system which has no place for a self-conscious,
creative mind and will. In fact, the universe appears as an ever growing
and unfolding deity, and the deity as an ever growing and unfolding
universe. Modern science more properly assumes a self-imposed limitation;
it searches for the laws underlying the action and interaction of natural
forces and elements, thus to explain in a mechanistic way the origin and
development of all things, but it leaves entirely outside of its domain
the whole question of a first cause and a supreme creative mind. It
certainly can pass no opinion as to whether or not the entire work of
creation was accomplished by the free act of a Creator. Revelation alone
can speak with unfaltering accents: "In the beginning God created heaven
and earth." However we may understand, or imagine, the beginning of the
natural process, the formation of matter and the inception of motion, we
see above the confines of space and time the everlasting God, the
absolutely free Creator of all things.

3. No definite theological dogma can define the order and process of the
genesis of the world; this is rather a scientific than a religious
question. The Biblical documents themselves differ widely on this point,
whether one compares the stories in the first two chapters of Genesis, or
contrasts both of them with the poetical descriptions in Job and the
Psalms.(423) And these divergent accounts are still less to be reconciled
with the results of natural science. In the old Babylonian cosmography, on
which the Biblical view is based, the earth, shaped like a disk, was
suspended over the waters of the ocean, while above it was the solid vault
of heaven like a ceiling. In this the stars were fixed like lamps to light
the earth, and hidden chambers to store up the rain. The sciences of
astronomy, physics, and geology have abolished these childlike conceptions
as well as the story of a six-day creation, where vegetation sprang from
the earth even before the sun, moon, and stars appeared in the firmament.

The fact is that the Biblical account is not intended to depreciate or
supersede the facts established by natural science, but solely to
accentuate those religious truths which the latter disregards.(424) These
may be summed up in the following three doctrines:

4. First. Nature, with all its immeasurable power and grandeur, its
wondrous beauty and harmony, is not independent, but is the work, the
workshop, and the working f