I just found an older journal entry that I'd written. Seemed like some of you might like to read it.
If you don't want to read it all, here's the sparknotes: the concept of God as a creator is flawed because God has failed to provide key elements to human survival. He has also fundamentally failed to provide a concrete moral compass. These facts indicate that God is imperfect. (The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that, if God is imperfect, he does not exist in the way that the Christians say he does, though this entry doesn't go that far.)
Old Journal Entry wrote: I believe that life was created not by chance, but by some fatalistic intervention on the behalf of some otherworldly force. I am neither confirming nor denying the existence of God here; in fact, in my introspective ramblings I have yet to do so. Rather, I am simply hinting at the possibility of a greater cosmic force, the answer to the eternal “so what?” (This question will be the subject of future ramblings, I am sure.)
If we accept the postulate that life is a creation, though the nature of the creator is seen foggily at best, an interesting question may be posed. If we are creations, why were we given the ability to create? We are the only creatures in the world with such a developed sense of creativity. No other animal in the world is capable of devising strategies and devices, never mind synthesize materials necessary to build complex structures and tools.
If God created man, then his creation was necessarily imperfect. This is not a value judgment; I do not intend to say that God is imperfect and therefore does not exist. But God did fail to provide man with everything necessary for survival. Man had to create things with which to build shelter and weapons more efficiently, using natural objects for unnatural purposes, creating social constructs, etc. None of these were apparently intended by God. Nowhere in the bible does it mention God’s desire for man to go forth and be technologically adept creatures.
(Jeff brought up an interesting point today. He asked if I thought God was to blame for creating the temptation by which Adam and Eve were booted from Eden. I considered it, and decided that it was the snake’s fault for presenting temptation, and God’s fault for creating the snake. Why he created the snake, I don’t know. Nor can I fathom this: if after Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they saw that they were naked and knew that it was bad, does that mean that God created man in a state of objective evil, and that the only reason Adam and Eve were unaware of this fact was that they were purely innocent? By eating the fruit, didn’t Adam and Eve escape the greater sin of ignorance to their own inherent evil?)
Man, therefore, is a creative creature by nature (perhaps because he has set himself apart from the Creator and needs to fill a certain void). But assuming that man does not exist apart from God (and the Christians say this is the case) we must take into account the idea that we are ourselves creations. The larger question here is that if we are creations, do our creations amount to nothing more than the creations of God vicariously through us? Are the great works of art and engineering nothing more than God’s hand manifest in our works?
If so, consider the implications. From churches to brothels, the Vatican to Vegas, all was created by God. Better than that, both Gregorian chant and death metal are attributable to God. Communism, Capitalism, McCarthyism, Nazism, Taoism… all of these things are intellectual creations, and are therefore the creation of God’s finest creation (or so we like to think), and perhaps therefore attributable to God.
Of course, if this is not so, if the creations of man are not attributable to God, is this an indication that God cannot be manifest in quotidian life? Every decision that we make is arguably part of a creative thought process, weighing carefully the costs and benefits of all possible outcomes before acting. The logical thought process is itself a creation of man. If this creation is attributable only to man, then God does not directly (only ideologically) influence our thought processes. Furthermore, so-called “revelations” are nothing more than the product of the creative process, which necessarily excludes divine intervention.
The idea of revelation is only made possible under the circumstances that God takes credit for man’s creations (producing the conundrums of the paragraph before last), or that He takes credit for some of man’s creations. This latter is most troublesome, considering it would be practically impossible to tell which creations of man were and were not conceived of by God. For instance, we might all agree that God took part in creating hunting weapons, as they would have been necessary for the survival of mankind. But I doubt very much if the evolution of these weapons into high explosives and high-velocity projectiles would largely be attributed to God. But the line gets fuzzy when one considers the use of these weapons for police use. Is the 9mm handgun the creation of God, and if so, what of the children being killed by drug dealers wielding the same weapon? The invention of certain medical treatments could have been divinely inspired, but the medicine that provides for abortions or corporal enhancement probably is not the work of God. It is easy to see where the line may be less clear, however, in the case of Euthanasia.
I am of the opinion that man creates independently of God, and that man’s creations are man’s alone. The concept of God – more specifically the individualized moral construction formed around this concept – functions only to help us determine how to properly and morally use these creations for good rather than evil. Of course, considering that we were created in a state of evil, perhaps it is God who needs a lesson in the ethics of creation.
