The identity of the creator

In his wonderful book, Karl Barth, John Webster  gives a nice overview of the content, context, and significance of Barth's doctrine of Creation. He points out that Barth's doctrine is distinctly different from that of other modern theologians. Specifically, it is not apologetic. It is trinitarian. It is not prolegomena, i.e. it is not just introductory material to more substantial doctrine. Furthermore, Barth freed the doctrine from abstract debates about ``causality.'' The doctrine is “not simply an account of origins, the doctrine …. talks of the creator’s identity rather than of some opaque act undertaken by a nameless force.”

God separates light from darkness, Raphael (1518-1519).

The absolute standard of ethics

I have been reading though the book of 2 Kings which records the steady decline and eventual end of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel. In describing the many different kings the assessment is either, "he did what was evil in the sight of the LORD" or "he did was right in the eyes of the LORD."
It is interesting to me that the text never says anything like, "he did was good for the people" or "he had a good heart but was a bit selfish" or "he was a much admired leader" or "he consistently applied his own ethical standard".
This also reminds me of how the period of Judges is described as
  In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Judges 21:25

The engraving is Josiah reads the Book of the Law aloud to the elders.

What Abraham could not see

⁵And he [the LORD] brought him [Abraham] outside and said, "Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." ⁶And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

Genesis 15

The above photo was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. I recommend looking at the amazing gallery of images. Indeed, my response is

 The heavens declare the glory of God,
   and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1

The farce of science

Steven Weinberg is one of the worlds leading theoretical physicists. In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1977 he published a popular science book, The First Three Minutes: A modern view of the origin of the universe. [This a decade before Stephen Hawking made publishing such books an attractive option for prominent scientists.] The end of Weinberg's book is widely quoted because of the eloquence of its pessimistic atheism. I reproduce it here:

Some cosmologists are philosophically attracted to the oscillating model, especially because, like the steady-state model, it nicely avoids the problem of Genesis...

However all these problems may be resolved, and whichever cosmological model proves correct, there is not much of comfort in any of this. It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning....

It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (Basic Books, 1977), pages 154-155.

On one level I actually agree with Weinberg because his views resonate with the book of Ecclesiastes. Science without God is like "Life under the sun"; there is no point or meaning in the equations that describe the beginning of the universe. That meaning and purpose comes from outside science.

Freedom, rest and joy on the Sabbath

²And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. ³So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. 

Karl Barth has an interesting exposition of this beginning of Genesis 2, all that it says about the Sabbath for man:

It is not a question of recuperation after a toilsome and well-done job. Even the Sabbath rest of man corresponding to the divine rest does not have this sense in the Old Testament, but means negatively a simple cessation and abstention from further work. The freedom, rest and joy of the Sabbath consist in the fact that on this day man is released from his daily work. On the Sabbath he does not belong to his work. Nor is it merely a question of having to recuperate from the work that lies behind him and to fortify himself for the new tasks that are ahead. On the Sabbath he belongs to himself.

Whether he be farmer, artisan, servant or maid, he is just the man who for six days had to be these things and to perform the corresponding tasks, but whose being and existence are more than all these things .... that his work cannot devour him but consists of steps towards this goal, is confirmed at the end of each week by the proffered freedom, rest and joy of the workless Sabbath which he is granted. It is this which gives perspective and depth, meaning and lustre, to all his weeks, and therefore to his whole time, as well as to the work which he performs in his time.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1: The Doctrine of Creation, page 214.

So on the Sabbath we can celebrate and enjoy that our work and employment (or lack of ) does not define us or have to consume us. There is freedom and joy in that.

The watercolour is God blessing the seventh day by William Blake.

Expect the unexpected

We all have pre-conceived ideas about how God should and should not act. A case in point is Naaman, as recorded in 2 Kings 5. He had definite ideas about the way that the LORD, the God of Israel, should heal him from his leprosy: it should be very dramatic.

¹⁰And Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean." ¹¹But Naaman was angry and went away, saying, "Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the LORD his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper.¹²Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?" So he turned and went away in a rage. 

The Prophet Elisha and Naaman, Lambert Jacobsz (ca. 1598-1636). I found this image at Biblical Art on the WWW, which is particularly useful because you can search under specific Biblical passages.

I believe in one world

I do believe the world exists. This may seem like a silly claim, but it engages with serious theological, scientific, and philosophical issues. Not only is the existence of God a contestable hyphothesis but so is the existence of the world.

In the Preface to Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics 3.1: Doctrine of Creation, the Editors Bromiley and Torrance state that Barth considers the radical position:

the supreme problem of theology is not the existence of God, as natural theology supposes, but the independent existence of creaturely reality.

Barth asserts that the whole doctrine of Creation is an article of faith, both that God exists and that the world [a creaturely reality independent of God] exists. Specifically, Barth writes:

the whole history of theology as a continuous fighting retreat in face of the irresistible advance of a rational and empirical science which on the very different grounds of a triumphant human self-conceit is quite sure of its subject. In preoccupation with only one side of the question, there has been a dangerous failure to realise that the question of creation is not less but even more concerned with the reality of the creature than that of the Creator. 

 Church Dogmatics 3.1: Doctrine of Creation, page 6.

When Barth wrote this more than sixty years ago, most scientists would have considered this quite silly. Today, logical positivists such as Richard Dawkins, would still take the view: the world is a non-contestable hypothesis, God is a contestable hypothesis. But not all scientists today have such a view.

Tony Leggett (who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003) has thought long and hard about quantum theory and the picture of the world it presents. In a short article in Science, The Quantum Measurement Problem [Is Schrodinger's cat dead or alive?] he makes the intriguing statement: 

Personally if I could be sure we will forever regard Quantum Mechanics as the complete truth about the physical world I think I should grit my teeth and plump for [the view that] Quantum Mechanics is the complete truth (in the sense that it always gives reliable predictions concerning the nature of experiments) but describes no external reality.