“Who Am I?” Project 2 - Why Divine Creation?

As indicated in the Introduction, I cannot answer the question, “Who Am I?” without at least giving some thought to the question of “Where did I come from?”  While it is obviously possible to answer this second question by considering only our knowledge of the particular world we live in, I feel compelled to start one question before that and ask, “Where did ALL of this come from?”  By all, I don’t just mean the earth, our galaxy, and universe, but everything.

I confess to wondering why more people don’t give serious thought to this question.  I think there are at least two very good reasons and one not so good reason for why they don’t.  First, it is a very difficult subject to think about, and so it is avoided by most people with bills to pay.  Second, many find religious answers to this question either to be sufficient or to be sufficiently absurd that a kind of intellectual antagonism to even considering the matter is produced.  Creation discussions become a kind of third rail (look it up if you do not know this reference) for thoughtful people.

This leads to the bad reason why many people do not ask this question – they think it is unnecessary.  In one sense, this is certainly correct.  We can go about our lives without ever really worrying about where everything came from.  However, it seems to me plainly false that comprehensive answers to descriptive questions about who we are and to normative questions about what we should be doing can be formulated without at least trying to answer the question of origins.  Moreover, a refusal to answer the question immediately biases any conclusions we reach in the direction of a world that is ultimately indifferent to any answer we propose.  This provides the final reason why people avoid the question.  There is a deep sense that the answer does not matter, so why bother trying?  This is circular reasoning.  Only if we have already decided that the question itself is not legitimate will we conclude that no answer to the question is legitimate.  I try to avoid circular reasoning, and I think you should, too.

Far from thinking the question is unanswerable in a thoughtful way, I think the most thoughtful conclusion one can reach is that everything was created by God, and I understand such creation in terms a tradition called creation ex nihilo (however, I will move away from ex nihilo language only because it is confusing).  That is, I think this idea of creation ex nihilo is the most rational answer to the question, “Where did everything come from?”  I think the case is so strong that it creates a rational presumption shift.  I think that thoughtful people should assume it is true until better arguments are found to cast the argument into doubt.  This is no conclusion drawn from religious faith alone.  It is a conclusion drawn from arguments that play by the rules of rationality.  I think people who aspire to rationality, to thoughtfulness, need to consider the arguments and not simply ignore them.

You will certainly have noticed by now that I am obviously a theist, a person willing to affirm that God exists.  In fact, I am a rather evangelical theist, which means that I am very happy to share the reasons and implications of my theism with others.  Being evangelical about my theism, however, has no direct connection whatsoever to so-called Evangelical Christianity.  The God I believe in and the God most evangelical Christians believe in have some really important differences.  I will get into these differences later in the project.  For now, please don’t be overly put off from this project by my appeals to the idea of God (nor overly excited, as I will almost certainly disappoint traditional theists).

There is at least one final reason why I begin this project with the issue of divine creation understood in the tradition of creation ex nihilo.  It marks perhaps the biggest intellectual shift I have experienced in my professional career.  For over twenty years, I was a firm believer in the “co-everlastingness” of the world alongside God.  This is the position taken by most in the traditions of so-called process philosophy and theology.  For the process folks, neither God nor the world can fail to exist.  They are both necessary and always exist in relation to each other.  While no nondivine thing is necessary, process thought affirms that it is necessary that nondivine things exist.  Likewise, while they affirm that it is necessary that God exists generally, no specific instance of the reality of God is necessary.

I no longer think this position makes sense.  As we shall see, I do think God changes and it is quite possible that God is always creating universes, but I have concluded that the co-everlastingness of nondivine things with God is incoherent.  The process folks will immediately counter that my new position means that I cannot say anything positive about God.  They argue that the God of creation ex nihilo disappears behind an impenetrable gap between what we can say about the world and what we might want to say about God.  God, then, is reduced to a purely negative concept indistinguishable from nothingness.  This is an important objection, and I will have an answer to it in a later post.