Creation without time

A RECENT legal battle pitted the theory of a one-time creative incident several thousand years ago against Darwin's widely held theory of evolution. One theory cited Scriptural authority; the other, confirmation by objective data. There is, however, a third accounting of creation that, while not widely acknowledged, lines up with Scriptural authority and objective proof when viewed rightly. It is a wholly spiritual concept of creation. To grasp it, though, really requires first coming to grips with what God's nature is and what He does. Think of God as Spirit, a Biblical term for Deity. He is the very opposite of matter. Think of Him as infinite Mind--not limited in any way. He has created all as the manifestation of His own nature. This creation was neither a one-time event nor a material, evolutionary process over billions of years. It was and is the ever-appearing of God's expression. The very first verse of the first book of the Bible records this spiritual creation: ``In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.'' 1 Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, writes, referring to this passage: ``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.'' And she continues later: ``There is but one creator and one creation. This creation consists of the unfolding of spiritual ideas and their identities, which are embraced in the infinite Mind and forever reflected.'' 2 This scientific account of timeless, spiritual creation stands up to hard examination and the test of proof. God is All. He is Spirit. He is the one creator and His creation is spiritual. At no point does time enter this creation, so at no point does matter enter it. The confusion comes when we try to trace a supposed material creation--which is a counterfeit of the one true creation--back to God, Spirit. And of course it can't be done. You can, however, through healing, prove this timeless creation to be the only genuine one there is. When Christ Jesus said, ``Before Abraham was, I am,'' 3 wasn't he indicating something of his timeless identity? And with this timeless sense of himself as the Son of God, revealing man as God's expression, Jesus proved the reality of spiritual creation again and again. Take, for example, his healing of a man with a badly withered hand. Substance that, from a material point of view, was not there before the healing, was suddenly there. Had Jesus created matter or rearranged it for a fleshed-out hand? No. But his realization of eternal, spiritual facts of God and man brought to light in a tangible, practical way something already true about that individual. The truth of man created spiritually as God's perfect likeness--already and always in-tact was proved. Nothing needed to evolve or develop over a period of time. Similar instances in Jesus' own day could be cited, such as the appearing of enough food for five thousand when only moments before there were just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fishes. Spiritual healing in Jesus' day or now is not, then, a matter of creating something additional. It is a matter of realizing the already perfect creation of God. Christian Science brings this fact to light: there were not several or even a couple of creations. There was, is, only one creation, that of God, Spirit. The more we understand of this true spiritual creation, the more of it we'll see. More and more it will be natural to perceive the spiritual as the only. This true spiritual record of creation isn't really an alternative to other theories any more than a round earth is an alternative to the supposed flat one of centuries ago. There never was a flat earth, no matter how stubbornly it was believed in. In reality, there never was a material creation, never a creation that took place in time or over a period of time. There may be several theories for the counterfeit, material sense of creation. There is ultimately only one true record of creation, the spiritually scientific one. And it does not include time. None of us, living in a world of time as we seem to, fully grasps what timeless creation is. If we did, there would be no limit at all to what we could do, how long we could go. But in the degree we do begin to understand it--discern it as the result of prayer and purification of thought we put off limitations that have their roots in what we now call the past. Eternity--because it includes only God and the unfolding of His spiritual ideas poses no threat. 1 Genesis 1:1. 2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 502-503. 3 John 8:58.