Your Questions and Answers
from The Christian Science Journal
Could you please explain the position of Christian Science on creationism vs. evolution?
I’ve come to appreciate both the originality of Mary Baker Eddy’s thought and the depth of her spiritual understanding in relation to her discovery of Christian Science. She often found that mistaken assumptions about reality and the nature of Deity underlay a number of the questions that have troubled people through the ages, including the nature of creation.
Questions about both creationism and evolution assume that matter is the substance of existence and being, and that either God created matter or that animal and human development evolved through a process of natural selection. However, Christian Science takes the unique viewpoint that creation is completely spiritual, forever intact and at the point of perfection. The Christian Science position is that God, or Spirit, created the universe, including all men and women, and that because God is Spirit, His/Her creation must also be spiritual, not material.
As Mrs. Eddy put it, “There is nothing in Spirit out of which matter could be made …” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 335). So as we consider the first chapter of Genesis, which relates the creation of the universe, we read that God’s command “Let there be light” was the first moment of creation (Gen. 1:3). Yet the commonly viewed sources of light—the sun and stars—had not yet occurred. Mrs. Eddy tackles this seeming inconsistency head-on, and comments, “Was not this a revelation instead of a creation?” (Science and Health, p. 504).
If we shift our thinking to the spiritual basis of creation—as revelation rather than a point-in-time event—the conflict between the traditional views of creationism and evolution disappears. And with this new viewpoint, we have the basis and foundation to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and reason the way he did. Through his ability to reason from a purely spiritual standpoint, he maintained his view of a perfect, timeless, spiritual creation in the face of some pretty daunting evidence to the contrary: leprosy, blindness, palsy, and even death. Yet his understanding of the truth of the spiritual nature of creation enabled him to heal these cases considered incurable, by demonstrating that spiritual perfection is always intact because it has been established by our Creator.
Sarah Hyatt | Charleston, South Carolina, US
The Bible says, “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me” (Isa. 45:5). Christian Science supports this statement by discerning creation not as developing matter, but as the revelation of infinite, divine Spirit, with the universe and all creation as wholly spiritual and good. There are not two parallel creations, one spiritual and one material. Dualism is unknown in Spirit’s universe.
Referring to the first verse in Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Mary Baker Eddy explained: “The infinite has no beginning. This word beginning is employed to signify the only,—that is, the eternal verity and unity of God and man, including the universe” (Science and Health, p. 502). Knowing that the universe has no starting point eradicates the fear that creation will eventually end and also transforms the view that creation took place literally in seven days.
Peter gave the proper perspective when he wrote, “Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (II Pet. 3:8). If we agree with the Bible’s explanation that God’s creation is infinite, then it follows that creation is a continuing revelation, and our only work for eternity is to discover its beauty and sublimity.
As humanity deals with these questions about evolution/creation, people who view the origin of the universe from a material basis will no doubt continue to find Darwin’s theory of evolution a reasonable explanation of human creation and development. But from the standpoint of the teachings of the divine Science of being, in which “God created man in his own image” (Gen. 1:27), God’s spiritual, perfect, and complete creation is already in existence, and always was. We do not have to graduate through material conditions—or even a material death—in order to become spiritual and immortal. Through our increasing understanding of our true, spiritual nature, we will progressively drop material concepts about creation to see the full revelation of God’s spiritual, divine creation—which has always been intact and present.
Malcolm Jackson | Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
The debate between creationism and evolution that has garnered so much attention recently has an underlying assumption—that matter is the basic building block of creation. The debate seeks to determine who or what created matter and how it developed. To the evolutionist, creation as matter developed as the result of perfectly logical physical processes. To the creationist, God created matter and then left it to develop essentially on its own (but He intervenes now and then when things get out of hand).
Christian Science challenges the basic assumption in that debate and suggests that the key to understanding creation lies along spiritual lines: that divine Spirit is the Creator and that Spirit creates consistently with its own nature. Therefore Spirit cannot create its opposite, matter. Instead, Spirit creates and evidences itself as spiritual ideas and not as material objects.
Christian Science holds that what we term matter is not really a physical phenomenon, but a mental one—that its “substance” comprises material assumptions and beliefs and that matter changes as those assumptions change. In this regard, evolution may be more consistent with the “truth” about matter. Mrs. Eddy spoke to this issue in Science and Health: “Evolution describes the gradations of human belief, but it does not acknowledge the method of divine Mind, nor see that material methods are impossible in divine Science and that all Science is of God, not of man” (p. 551).
So, Christian Science departs from the theory of creationism that proposes that God created matter and also from the theory of evolution that proposes that Mind, God, must be left out of its own creation. Christian Science clears up the debate by showing that creation is in fact a spiritual process with God at its center, creating spiritual ideas, which human theory or material belief (i.e., matter) tries to copy or misinterpret. The only substance to matter is illusion—the erroneous thought we hold about it. True creation comprises the spiritual ideas that God evolves.