Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church,

and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute

chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

Thomistic Institute.org. What I want to do is talk this evening about creation, depictions of

creation in the Bible, and specifically in the Old Testament, and then also how creation, that is the created world,

is a pathway to coming to know God, how God's vestige, how his thumbprint, if you want,

can be found on the world.

And there are ways that the Bible itself describes how by reflecting on the world, reflecting on the scriptural text, we can come to know God in a deeper way.

So that's the general trajectory of my lecture this evening.

But before I kind of get into any of that, I want to talk a little bit about Catholic interpretation or Catholic biblical interpretation, how we as Catholics read the Bible.

So it's not your average book. All right. So if you are avid readers, I would just ask you to reflect on the fact that if you have a novel, if you have a newspaper, if you have a textbook, I don't know, hardcore engineering textbook, one of those biology 101 textbooks, all of those different things. By the very physical

stature, signal a different kind of text that you're going to approach differently. So if you

have a newspaper, it's flimsy, you just want to read something, get a little information,

and then you're going to throw it away or recycle it.

If you have a novel, it's a pulp novel, like a paperback novel, similar.

It's for entertainment.

So you're not going to necessarily pour over every single word.

On the other hand, if you have a big textbook, you're going to highlight, you're going to

take notes, you're going to try to memorize individual parts. So there are different ways that we

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