The Earth is remarkable, and valuable, for the genesis that occurs on it. Genesis is astronomical first; Earth must be set in its cosmological precedents and environments. There it is remarkable that something appears out of nothing, that this something appears, as cosmologists are now saying, “fine-tuned” for constructing a complex world. But the capacity of this something to generate, its “nature,” is especially revealed in the complexity and diversity of the events that take place on Earth.

Ours is an age of many doubts, but no one doubts that there has been remarkable genesis on our planet, no one including those who doubt “creation,” since this hints of a Creator. Nor do those who, in seeming sophistication, doubt whether “nature” exists, the latter term being (they may complain) some sort of socially constructed category, or filter, with which to view the phenomena – in this respect not unlike the “Creator God,” a way of framing up a world-view, only now a modern, Western, secular frame. For the puzzled, there are, in broadest outline, two complementary or competing explanations of this genesis: a scientific account, for which we take the title word “genes,” and a religious account for which the symbolic word is “God.” The term “genesis” mediates between the dual accounts, keeping the naturalistic accounts in dialogue with other philosophical and metaphysical possibilities for the explanation of this Earthen fertility.