1956 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 235

TOWARD A THEISTIC CREATIONISM

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already existing creaturality. Let us take a look at the Genesis account to see whether what we should expect to find there is also actually present. Nothing is said quite so plainly nor quite so insistently in the Genesis account as that process is of the very essence of the matter. Sequence is held up to us everywhere. First of all, we read of a series of creative acts. God who could also have called into being, in the twinkling of an eye, a whole world full of creatures, with trees loaded with ripe fruit for the taking and birds fluttering in their branches — chose not so to exercise His creative power. He who surely did not have to create in instalments nevertheless did just that, taking a whole „week" in which to arrive finally at the final objective. He who runs may read that the purpose of this Report is not to deny the processional but rather to enunciate it. Now process normally implies progress. God's self-disclosure, for instance, was processional but it was also progressive. It moved from the simple to the complex. There is in all of God's redemptive work such a thing as the „fulness of time"; „first the blade and then the ear and then the full kernels in the ear" is the law of God's program elsewhere. We may therefore ask whether the account of God's creative activity as given in Genesis also has the element of progress in it, whether here too it is a matter of a scale with ever-increasing complexity. Again nothing is more apparent than this in this saga concerning origins. Mountains and rivers, low forms of animal life, higher forms, vertebrates, finally man „in His image". At this point it is herhaps not amiss to repeat what has oft been said already that when the Bible at this point reports on the progressive character of God's creative enterprise it is not so much interested in relating how and where the forward step was achieved as to reveal to us that it was achieved. The Good Book does not preclude and render unnecessary the labors of the taxonomer; it does not do his work for him but rather assigns his task to him, tells him that schematization is inherently possible. As has been said already, man occurs at the end of the progressive scale. It has sometimes been said, a bit naively, that man was made last, on the sixth day, because God wanted all the rest to be on hand ready to receive man and to serve him before God introduced him. The house had to be all ready and garnished, so to speak, before the bride was carried over de threshold. This is hardly a good explanation for man's last-ness. First of all, he could have been quite happy upon

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