Here is matter unorganized...

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? There are a few different ways to answer this elementary question. First, one could say that the sound of a tree falling is simply vibrations in the air caused by the tree interacting with other trees and the ground, and thus it makes a sound regardless of whether or not someone is there to hear it.

A second answer to this is to say that sounds are not the vibrations in the air, but are rather the phenomenological experiences that results from those vibrations interacting with complicated structures of the inner ears and traveling to the brain as nerve signals where those signals are transformed into what our minds experience as sounds. Thus, without any ears and brains to receive and transform those vibrations in there air, there are no sounds resulting from the falling tree.

A third answer builds on the second, but instead focuses on the sound of a falling tree. Even if an ear and brain are present to receive and transform those vibrations to a phenomenological experience, there still remains the ability for the sounds of a falling tree to be heard as such. This requires both distinguishing and identifying the sound. The forest contains a blend of vibrations from rustling leaves and branches, chirping birds, rushing rivers, animal calls, wind, etc. Together these bombard the ear and brain as a chaotic mess of vibrations. It is only through time and experience that our brains begin to distinguish one set of vibrations from another (which begins in the womb). Furthermore, as time and experience enable the vibrations to be distinguished, more experience and and instructions (both self-taught and from others) enable us to identify the sounds we are hearing. What entered our ears as unorganized/chaotic vibrations are able to be experienced as organized and ordered sounds. In the forest we can hear, not just sounds, but the sound of a falling tree, the sounds of rustling leaves, the roar of the river, and the chirping of individual birds as if they were each happening in isolation.

This brings me to divine creation and the purpose of this post. In early and even contemporary Mormonism, certain Mormon thinkers criticized and mocked the notion of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing, calling the creation of something out of nothing to be nonsensical--and they did so with the odd assumption that it made more sense to understand God as creating the world with chaotic stuff by speaking to rocks that listen and obey, or angels manufacturing the objects of the world with their knowledge of chemistry. To be honest, I find theories like the Big Bang and natural selection to be far superior and adequate at explaining the existence of objects in the universe and world. In fact, I feel confident in saying that if someone rejects those theories they can only do so out of ignorance or harmful religious fundamentalism.

Many religious scientists who accept cosmological explanations of the universe or evolutionary explanations of life do so with the caveat that those are tools by which God created those things. Such a view, however, is unnecessary and should be rejected, simply because one of the key explanatory values of these theories is that they do not require any deity or higher-being to operate. They are self-sufficient in explaining the existence of the physical state of things in a purely atheistic universe.

Does that mean that I am saying that God did not create the universe? No. Those of you who have followed my philosophical/theological pondering know that part of my project has been to rethink religious language about the divine, understanding them more in terms of divinity than in term of anthropomorphism. For example, eternal life is a type of life, not just more of it; and God's power is a type of power (specifically, love), and not just abilities of a Supersupersuperman. Similarly, I believe we should understand God's creative ability as a type of creation, and not just the creative abilities of a steroid-induced artisan. In other words, God's creative act is not analogous to a potter working unorganized clay into a new physical thing, but is instead His imbuing purpose and meaning into an already existing universe of things.

Just as the forest without distinguishing and identifying brains contains a chaotic and seemingly incongruous mess of vibrations in the air, the physical universe--as it presently is--is chaotic and unorganized in itself. The physical universe does not distinguish rock, from mountain, from ant, from ice, from star, from human baby, from good, from bad. Those are things that we do (as well as other brained-animals to a certain extent). Using the tools of experience and science we organize the world by distinguishing and identifying those things that we distinguish. Without humans and god, the world of things would still exist. There just wouldn't be anybody around to point at it, saying, "This is a rock," "This is ice," and "This is a baby."

This type of creation by organizing that which is inherently unorganized is similar to, but not wholly analogous to, God's creative act (even though one could read this into the Genesis 1 account of creation). Rather than simply organizing the unorganized product of cosmology and natural selection by distinguishing and identifying its parts, God's creative act is a type of organization that only God can do. His act was to imbue the whole with purpose and meaning.

To talk about God creating the universe should not be a discourse on the origin of things (including Homo sapiens), but the recognition of the purpose of the universe. At its religious heart, to say that God created the universe is not to say that the universe of things would not exist if there were no God, but is to evoke the purpose and meaning that the universe and ourselves have been given.