THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS QUESTION NEVER ANSWERED

Post dedicated to America’s Newest Best Worst Apologist, Mel Wild: senior pastor at the Cornerstone Church.

It is the most conspicuous religious question never answered, and this simple brute fact should aggravate and needle every waking moment of every person who believes this world was created:

Why did the Creator create? For what purpose was this artificial world intended?

In the Christian theatre, the totality of thought paid to this rarely even asked question begins and ends with the 13^th century musings of the Dominican friar, St. Thomas Aquinas: bonum diffusivum sui, goodness spilled out.

This suggestion (that creation was some sort of an inevitable accident) is fatally flawed; a victim of Christianity’s own laboured definition of the nature of their god, a Middle Eastern god named Yhwh. According to the Christian philosopher, Yhwh is an aseitic being, meaning fully contained and existing in and of itself. Nothing is, or can be, outside God. God is all, and all is God. Pantheism and aseity are inseparable, and because they are inseparable, there can be no spill-over. An aseitic being has neither the capacity to grow, nor the means to leak and spread out into something new, for that would contradict the very definition of aseity.

Self-evidently, the Dominican friar was wrong. Creation could not have been an accident. Something wholly unique—something artificial—was created, and apologists like Mel Wild (who repeatedly claims only religion can answer the “why” questions) have no option but to embrace the synthetic corporeality of this world , stating “God is NOT the universe!” “He exists outside the universe,” and here, again:A “constructed” world is a false world. It is an unnatural, synthetic contrivance; a petri dish quarantined from the actual world (all that which is the aseitic Creator), and we know this because this world is sealed between the three things an aseitic being could never directly experience, but could impose on an artificial scape: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

An aseitic being cannot, after all, not be. An aseitic being cannot die. No such limitation exists in this world. A single-celled amoeba will enter this world, uninvited, live its entire life and die in two days. A human being, if they’re lucky, eighty or ninety years. Our planet, the earth, will be reduced to a cloud of atomic dust in about five billion years. And in one shape or another, the universe itself will cease to exist as it does today in a handful (or perhaps a basketful) of trillions of years. For the theist, that inevitably means we’re 1) outside the (eternal) Creator, and 2) inside an artificial scape; a world which did not have to be created, but was, and that leaves the greatest religious question still unanswered… Why?

What is the purpose of this petri dish we call the universe?

Why was this artificial world created?

What function does it serve?

Why are we here?