When I first began to discuss these things with
John Bauer, I asked him if he had read Lewis’s “Science and Religion” in
God In the Dock, the analogy of the coin drawer in the office that gains the same coin each day. Lewis said the mathematicians claim that 100 days from now there will be 100 more coins, and if that were the only circumstance, they would be right. (Or, you could say 100 days ago, there were 100 less).
But the hinge of the analogy is that something else has happened and a mathematician cannot explain it. It takes a detective or a psychiatrist. He can quantify how many coins went where, but that's not an explanation, and Genesis 1 is an explanation of the natural order in an ordinary sense.
In the same way, Joseph, Jesus' earthly father, could not account for Mary's pregnancy except to realize that something else had happened.
Something 'else' happened that resulted in the pre-existing condition of earth in 1:2. It was other than the marked seasons and weeks that followed. This alters what we know about fossils, because many layers of geology are altered, and it takes a hydrological event to trap a creature and result in a fossil. They have been found down to 9000km.
Back when you had asked me that question, I answered in the affirmative because I have that book.
Lewis does not disagree with my position about the laws of nature being a reliable guide for inferring what will happen (or has happened),
provided that nothing interferes, he said. “[The laws of nature] can’t tell you
whether something is going to interfere,” he said, or has interfered. And I agree with him. To answer how likely nature is to be (or has been) interfered with from outside, he said, “you must go to the metaphysician” (i.e., theologian)—because that is a theological question, not a scientific one. [1] “For Christians,” Moore said, “
the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their Author, science relates them to one another as integral parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell us of their interrelations, science cannot speak of their relation to God.” [2] And that was the whole point of the analogy: The explanatory level must match the kind of question asked. We don’t use science to study what the Bible says, and we don’t use theology to study how nature works. Lewis was distinguishing levels of explanation, which is determined by the nature of the questions being asked.
As for the question as to whether “something happened” prior to Genesis 1:2, that is a textual question answered with biblical exegesis. And you have provided that argument a number of times, an argument I don’t pretend to understand at all.
That being said, my view finds more agreement with Moore than Lewis, for he said that “the common distinction between the natural and the supernatural is unreal and misleading.” I completely agree. If God is providentially sustaining and governing all of creation, then to contemplate divine interference is to sing theologically off-key. It introduces a theological dissonance. Since creation is not in any way autonomous, there is no sense in which God could “interpose” upon himself. As Moore said,
There are not, and cannot be, any divine interventions in nature, for God cannot interfere with himself. His creative activity is present everywhere. There is no division of labor between God and nature, or God and law. … The plant which is produced from seed by the “natural” laws of growth is his creation. … We need hardly stop to remind ourselves how entirely this is in accord with the relation of God and nature, always assumed in the Bible. What strikes us at once, trained as we are in the language of science, is the immediateness with which everything is ascribed to God. He makes the grass to grow upon the mountains. To him the young ravens look up for food. He holds the winds in the hollow of his hand. Not a sparrow falls without his knowledge. He numbers the hairs of our head. Of bird and beast and flower, no less than of man, it is true that in him they ”live and move and have their being.” O Lord, how glorious are thy works! For the Christian theologian the facts of nature are the acts of God. [3]
I don’t see any room in a coherent, self-consistent Reformed theology for a two-tiered ontology of the created order, natural and supernatural. As Alexander observed, “There is only one great ‘dualism’ in biblical thought—that which describes the relationship between God the creator and everything else that exists.” [4] I think this is articulated in Reformed covenant theology as the Creator–creature distinction. There is God, and there is everything he has made. There is nothing else. To bifurcate creation into natural and supernatural realms is unnecessary.
