Day 40: God Is the Creator

Creation is the foundation of "all God's saving plans," the "beginning of the history of salvation" that culminates in Christ. Conversely, the mystery of Christ casts conclusive light on the mystery of creation and reveals the end for which "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth": from the beginning, God envisaged the glory of the new creation in Christ. CCC 280

Today's reading is about God and Creation. The majesty and splendor of the cosmos and everything that was, is now, or ever will be, all things "visible and invisible", come from God Almighty. Creation reveals the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence of the Eternal God. In our modern world, this can be ignored or pushed aside as a "fairy tale" in favor of science. Yet the Catechism makes clear that while science has its role, the mystery of Creation is still bound with the mystery of God. Science cannot give us "meaning and orientation of our life and actions". Only by faith in God and His grace can we receive both.

As the Catechism Companion, Vol I puts it:

In a purely material world, there is no such thing as free will, no right, no wrong, no objective morality. God made heaven and earth; he created all that is visible and all that is invisible. This is why there is a world instead of no world; this is why there is something rather than nothing: because God loves us, and he wants each of us to have eternal life with him. (p. 84)

So we can see how science answers the "how" questions about Creation, while faith the "why" and "Whom" ones. For the former one may wonder whether Catholics can believe in evolution. The Catechism Companion has an answer to that:

If the term "evolution" means the theory that life on earth developed from random chance or purely "natural selection" (the view of Darwin) with no divine role or direction, then the answer is no... Some theories which have suggested that God used an evolutionary process to create the world, do not contradict revealed truth. (p. 85)

God remains at the center of all life and Creation. That is the supreme truth when it comes to this.

The Ancient of Days, a 14th-century fresco from Ubisi, Georgia.