CREATION AND AUTOGENISIS

The world was not created by God.  To hold the view that God made the Earth and all living thing is to accept the premise that the entire cosmos, with its countless suns and planets, was brought into existence by divine actions.  This would mean that vast amounts of energy and matter had been produced out of nothing.

The creative god itself had to have come out of nowhere, complete with full omnipotence and omniscience.  Under any scenario envisioning a mighty act of creation, the basic unexplained elements are where the material came from to produce the universe, and where the supreme being came from in the first place.  For those who have unquestioning faith, no answers to these questions are required.

With respect to Earth, one of billions of planets in our universe, many religions adhere to the idea that man was introduced to this world fully formed and, in fact, looking like God.   There are a number of problems with this concept.  To begin with, for a being that would have been in existence for eons prior to the coming of humans, it is hard to imagine that it would have had any need for a mouth, a face, or arms and legs.  Clearly, this idea cannot be taken literally.

Another issue involves bones attributed to humans and pre-humans that lived thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years ago.  One solution to this conundrum, for those of a religious bent, is that men, and all other living things, were created fairly recently. At the same time, God placed in the ground all of the fossils that seem to indicate that man and other animals have been around for millennia.

Given that God is believed to be infallible and all-knowing, it is hard to envision that, in the process of putting living beings on Earth, it would also decide to place false evidence underground that life had existed on the planet for millions of years.  Another hypothesis provided is that God chose an appropriate moment in time to imbue inanimate matter with the spark of life.  Then, throughout the ensuing time periods, it guided the proliferation and development of the creatures it had caused to come into existence.  This seems to be the main idea behind the concept of intelligent design.