C. S. Lewis is reputed to have once remarked that the distinguishing feature of Christianity against other religions was that Christianity was based on the idea of grace: God's grace to us in Christ, to be specific.
But I think that God's grace goes much further, and marks all his interactions with us; including the very first.
Grace suggests generosity, the unlimited deployment of Godly resources where ours or other resources are simply incapable.
God's creation as recorded in Genesis 1 is an example of, and I think, consistent with his graciousness.
The alternatives, or the popular alternative of theistic evolution is, to my mind, most ungracious, and unlike God. God is not, as I read the scriptures, in the habit of requiring secondary causes to mediate his will. Well, I specifically think of grace setting aside our works, but wonder if grace also sets aside the possibility of God making a creation as a god-free machine that goes on to make itself. This seems to fly in the face of the generosity and thoroughness of God's grace, and his not relying on second causes to bring his covenental results: Christ saves, directly, without our works; God creates, as he said, without the works of a creation as a kind of demi-urge that removes God from his creation and obscures the marks of his loving grace towards us.
