Modern Age - Fall 2016 - 81

THOMAS AQUINAS ON CREATION AND SCIENCE

in, for example, China. Here Thomas offers us a kind of template
that we can use to map different explanations of origins. It is a
template that need not refer to a mere chronological account,
but could be descriptive of various positions that continue to be
affirmed. Those whom Thomas identifies in the first paragraph as
pre-Socratic materialists are well represented by many twentyfirst-century cosmologists and all those who share an exclusively
materialist view of reality.
The Creator, for Thomas, transcends the created order, but not
in the sense simply of being "other" than or "beyond" what is
created. Transcendence in this context is not to be contrasted
with immanence such that one necessarily excludes the other.
We may begin to think of transcendence as contrasted with
immanence, but as we reflect more on the radical otherness of
the Creator, we come to recognize that the Creator differs from
creatures in a way different from the ways in which creatures differ from one another, and in a way different from the difference
between all the created order and nothingness. The Creator's
transcendence is such that he can be the abiding cause of all
that is created, more immanent, in fact, to creatures than they
are to themselves. The Creator is not the highest being in a hierarchy of beings. The Creator is not a thing among things, not a
cause among causes, however true it is to say that the Creator is
the Uncaused Cause.

T

homas was able to examine the history of philosophical discourse on the "origin of things" and consider that discourse
in the context of his own understanding of creation precisely
because he had a philosophical understanding of creation-an
understanding not necessarily connected to any particular relimoder nagejour nal .com

81



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Modern Age - Fall 2016

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