David Lee presents a personal view of the doctrine of God the Creator.
One of my favourite television programmes is the weather forecast. It is always nice to see Carol Kirkwood telling us what weather to expect in the next few days and I suppose we can easily forget what a tremendous technical and scientific achievement it is to produce these forecasts. All around the world there are thousands of weather stations continually measuring the air temperature, the wind speed and direction and the atmospheric pressure. These results are transmitted by radio signals to the meteorological centre in England where a huge computer produces the weather charts from which our forecasts are derived.
The confidence of the weather forecasters and the trust with which we listen to them means that we understand that the universe around us is intelligible, that it behaves according to what we call the laws of science, gravity, relativity, chemistry, physics, light, mass and so on. Of course it is more complicated than that, the amazing achievements of the space programmes getting men on the moon, and sending cameras and research machines to the surface of the planets have been made possible by very much hard work, oceans of money, and enormous scientific and engineering skills. The universe itself produces problems, we get sudden eruptions of volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and fires. We cannot prevent these things, but our scientific knowledge can work out advance warnings, so that we can have plans to save human life and minimise the damage. The universe is a rational thing. But how did the human race come to that knowledge?
Now I want you to turn back the clock at least 40,000 years to the early days of the human race. When primitive man stood at the mouth of his cave and gazed at the world around he knew himself to be in an alien environment. At any moment disaster could strike, natural events such as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wild beasts and so on. He had no knowledge of science; he had no idea of the size of the world and all the things that caused his distress. The universe was a mystery. This was the time when human language was developing, and with that the ability to talk and discuss together what to do about the state of the world around, how to avoid these disasters, how to keep the family or tribe safe in an alien world. They realised that they needed some narrative to explain the mystery of their existence. Eventually the idea emerged that they could make sense of the world and that it was possible to understand why things happened.
The answer they gave to these questions was that behind and above their world there was an invisible being in charge of it all who was the cause of all that happened, and they called it God. Moreover, they came to believe that God had human properties. This was the highest they could imagine, he acted with purpose, he knew what he was doing and so on. When it came to natural disasters, they thought that God was punishing them, because they were not behaving as he would want, so we had the beginnings of a moral system.
Now there are two points of view about this. The first is that God is an actual being, infinite and supreme, and that he chose to reveal himself to human beings when they were able to believe in him and to follow his laws. This is the traditional position of the Christian Church, and indeed of all the theistic religions. The second viewpoint is that God is a human invention, primitive man just had a good idea, and that God was invented and is still being invented to enable us to make sense of the universe around. When we say that we believe in God Almighty, the maker of heaven and Earth, we are really saying that the universe around us is a rational entity, it can be understood, and it is governed by laws, which have been discovered by human beings. That is a wonderful claim, something to celebrate, and indeed to thank God, whether real or invented, for enabling us to attain such knowledge.
The Venerable David Lee is a retired cleric of the Church in Wales.