The Joy of Painting Creation

This isn't particular to the counter-culture and its relation to faith, but this is my blog and it's not irrelevant, either.

The Creationism vs. Evolution Debate popped up on a forum my wife frequents. The stance she's taken thus far is pretty much my stance: it's a pointless debate. To avoid inviting tangential debates, I'll only summarize that we believe each thesis to be rooted in fundamentally different presuppositions, which can only be changed by spiritual prompting beyond the exclusive influence of reason.

Anyway, we were discussing the whole matter, and my wife pointed out that the analogy of God to an architect is flawed. The implication is that God planned out His "blueprints," and merely finalized them on each of the six days. Genesis doesn't say that God sequentially executed a predetermined course of action. For example, after God created the man, He later decided that the man shouldn't be alone and created the woman. Perhaps God created more organically!

"Let there be light! ...hmm, now let's separate the light from the darkness - nice!" "Hey, let's put stuff in the water!" I was reminded of Bob Ross, from "The Joy of Painting," moving intuitively from a blank canvas, to a plane of light and dark, to an abstract land mass, to detailed landscapes. "Let's put a happy little tree here..."

"But God is perfect," some may object. I think we misunderstand perfection, especially as the ancient Hebrews understood it. To be perfect is to be complete, and has the same root word for peace. Perfection is to not lack anything. It's not necessarily that Does-Everything-Right-the-First-Time-Perfection we hate in high school, or an anal-retentive attention to detail. God is not necessarily a Type-A personality. If God can instantaneously create from nothing, maybe it took Him six days to create the universe because He was experimenting, playing around, trying things out, and only at the end of the day was satisfied enough to say it was "very good." Like Bob Ross used to say, "We don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents."

In the creative process today, there are generations of a single work. There are stages of Bob Ross' painting before he stops and calls it very good. If you chip away at the paint, you find evidence of the earlier stages - how the tree used to be a bush and the stream might have been a rock. Look at wikipedia, or collaborative documents, or computer programs, and you see the logs of even thousands of generations of revisions on a finalized work. Isolate one of those revisions, and it's a different work entirely. It's just natural in the course of the organic process to have traces and evidence of change little different than the evidences of evolution we find. (I'm not making any ostentatious claims on this, but only remarking on how natural such evidence is to creation at any level.)

This makes more and more sense to me as I think about it, which I've only done for a couple hours... maybe once I've thought about it a couple weeks or years, I'd feel confident enough to say more, but for now I'll let God be God and marvel at His wondrous works.

"Pink fluffy clouds..."

:-D