Creation
If God had a choice about the method of creation, it should be fairly obvious that she would prefer an immaterial over a material creation. Why so?
1. An immaterial creation lends itself to coherence. There will be no mind body problem with which to deal.
2. The creation process will be much more natural. The creatures can and will directly participate in the process.
3. The eschatology process will also come about more naturally and continuously.
The difficult part is to understand how and why the prophetic tradition got itself off onto a materialist tangent, in contrast to the eastern traditions.
But let us back up. There may, nonetheless, be some advantages to a matter based creation. If God is clever, there is no reason why we creatures should not be treated to the best of both types of creation. After all, should this not rationally be the best of all possible worlds, involving the best of all possible creators and creations? In that case, the preferred creation would be an immaterial one, that would take on a material appearance to an optimal degree.
It might be easy to think that God must have outdone herself in regard to the material or natural appearance of our world. Was it really necessary for her to fool so many of us for so long? But again, this is not difficult to rationalize, particularly considering that given its immaterial basis and the participatory nature of its creation, it is mainly the case that we creatures were simply allowed to do a bang-up job of fooling ourselves. And did we ever!
Off the top, I can think of two forms of rationalization for the deceptively material appearance of our ideal, little dream world. Let's make that three...
1. Atomization and democratization are not accidentally linked. It has to do with the concept of the level spiritual playing field that is made possible by atomistic metabolism, and all that. We were going to have to be shuffling the spiritual deck many times in our sojourn from the Alpha to the Omega, and the genetic shuffling was no small part of that. It is a bit like the game of solitaire. We have to sort through the cards any number of times before they are aligned for the rapture where the last become the first, or did someone else already figure that out?
2. Homo Faber. That's us. Keeps us busy and out of trouble. It requires a lot of cooperation and raw matter. Talk about planned obsolescence. We are able to continue the process of creation, seemingly on our own. We can almost think of ourselves as self-made demi-gods. And we are able to set things up, communication-wise and otherwise, for the pre-millennial drama.
3. Drama! Can we imagine that God is not a dramatist? Are we not all suckers for the surprise ending, for the big finale? Will we be disappointed? I think not. Our self-deception around the concepts of materialism are a major part of setting up the grand finale.
And what I have just described may also be the easiest method of creation. Who said that God should not learn a trick or two from Tom Sawyer's method of fence painting? Nothing like cajoling your creatures into taking on the more onerous tasks of creation. Why should God have to do all that bean counting when she has so many willing volunteers such as us scientists, etc.? Just add a dollop of teleology, and presto, you're in the creation business, big time.
Why are we scientists so dense about the possibilities of our own self-deception? Why are we so naive? Well, if God didn't love fools she never would have made so many of us!
Messianic Initiative:
8/27/02