The Bible starts with a deed and a wonder: ‘In the beginning God created . . .’. The reader is at once, without preliminaries, told of a power so great that it handles the sum of things, ‘heaven and earth’, and produces what it handles. Prior to whatever else is going to happen, things, we learn, only- are because of ‘God’. The statement is familiar—too familiar; but what it says is wonderful, in the sense that it means that the accepted order of things, the world around us, need not be. All wonder, all surprise, implies a norm, an accepted order of ‘ordinary’ reality from which the surprising fact or act seems to deviate as an exception. But here it is the whole ordinarily accepted norm itself, not man’s world only but all nature too, that is suddenly presented as an ‘exception’: it need not have been. The accepted norm is swept aside and another, infinitely more real, appears—God. As for the universe, we know now what it is made of—nothing!

I shall not attempt here to prove this doctrine as a thesis, restating familiar arguments, but only to draw out its meaning a little and then touch on one or two difficulties we may find in holding it firmly.

The doctrine tempts the imagination (witness my first paragraph), but it baffles it too, of course. Our images are always of limited things or activities, and if we try to represent ‘creative’ activity we have to make shift with such human doings as seem most original—the production of a symphony or poem, of a scientific or philosophical theory: all human things, presupposing at least the man who produces them and some sort of working material.