Thomas Aquinas argues against an historical six-day creation

During a break earlier today I read through an excerpt from Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on the Sentences (using the Penguin Classics translation by Relph McInerny). In it, Aquinas discusses the creation of the world, and I was surprised by how modern he sounds in places. I read it to some students after lunch, who found it interesting, and also disagreed with much of what he said, which is fine. But I thought it was worth sharing some of it here.

Aquinas begins:

Article 2: Are all things created simultaneously, distinct in their species?

It seems that they are.

So there are two questions in play here, and I am more interested in the first, which might be phrased, “did God create everything in an instant?” (in other words, not over a period of several days). The second asks if God created everything (living and non-living types is his sense, I believe), already distinct in their species (Ken Ham would like that). Aquinas says yes to both.

Let me then give you some of his reasoning.

1. It is said that in Ecclesiasticus 18.1, “He that liveth for ever created all things together.”

Worth noticing that this is Ecclesiasticus, not Ecclesiastes. But in any case, I don’t think that needs be read as “in an instant”. But he continues.

2. Moreover, there is more distance between the spiritual and the corporeal creature than between two corporeal creatures. But spiritual and corporeal things are held to have been made at the same time. Therefore much more so must all corporeal things.

This is the sort of philosophical comparison that modern scientists love to say “not necessarily” to - we trust our data more than your argument. We know that A and some of B were made at the same time, so surely all of B must have been made at that time too, for B is more similar to B than B is to A, he says. Eh. But I would say, something you seem to get from Aquinas (and many other ancient writers) a lot is, our God is perfect, and he made an ordered universe, so whatever would have been the most perfect thing to do, and whatever would produce the best order, that is what he did.

4. Moreover, the work of creation manifests the divine power. But the power of an agent shows less when its effect is completed successively than when it is produced immediately in its perfection. Therefore it seems that all things are distinct from the beginning.

The work of creation shows the power of God. That power is shown better when the full creation is completed immediately, is the argument. (We might note at least that Aquinas would presumably dislike any sort of modern evolutionary creationism proposal on this ground.)

5. Moreover, it is clear that God produced the whole work of one day in one moment. Therefore it seems ridiculous to say that he stopped acting for a whole day until the beginning of the next, as if he were exhausted. Therefore it seems that creatures are not distinguished by the succession of days, but from the beginning of creation.

So, if we did believe that God did such-and-such on Day Two, it isn’t as if it would take him the whole day to do it, he could accomplish all the work of Day Two in a moment. So then why suggest he paused until the following day as if he needed to rest? That’s just silly, says Aquinas. (A common rebuttal would be that, sure, God didn’t have to create in this way, but he was laying down a pattern for us.)

6. Moreover, the parts of the universe are mutually dependent and the lower are especially dependent on the higher. But where things depend on one another, one is not found without the other. Therefore it seems unfitting to say that first there was water and earth and afterwards the stars were made.

So, you can’t talk about a tree without first talking about the ground, doesn’t make sense. But the example he gives is that you can’t talk about the earth without talking about the stars… I’m not sure what he means by that actually. (There is one star we need very badly, of course, but not the rest in such a way.)

But what about Augustine and the Bible?

So, whatever you might think of it, the above is his argument for a “yes” answer to creation in an instant, already with differentiated species. It did strike me that this is definitely a philosophical argument, very little scripture appears within it.

Aquinas comments, however, that Augustine believed that different creatures came to be over the course of six days. It isn’t usually good to disagree with Augustine, so how should we handle that? He says:

It should be said that what pertains to faith is distinguished in two ways, for some are as such of the substance of faith, such that God is three and one, and the like, about which no one may licitly think otherwise…

Some truths, like the Trinity, are so fundamental that no Christian should think otherwise.

Other things are only incidental to faith insofar as they are treated in Scripture, which faith holds to be promulgated under the dictation of the Holy Spirit, but which can be ignored by those who are not held to know scripture, such as many of the historical works. On such matters even the saints disagree, explaining scripture in different ways.

Other things are not fundamental. People who don’t know scripture are entirely ignorant of them, and (far as their faith is concerned), that’s OK. Saints who do know scripture disagree about them.

Thus with respect to the beginning of the world something pertains to the substance of faith, namely that the world began to be by creation, and all the saints agree on this.

The fundamental thing upon which we all must agree is only that God created the world. (So it’s OK that he disagrees with Augustine, in other words.)

But why do we get this story about six-days in the Bible, then? He says:

As to nature, just as sound precedes song in nature, though not in time, so things which are naturally prior are mentioned first, as earth before animals, and water before fish, and so with other things.

“Sound” is a more fundamental thing than “song”. If someone didn’t know what either was, you would explain “sound” to them first. But when you sing a song, at that moment, the sound does not precede the song in time, they come out together. Thus, he implies, so it was in creation and the creation story. He continues:

But in the order of teaching, as is evident in those teaching geometry, although the parts of the figure make up the figure without any order of time, still the geometer teaches the constitution as coming to be by the extension of line for line….

A beautiful painting is one object, all there together. But if you’re describing how it was made, you still describe it line by line. This, he suggests, is what is happening in early Genesis - God made everything in an instant, but we could not comprehend that, so it is described as a process as a sort of teaching tool, essentially. He concludes:

So too Moses, instructing an uncultivated people on the creation of the world, divides into parts what was done simultaneously.

That part especially grabbed me, because Aquinas here sounds almost like many moderns. It is commonly said today, God created the universe, he used, for example, the Big Bang to do it… had he described the Big Bang to the ancient Israelites, it would have made no sense to them at all, they were quite ignorant about such things. God could have miraculously brought them mentally into the modern age, but he wasn’t interested in that either. So he accommodated himself to where they were, and told them a story that taught them the theology they needed to know. Aquinas knew nothing of the Big Bang Theory either, but the comment that Moses was instructing an “uncultivated people” could be yanked right out of 2025. So I found that interesting.

Your comments are welcome, of course.

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