“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.

The scientific works of Aristotle and several of his mediaeval commentators provided an arsenal of arguments which appear, at least, to be contrary to the truths of Christianity. In particular, how is one to reconcile the claim, found throughout Aristotle, that the world is eternal with the Christian affirmation of creation, a creation understood as meaning that the world is temporally finite, that is, has a temporal beginning of its existence? In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council had solemnly proclaimed that God created all that is from nothing [de nihil condidit] and that this creation occurred ab initio temporis. In 1277 the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, issued a list of propositions condemned as heretical, among them the claim that the world is eternal. As chancellor of the University of Paris, the bishop was well aware of the debates about creation and the eternity of the world which raged through the thirteenth century. [12] The controversy was part of the wider encounter between the heritage of classical antiquity and the doctrines of Christianity: an encounter between those claims to truth founded on reason and those founded on faith. If faith affirms that the world has a temporal beginning, can reason demonstrate this must be true? What can reason demonstrate about the fact of creation itself, as distinct from the question of a temporal beginning? Indeed, can one speak of creation as distinct from a temporally finite universe? These are some of the questions which thirteenth century Christian thinkers confronted as they wrestled with the heritage of Greek science...

Aquinas, following the lead of Augustine, thinks that the natural sciences serve as a kind of veto in biblical interpretation. Augustine observed that when discussing passages of the Bible that refer, or seem to refer, to natural phenomena one should defer to the authority of the sciences, when available, to show what the text cannot mean. In examining, for example whether the light spoken of in the opening of Genesis (before the creation of the Sun and the Moon) is physical light, Augustine says that if physicists show us that there cannot be physical light without a luminous source then we know that this particular passage does not refer to physical light. [26] The Bible cannot authentically be understood as affirming as true what the natural sciences teach us is false...

According to Aquinas, natural things disclose an intrinsic intelligibility and directedness in their behavior, which require that God be the source. Finality and purpose, keys to an argument for the existence of God, have their foundation in nature as a principle in things. Eight hundred years before Aquinas, Augustine makes a crucial distinction between God's causal activity and what in our own day has come to be called "intelligent design." "It is one thing to build and to govern creatures from within and from the summit of the whole causal nexus and only God, the Creator, does this; it is another thing to apply externally forces and capacities bestowed by Him in order to bring forth at such and such a time, or in such and such a shape, what has been created. For all things were created at the beginning, being primordially woven into the texture of the world; but they await the proper opportunity for their existence."[40]

Some people read books in order to find God.  Yet there is a great book, the very order of created things.  Look above you; look below you!  Note it; read it!  God, whom you wish to find, never wrote that book with ink.  Instead, he set before your eyes the things He had made.  Can you ask for a louder voice than that?  Why, heaven and earth cry out to you:  “God made me!”

St Augustine

God has decided once and for all how the order of the universe He created is to be carried out, and does not arrange anything by a new act of will.

St Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, Book 3, Section III