The Literal Meaning of Genesis (continued)
principles causally created in the works of the first six days.7° The angel's function in such a case is like that of the farmer or the physician.
Who, then, can dare to say what ministry the angels performed for God in the making of the first woman? I would say without hesitation that the flesh formed in place of the rib, the body and soul of the woman, the shaping of the bodily members, all the inner organs, all the senses, and whatever there was by which she was a creature, a human being, a woman—all this was done by the work of God, which God did not do by the angels but by Himself, not creating His work and then leaving it, but unceasingly creating it, so that no creature would continue to exist, not even the angels, were He not working by His creative act.
CHAPTER 16
The difficulty of understanding the ways in which life ts created.
29. In so far as our powers of observation and our human intelligence can understand nature, we have no evidence that any flesh with life and sensation is born unless it is from one of four sources:7! either from water and earth, which serve as its material elements, or from the shoots or the fruits of trees, or from the flesh of animals (as happens in the case of countless kinds of worms and reptiles), or from the copulation of parents. We know of no flesh born of the flesh of any living being, like it in everything except sex. Hence, we are seeking in nature for a similar occurrence of this creation by which a woman has been made from the side of a man, and we can find none. The reason for our ignorance is that although we know how men work in this world, we do not know how angels cultivate the earth, if I may use the expression.
If the ordinary processes of nature were to produce a certain kind of bush without human labor, we should know nothing else than that trees and plants were born from the earth and also from their seeds falling again to the earth. But we should know