[112] astronomy^a decentralized the earth and made it a small piece in an infinite universe. I come to a second example for the same fundamental thesis, namely the excitement produced by Darwinism^b in the 19th, and in this context also in the beginning of the 20th, century. What was the reason for this excitement? It has two reasons. The one reason was that the develop- mental interpretation of reality and its mechanistic form seemed to contradict the symbol of creation^c. Creation, in traditional thinking, was understood as a divine act "in the beginning," and even if the biblical story was not taken literalistically [sic.]--as it, however, very often WAS taken--but even then it was considered as an expression of a divine act with which the world process has started, and in which the divine forms of life have been produced so that they could develop independently and in mutual interdependence on earth. But the idea of a development of one of them, or all of them, out of the other ones was something which seemingly contradicted this myth of creation. Now what do we say to this first part of the problem of Darwinism^d? We must say that this is an idea of creation which, even if the story of Genesis is not taken literally, is literalistic^e. It takes creation^f as an event either in time^g and space^h--which usually is the imaginary form in which it is taken--or in such a way that it happened once upon a time, and when it happened, time itself started. Now this doctrine of creation is in no way the necessary consequence of the fundamental idea of creation, which is so fundamental for Christianityⁱ that it took at least 100 years of a life-and- death struggle, for the early Church^j, to resist any attempt to dissolve Christianity from the Old Testament and the presupposition of all Old Testament piety, namely the idea of creation. For the idea of creation