Plantinga Chapter 2: Creation

Plantinga covers a wide variety of information, opinions and points about creation and its effect on us as humans and as creatures formed by God. Because of this wide base, I am just going to choose a few points that stuck out to me from the chapter to talk about. The first is the notion that “Creation is neither a necessity, nor an accident” (page 23). I have not, for very long, pondered the reason that God created. I may have thought about how, when, or what exactly He created, but the why didn’t seem to matter. He did it, so why does it matter what His reasoning was? Plantinga goes on to say that the act was fitting for God. He didn’t need us, and He didn’t create us on a whim or out of boredom. It is in God’s nature to create, to design, to share. This makes sense to me because we, who are made in His image, also create things. Sometimes we create because we are bored, sometimes we create because we need something. But other times, we create out of the same “imaginative love” that G.K. Chesterton says that God created out of.

The next point that stood out to me in particular is somewhat related to the first. If God has created all things, simply out of an imaginative love that is in His character, then we are to have the utmost respect for what He has created. Plantinga’s first point from the “Meaning of the Christian Doctrine of Creation” section is that all things are potentially redeemable. Everything has in it some of the good that God originally created it to have. This, at first, was a bit hard for me to swallow. Even mosquitos? Even deadly tsunamis? Even Hitler? Yes, each of these things, no matter how fallen, does have some of the original goodness that it was created to have. It may be hidden, buried deep beneath the surface; it may take years to dig through the bitterness and resentment and hatred of the havoc that something has wreaked, but the goodness is there, and we must seek to find it. It is not that we can redeem any of these things. We simply must find the goodness, and never condemn anything as beyond repairable. And this says something about the God that we believe in- the Creator God in whom we believe, and how we trust and hope in Him to one day restore us to the perfection that we were created in. Lewis puts in this way in “The Weight of Glory”, “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” And the things that we thought were unredeemable will be restored to the good and perfect status for which they were created.