Creation

Genesis 1 has been called our essential mythology. A God who thinks, speaks, maybe even feels - A God who was already there before anything else - this God makes the world. He takes a formless mass of mud and shapes our world, the sun, the stars, the plants, the animals...the humans.

We, of course, live in the age of evolution, which, though apparently scientific, says we are an accident of history (or prehistory). We could have ended up looking like elephants or starfish, but all the mistakes of genetics made us what we are.

The existenialists - Sartre, Camus, and so on - took the whole thing to its logical end. If we are an accident, then life has no purpose and everything is a joke. Sad joke, to be sure, but a joke anyway. So we carry on day after day because...

1. We're curious.
2. We've got instincts that drive us to preserve ourselves.
3. We believe that being, even without meaning, is better than not being.
4. Life does have its compensations - pleasure, love, whatever.
5. We can make our own meaning by creating our own mythologies that tell us that life is worth it.

People are surprisingly optimistic, so they must be finding something to compensate for the scientific reality that we are simply fleeting organisms within the earthly ecosystem.

Strangely enough, most of us believe in God. Most of us think that this God is somehow responsible for our existence. If that's true, then this God defines our meaning. Problem is, we're not sure how to contact him.

Genesis 1 says that God was here before we were, and that he made us. The alternative is that nothing made us but the blind energy of evolution.

Pick one.