Note. This is a machine-assisted translation of a Chinese original. Where wording matters, please consult the Chinese original.

Tianwen · I · How would the Creator make this world?

If the world was created by God, how did He create it?

When I first encountered God I tried to draw close to Him, and I wanted to understand Him more deeply. I wanted to know not only that the world was made by God, but also how He made it, and, even more, why He made it the way it is.

Is it hard to create a world?

When we do not understand the world, it strikes us as truly bewildering in its variety. If I were to create such a world, the task would be unimaginable: I would have to arrange when the sun rises and when it sets, decide how many species there are, and set out how each species mutually generates and constrains the others. It would be an impossible job.

The Bible says: "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

God brought everything in the world into being one piece at a time, and arranged each thing properly. This sounds like the work of an omnipotent God. But once I thought about it more carefully, something did not add up — is this what a perfect God would do?

It is easy to see that God in fact has other options. Rather than creating each of the myriad things one by one, He could create only a rough prototype and then keep correcting it as the system runs; or He could simply lay down some rules and let the world run on its own under those rules. These are all options.

Compared to a God who is busy and harried, fretting over every single thing in the world and creating each item by hand, the latter approaches are clearly more perfect. If a Lord who is omnipotent and perfect had to choose among them, I am sure He would choose the latter rather than the former.

But is even that the most perfect option?

Let us first look at how we ourselves come to know the world.

When we understand nothing, the world is full of wonders for us. Flowers, it turns out, come in different colours and shapes; the world contains an astonishing number of animal species; the weather rains and blows in turn. There are so many things in the world that we have to understand them one by one.

As we grow up and begin to study, we slowly realise that behind these apparently complicated things there is something common. On the surface they are diverse and tangled, but inside they share something the same. So we do not need to understand them one item at a time.

The more we understand on the surface, the fewer the core things we still need to grasp.

Although we cannot yet fully understand all the secrets of the universe, the overall thread is already visible. We find that the world needs fewer and fewer constraints. If God were to create such a world, the "prototypes" He would have to construct grow fewer, the "rules" He would have to lay down grow fewer, and the "corrections" He would have to apply grow fewer.

When we push this to its limit — what reason do we have not to believe that this world, in fact, requires no "prototype" at all, no "rules", and no "corrections"?

So we have reason to believe that God need not do anything at all, and yet this world is constructed.

So we have reason to believe that for thousands of years people have misunderstood God — taking Him to be someone who has to do a great many things to construct the world. In fact, God may truly be omnipotent: He does nothing, and the world is already there.

But if God does nothing at all, then where do the sun, moon and stars, the mountains and rivers, the grass and trees, even you and I, all come from?