its own right.  All that is and wherever it is owes its being to the divine will and sustaining presence.  A thing that existed by itself, some brute entity that stood in no relation to anything else, would not be a creature; creaturehood points to an external cause of existence.  There is no better way of expressing the dependence of the world on God than the standard biblical one, in both Old and New Testaments, of attributing it to the outgoing of the Mind of God in the utterance of His Word.  Science cannot get behind things at the point of origin and analyse the nature of the contact between the visible and the invisible; it has no formula for creation.  Its business is to take Nature as a going concern, to investigate its movements and changes, and discover the laws determining them.  Cosmology deals with things in their furthest range; it studies the nature and structure of the entire universe, including the question of its origin and final issue, in so far as this is implied by a knowledge of how Nature actually works.

As understood today cosmology is among the youngest of the sciences, and may be said to have begun in 1917 with the publication of some notes by Einstein on the bearing on cosmology of his General Theory of Relativity.  Since then, the new methods and techniques developed by astronomical investigation have greatly increased the date for a modern view of the universe; but it will be readily appreciated that recent discoveries are variously explained and interpreted.  At the moment several questions of first‑rate importance for cosmology are under vigorous discussion, and we shall have to await their settlement.  With this in mind, what has the present trend in cosmological theory to say on the Christian view of a world beginning and ending with time?  Thirty years ago Sir James Jeans compared the universe to a clock that was running down, but which must once have been wound up in some mysterious way, and Eddington held that the principle on which this running‑down movement was taking place, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the decreasing availability of energy), was so important that if any fact contrary to it were established, the whole system of knowledge would be upset.  It was on the strength of this Law of Entropy, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics is sometimes called, that Bertrand Russell made his famous prediction that the final result “towards which the whole creation moves” is a universe in ruins enveloped in eternal darkness.

But now the advocates of the New Cosmology, of whom Professor Hoyle is the best known, believe that this catastrophe will be averted, not by any violation of the Law of Entropy in the behaviour of existing matter, but by the appearance of new matter.  According to their ‘steady state’ theory, the loss of energy in the universe is counterbalanced by the coming of new matter which goes into the formation of new stars and galaxies, so that the general features of the cosmos are preserved.  This process has always been going on; the universe is for ever the same without beginning or end.