product, the blame is to be laid on the refractory nature of the chaotic, preexisting matter
with which the craftsman had to work. (Not even the most skilled violin maker can
achieve much success if the only raw materials available are Styrofoam and cotton
string.)
Timaeus's account models creation on a causal process with which we are familiar
enough. The familiarity, however, comes at a price that many theists are unwilling to pay.
Matter, on Timaeus's account, exists and has its nature in independence from the
craftsman-creator. A fairly straightforward application of (A) tells against construing
divine creation as a species of material rearrangement.
The doctrine of creation ex nihilo removes Timaeus's limitation. According to Augustine,
for example, the universe was made out of “concreated” matter, that is, matter created
simultaneously with the creation of the universe (1960, 367). A natural extension of
Augustine's claim is to suppose that in creating the universe, God created the
fundamental particles, stuff, or energy that makes up the universe, and that God set the
laws and parameters that describe thereafter the behavior of the physical processes that
occur in the universe.
Creation ex nihilo is a significant departure from Timaeus's folksy account. It is one thing
to give you titanium tubing and ask you to build a bicycle. It is quite another to ask you to
build a bicycle out of nothing whatsoever. But for many believers, Augustine included,
the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, although true, is insufficient by itself to express the
nature of God's creative activity and the dependency of creatures on God. For one thing,
the doctrine gives us no reason to think that the creator still exists: sometimes artifacts
outlast their artificers. For another, the doctrine by itself does nothing to validate the
sentiment that God created us. Without such validation it is hard to see why it is
appropriate for believers to respond to God as a spiritual parent. It is difficult to conjure
up an attitude of filial piety toward a being whose sole contribution was to set into motion
a chain of events that resulted, say, approximately 15 billion years later, in one's coming
into existence. Although compatible with the doctrine of creation out of nothing, the
deistic portrait of God as the cosmic artificer, whose craft is so supreme that he need
not—and thus does not—subsequently attend to what he has created, is a poor
resemblance to the believer's picture of God as personal.
One way of retouching the deistic portrait is to suppose that God does intervene in
creation on occasion to perform miracles, not necessarily to adjust anything that has gone
awry, but rather to make manifest his providential concern. Many believers, however,
who may doubt ever having witnessed a miracle do not stake their claim for God's active,
personal nature solely on such impressive divine sorties. For these believers miracles,
almost by definition, occur in stark contrast to the way God sustains the everyday
functioning of the world.
end p.38
Conservation
Traditional theology has a remarkable strategy for characterizing God's sustaining
function. The strategy involves two maneuvers. The first is to distinguish generation and