CREATION - What the idea entails and what it does not entail


April 15th 1998


The next issue, Number 23, will appear on May 15th 1998.





Creation is the classic doctrine that purports to solve the problem of existence. That problem can be stated simply - 'why does anything exist, why isn't there simply nothing whatever?'

The ordinary person has things more urgent to do than theorising about existence in general; the common task is to cope with the existence that we are stuck with - for better and for worse. It is only people with both a fine sense of their own wisdom, and the secure leisure to ponder these things, who are at all bothered with the problem.

The stock assumptions are that the natural world of which we are aware, and of which we are part, has not always been - it must have had an origin - and, what is more, it could not have originated itself, could not have sprung into existence spontaneously.

So, on those assumptions, there has to be a prior entity that started it all - a creator. Given that notion, we have to identify the minimum necessary attributes of such a creator during the process of creation. They boil down to two: real existence and creative propensity. Other attributes are strictly superfluous; if we attach them to the creator we do so to please ourselves - not inescapably to endow the creator with creative capability.

The creator-idea is by its very nature unfalsifiable; whatever we may discover ..... we may say of the discovered fact .... 'it is so because the creator made it so.' There is no test of this statement, that we can envisage, that might show it to be false. It is a catch-all statement. Even if, hypothetically, we were to think we had disproved it then it is open to anyone to say 'the creator has, for reasons that we may not understand, inserted an illusion of disproof into our thinking'.

Given this unfalsifiability, there is no reason why those people who believe that there is indeed a creator cannot attribute to him, or to her, or to it, any feature they like; where there is unfalsifiability, the question of proof versus disproof simply does not arise.

Let us begin by giving the creator a title - God. The rest of this 'thought' is given to the exploration of some possible god-ideas and, since no proof or disproof is possible and so long as the god-idea we profess is not plainly self-contradictory, we are free to believe anything whatever on the subject. Let us define two terms - a theist is a person who believes in the existence of a creator-god while an atheist is one who sees no satisfactory reason for holding that belief. We can now explore some god-ideas that are in accord with the creator's supposedly necessary function.



The first thing to understand is that the creator would have to be in being only on the occasion of creation but need not necessarily have survived the process. It is perfectly coherent to suppose that there was a creator to do the creative business but that, ever since the act, there has been no such being. Such a doctrine might, loosely, be called Creatheism.

This is not so very fanciful .... given that it is the normal practice to consider that there is a significant similarity between the perceived creator and our perception of ourselves. (The theist says that we are created in His image; the atheist says that we create 'him' in our image. Whatever the way of it, some similarity is generally taken for granted). The notion of Creatheism is, in this light, not so very fanciful. There are many instances in human life of a creative act being followed by, or even practically simultaneous with, the death of the creative agent. A man with a weak heart can die in a too strenuous act of copulation and yet still have inseminated his mate successfully. (What a way to die! ... I hear you cry). A martyr's death can trigger a huge wave of support for the cause for which martyrdom was accepted, welcomed even.

Again, following the 'in his image' idea, a surviving creator need take no further interest in the creation after the creative act has been accomplished. Novelists do not, one must suppose, read their own books very much; they read others' work; they produce more of their own; in any case, ultimately, they die leaving their works in being. The same can apply to painters and to musical composers not looking at, or listening to, their own work very much. Pursuing matters further along this line, there are cases of creative workers actually regretting their creations, abandoning works half-finished or indeed repudiating them, destroying them. (At a popular level, Sullivan hated the Savoy Operas and Conan Doyle tried hard to kill off Sherlock Holmes and Elgar's irritation with 'Land of Hope and Glory' is well documented).

Again, there is no need for the creator to be a singular entity; there could be two or more of them. Much of human experience, a great deal of the data we have, can be described coherently by reference to a committee of quarrelling creators under a weak chairman.

Finally there is simply no necessity to suppose that the creator is, in any meaningful sense, personal. An 'it' might have existed for long enough to instigate the creative act; there is no need to insist upon the creator being a 'he' or a 'she' or even an individual at all. If we feel we must have the creator-idea in personal form what is so silly about a Sun-God and an Earth-Goddess doing the business together? At least we know that the earth and the sun are real (if anything is) and that we spring from the one by the action of the other.

The creator idea, as an explanation of existence, need only entail that the creator(s) be extant for long enough to realise the creative potential inherent in it, in him, in her or in them.

The idea is unfalsifiable and any additional features people come to attribute to the creator they profess to identify (thus turning the creator-idea into an acceptable god-idea) are not merely unfalsifiable; they are gratuitous and potentially misleading and potentially useful to the power-hungry who can use the god-idea to manipulate and control the rest of us.

The creation idea does not entail any particular creation-story or any particular god-person let alone a good, knowing, compassionate, Genesis-based god-person who cares about us especially. We may believe in such a god, and in such a story, but these very human attributes attached to the creation-idea are strictly not entailed by the yen for a creator to explain existence.

Atheism, as defined in these 'thoughts', is not a position from which there is any purely logical necessity to depart.





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