Lianne Acierto

Tiolo Alvarez
Gab Omar
Girome Quemado
Riana Uy
Rebecca Varela

Creation and Genesis

Thesis Statement: God created the world out of gratuity, order, and goodness, therefore we must
respect and appreciate the existence of every being, for we are all grounded by the fact that
everything is by God.

3 Doctrines:
1. Gratuitous - God willed the creation of the world and was not merely created by
chance, as opposed to the story of Enuma Elish and Atrahasis.
2. Ordered - There is a law intrinsic within each of God’s creation that guide them to
be.
3. Good - Because we are creations of God we all participate in His goodness
(Participation principle). We are all naturally good.
The Dominion Paradigm
● Having dominion over God’s creation, we are called to represent Him in taking
care of the rest of the creatures, allowing them to flourish in the life given to them
by the loving God.
● When human beings have dominion over the creation of God, they set foot on it to
signify their responsibilities as stewards of His creation. But we usually mistake it
as domination in which we crush God’s creation, forgetting the real purpose of
our humanity.
The Community of Creation
● All life results from the same biological process. Living beings share elements of
the same basic code.
● We have spiritual poverty because all creatures were created by God equally, we
were all created poor
● Human beings belong to this community and need other species profoundly, in
some ways more than other species need them. Human beings are not simply
rulers of the life-world but dependent upon it at the most fundamental level.
○ Like how trees provide oxygen for us and we provide carbon dioxide for
them.
● Man as Homo adorans and man as Homo faber
○ Homo adorans is man who works
○ Homo faber is man who adores
 ○ Too much homo adorans would make man see the world as so magnificent
that man would end up just adoring.
○ Too much homo faber would make man create the world in his image.
○ There should be a balance because our world is not a human world.
● Neither plants, animals, nor human beings, neither land, sea, nor air, neither sun,
moon, nor stars would exist apart from the life-giving, loving power of the
Creator.
● In this profoundly theocentric view, human beings participate with others in an
interdependent world fundamentally oriented to God.
● In varied interactions each member gives and receives, being significant for one
another in different ways but all grounded in absolute, universal reliance on the
living God for the very breath of life.
● Repositioning the human species within the community of creation centered on
the living God and reconceiving our identity primarily along the lines of kinship
rather than rule opens a promising new avenue for religious self-understanding
and sound practice.
● Theology done in this framework gives importance of our connection to,
relationship with, and solidarity alongside others of God’s creatures, instead of
emphasizing our differentiation from them.
God in the world
● As catholics, we see God in all things. Though God transcends ultimately and is
completely other than everything, He remains immanent in all things. We
encounter God through his creation in many different ways.This belief is called
panentheism. This is different from pantheism such that in this belief, everything
is God; this is completely different from deism because God never left the world.
He remains present in all things that serve to be sacraments in this world.