And I don’t think such a concept is found in Scripture. It was a drift that began in the 12th–13th centuries as Aristotelian categories were imported into Christian theology. Reformed orthodoxy doesn’t really cohere with that kind of ontology. Rather, we affirm the original and patristic view of creation as upheld by and contingent at every moment upon the creator’s willing. Like Augustine and others, we treat nature as the continuous theater of providence. Even in Old Testament times, there was no idea of a self-existing, stable “natural order” into which God would intervene. They believed, as did later Christianity, that deity pervades the world. “The Israelites, along with everyone else in the ancient world, believed instead that every event was the act of deity—that every plant that grew, every baby born, every drop of rain and every climatic disaster was an act of God,” explains Walton. There are no “natural” laws governing the cosmos; God does that. And there are no miracles in the sense of events deviating from that which was “natural,” there are only signs of God’s activity (either favorable or not):
The idea that deity got things running then just stood back or engaged himself elsewhere (deism) would have been laughable in the ancient world because it was not even conceivable. As suggested by Richard Bube, if God were to unplug himself in that way from the cosmos, we and everything else in the cosmos would simply cease to exist. There is nothing “natural” about the world in biblical theology, nor should there be in ours … [because God] is thoroughly involved in the operations and functions of the world. [5]
Those who defend this idea of occasional interventions by God seem to have failed to notice that “a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence,” Moore noted. Indeed! And that mindset reflected the deism prevalent in the 18th century which, even when trying to sound orthodox, spoke of God much like an absentee landlord who doesn’t mind his property as long as the rent comes in. “Yet anything more opposed to the language of the Bible and the fathers can hardly be imagined.” [6]
“As a result,” Walton says, “we should not expect anything in the Bible or in the rest of the ancient Near East to engage in the discussion of how God’s level of creative activity relates to the ‘natural’ world.”
The categories of “natural” and “supernatural” have no meaning to [the people of the Old Testament], let alone any interest (despite the fact that in our modern world such questions take center stage in the discussion). The ancients would never dream of addressing how things might have come into being without God or what “natural” processes he might have used. Notice that even the biblical text merges these perspectives when Genesis 1:24 says, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” but then follows up with the conclusion in the very next verse, “So God made the animals.” All of these issues are modern issues imposed on the text, and not the issues in the culture of the ancient world. We cannot expect the text to address them, nor can we configure the information of the text to force it to comply with the questions we long to have answered. We must take the text on its own terms—it is not written to us [though it was written for us.] Much to our dismay, then, we will find that the text is impervious to many of the questions that consume us in today’s dialogues. Though we long for the Bible to weigh in on these issues and give us biblical perspectives or answers, we dare not impose such an obligation on the text. God has chosen the agenda of the text, and we must be content with the wisdom of those choices. If we attempt to commandeer the text to address our issues, we distort it in the process. [7]
Let me tie this back into what Lewis was arguing. His point was that the laws of nature, studied
scientifically, describe the workings of the created order through secondary causes—a distinction that is itself
theological, since it directs one’s attention to the primary cause, namely, God. The explanatory level must match the kind of question asked. The laws of nature tell us what follows within the created realm, all else being equal. If the result departs from what would ordinarily arise under those same conditions, then the conditions themselves have changed. In some cases—such as the virgin birth—the shift is not a breakdown of natural law but an instance of God employing an extraordinary mode of providence. The explanatory level moves accordingly
Moore’s argument exposes the hidden and ultimately needless assumption operating in Lewis’s analogy. If creation is never autonomous, then talk of “interference” misconstrues the relation between Creator and creature. The entire framework of “outside” and “inside” dissolves. What Lewis treated as a metaphysical question becomes, in a coherent Reformed ontology, a straightforward matter of providence. God does not step into a system running on its own; the system has no independent existence apart from his sustaining will. The created order is not a vast machine engineered by a distant Designer but a sacred kingdom upheld and governed by a sovereign Ruler. In that sense, Moore does not so much contradict Lewis as carry the logic of providence to its proper conclusion. Lewis was right to distinguish explanatory levels; once the ontology is clarified, the levels align without strain. Science addresses the regularities of secondary causation, while theology speaks of the God who grants both ordinary and extraordinary providence their existence, purpose, and meaning. Miracles are not breaches in the natural order but particular, purposeful expressions of the same sovereign agency that upholds all things.
References:
[1] C. S. Lewis,
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 2005), 74.
[2] Aubrey L. Moore,
Science and Faith: Essays on Apologetic Subjects, 6th ed. (1889; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1905), 185. Emphasis mine.
[3] Moore,
ibid., 225–226. Emphasis mine.
[4] Denis R. Alexander,
Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Monarch, 2014), 216.
[5] John H. Walton,
The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 18.
[6] Moore,
ibid., 184–185.
[7] Walton,
ibid., 18–19. Emphases mine.
