The world's beginning refutes godless cosmologies

Those who did not know God would not allow that an intelligent cause stood over the origin of all things, but drew their conclusions in a way consistent with their initial ignorance. For this reason some fled to material principles, assigning the cause of everything to the elements of the world; others imagined that atoms and partless bodies, masses and pores, hold together the nature of visible things. Now, they said, when the partless bodies come together with one another, and now when they are rearranged, births and destructions come about; and in the case of the more enduring bodies, the stronger interweaving of the atoms provides the cause of their permanence. Truly those who write these things weave a spider's web, setting up such fine and insubstantial principles for heaven and earth and sea. For they did not know how to say, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Because of this they were deceived by the godlessness dwelling within them into thinking that all things are unsteered and ungoverned, carried along as chance would have it. So that we might not suffer this, the one who wrote the account of the world's creation at once, in his very first words, illuminated our minds with the name of God, saying, “In the beginning God made.” How beautiful is the order! He placed “beginning” first, so that no one would think the world is without beginning. Then he added “made,” so that it might be shown that what was made is the smallest part of the Creator's power. For just as a potter, having shaped countless vessels by the same art, has not used up either his art or his power, so also the Creator of this universe does not have a creative power measured to one world alone, but one that surpasses it to an infinite degree, and by the inclination of his will alone he brought the magnitudes of visible things into being. If then the world has a beginning and has been made, ask who gave it its beginning and who is its maker. Or rather, so that you may not be led astray from the truth by searching with human reasonings, he anticipated you with his teaching, placing in our souls as a seal and a safeguard the precious name of God, saying, “In the beginning God made.” The blessed nature, the ungrudging goodness, the one beloved by all who have received reason, the much-longed-for beauty, the beginning of all beings, the source of life, the intelligible light, the unapproachable wisdom—this one “made the heaven and the earth in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1). Do not imagine, then, O man, that visible things are without beginning; and do not suppose, because the things that move in the heavens run round in a circle and the beginning of a circle is not easily grasped by our ordinary perception, that the nature of the bodies that move in circles is without beginning. For this circle—I mean the plane figure enclosed by a single line—even though it escapes our perception, and we cannot discover where it began or where it ended, we are not therefore obliged to suppose that it is without beginning. But even if it escapes perception, in truth it certainly began from some point, drawn by one who marked it out with a center and a radius. So you too, because the things that move in a circle return upon themselves, do not let the smoothness of their motion, uninterrupted by anything in the middle, leave in you the error that the world is without beginning and without end.