According to Holy Scripture, God did not create all things "at once, but gradually, observing an admirable order" (ordo crea.tionis). As the first chapter of Genesis affirms, God, in creating all things, proceeded from the lower to the higher, until He finally made man as the crown of His creative work. In general, the work of creation comprises three steps: a) the production, on the first day, of the crude material, "which was the germinal source, as it were, of the entire universe" (Quenstedt); Luther: moles coeli el terrae; b) the separation and disposition of simple creatures during the first three days (light on the first day; the firmament on the second; the separation of the earth from the waters on the third); c) the furnishing and completion of the world, which was brought to perfection in three more days (the celestial bodies on the fourth day; the fish and fowl on the fifth; the creation of land animals and of man on the sixth).
We thus distinguish between immediate and mediate creation, the former being the creation of the moles coeli et terrae out of nothing and the latter the arrangement of the previously created material.
This order of creation must, however, not be interpreted as an evolutionary process; for according to Scripture the world was not developed by forces resident in matter itself, but by the creative power of God. (Gen. 1, 1: "God created"; v. 3: "God said.") The creatures thus came into existence through the omnipotent command of the personal, transmundane Creator. This truth our dogmaticians have expressed by the statement: "The efficient cause of creation is God, and He alone" (Calov). Nor can experimental science gainsay it, since it can prove neither a development of organic things from inorganic (generatio aequivoca) nor a development of higher forms from the lower (Deszendenztheorie; Transmutationshypothese).
Evolution must be rejected as untenable even on rational grounds, a) since it does not account for the existence of primeval matter and b) since it rests upon a principle disproved by nature, namely, on the supposed transmutation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous (transmutation of species). Scripture, on the other hand, accords with reason in the following points: a) the creation of all things by an omnipotent God; b) the orderly procedure in the work of creation; c) the propagation of creatures after their kind, Gen. 1, 21. As all creatures came into existence through the creative command of God, so they are preserved and propagated through the divine omnipotent will, Acts 17, 28. The existence of the universe to-day with all its manifold creatures is due to the blessing which God pronounced upon the whole creation after the completion of His creative work, Gen. 1, 22; Col. 1, 17.