Question 4: Who created what?

An old man dies and his son buries him and plants a few apple seeds in the ground above. Some years later he passes by the burial plot and notices a small apple tree has grown. He tells his mother who picks some apples from the tree and bakes an apple pie.

Who made the pie?

Not exactly a sphinx-standard riddle: the mother made the pie.

But ... the apple tree made the apples. And the son planted the seeds that made the apple tree. And the father, rest in peace, fertilised the tree. And (for the sake of argument) Mary Ann Brailsford raised the first apple tree from which this particular Bramley variety derives. And an unidentified prehistoric farmer somewhere in central Asia originally domesticated the wild ancestor of the modern apple.

We could go back even further, but I think I've laboured the point enough: it is possible to argue half a dozen different 'creators' for something as simple as an apple pie. We need to narrow down what we mean. Which of these are comparable with God as the creator?

The apple tree: hopefully nobody will object if I discount this one. The biblical God is a conscious entity. This comparison might stretch to work if we were talking about 'Mother Nature', but we are not. God definitely isn't a tree.

The father: the apples are in part made out of the body of the father. He was the fertilizer that fed the tree. But that's not what we mean either. The Old Testament does not say that the universe is 'made out of' God. It is also fairly clear that God cannot die.

Mary Ann Brailsford and the mystery Kazakhstani farmer: we're arguably closer here. Both these people made deliberate efforts to create something. Although neither of them could have had any useful knowledge at the time that their efforts would one day lead to the making of this specific apple pie. And neither of them would live to witness the specific apple pie.

The son: again, the son made a deliberate effort to raise apple trees. And in this case, it is possible that he made that effort knowing that one day his mother could use those apples to make a pie.

The mother: made the pie.

Discounting the father and the tree, which of the remaining three is most comparable with how the Old Testament defines God as creator?

God created everything, but that does not narrow it down: all the apples came from the tree planted by the son, all Bramley apples come from Mrs Brailsford's tree and prior to that from the domestication of wild apples in central Asia.

Back to the source. The whole of the first chapter of Genesis is essentially of the form: "God said 'let there be X' and there was X and God saw that X was good".

(I'm reducing it to that simply to avoid any discussion of the translations or mistranslations of the various 'X', or the possible pedantic knots you can tie yourself in over the order and time in which they were created ... there is plenty of good reading on The Internet about the origins and interpretations of Genesis. It even allows for Genesis to simply be a model or metaphor for the actual creation process.)

This clearly discounts the historic origins of the apple as a comparison. Genesis states that God created each specific X and witnessed that it was 'good'. God did not simply set into motion a sequence of events without knowing what might eventually result.

So there are only two roles in the creation of the apple pie that are comparable with the role the Old Testament assigns to God in the creation of 'everything'. Either the son, who remotely put into progress a sequence of events that he anticipated would one day lead to some good pies. Or the mother, who knowingly made the specific pie in the story.

Definition 4: God part 3.

Apologies. I'm getting a bit cavalier with my choices of titles and numbers. This section is a continuation of this. Feel free to apply a more elegant numbering scheme in your head.

Omniscience and Omnipotence

A few words on these two concepts before we get to the meat.

First things first. Strictly speaking, just because you are capable of something it does not necessarily follow that you must demonstrate that capability. I know the words to the Spice Girls' "Wannabe". I am not necessarily going to sing it.

However, I would argue that when you claim a capability, it is only a useful claim if you can provide evidence of that capability. As an example to illustrate this, it is fairly common for the leaders of personality-driven cults to make claims of supernatural powers: healing, knowledge of the future, even the ability to fly. It is not unusual, when challenged on these claims, for the individuals to then claim that they choose not to use their powers. A very handy cop out.

If I were challenged on my knowledge of the lyrics to "Wannabe", I could sing the song. If I were to simply say "I choose not to sing it" then the challenger would be well within their rights to doubt my claim or even label me a liar. (it may simply be that I am generous and thick-skinned; I may prefer to be thought a liar than to inflict my interpretation of the Spice Girls on the world.)

Bottom line: one cannot easily disprove the claim "I have this power but I choose not to use it", but, I would argue, it is completely irrelevant. Capabilities that are never demonstrated have, almost by definition, no effect on the rest of the universe. Have I overstated this yet?

Back to the point. Does the Old Testament claim that God is omniscient and omnipotent? Some references ... not involving Isaiah this time.

A quick search for the term 'Almighty' on Bartleby brings up lots of references to 'the Almighty' and 'Almighty God'. If you accept 'almighty' and 'omnipotent' to be synonymous then that should be enough to verify that the Bible labels God as omnipotent.

In terms of God's actual claims to power, Job chapters 40, 41 and 42 provide a nice example. This is essentially a list of tasks that are beyond the abilities of a mere man such as Job, but which God claims to be capable of performing. And then we get the meat in Job 42:2

"I know that thou canst do every thing,
and that no thought can be withholden from thee."

Job acknowledges that God can do every thing. That's a pretty direct statement of omnipotence. He also acknowledges that God can see all thoughts, which is a substantial part of omniscience as well.

What about the rest of omniscience? I struggled to browse my way to this, even with the help of Bartleby, so I 'cheated' and googled and lo and behold there is an entire psalm (139) dedicated to the fact that God is omniscient (and also omnipresent).

So ... according to the Old Testament, God is capable of seeing everything and doing anything.

Definition 3: God part 2.

Back to God again. And back to the source (or as close as I can get to the source without learning a selection of bronze age middle eastern languages). There are clearly several other versions of the Old Testament in current use, but I don't have the resources to cross check every single one. I'm more than happy to take suggestions of variations and clashes in comments. For current purposes I am simply going to list the usual attributes of God and reference them to the appropriate bits of the King James version of the Old Testament.

Using Bartleby's excellent searchable reference books (one of the finer corners of the Internet) makes the task of finding the biblical definition of God easier. But still not very easy. As you might imagine, or know, the word "God" appears quite a lot in the old testament. The majority of these occurences are statements praising God, or advising God's followers how they ought to behave towards God, or reporting what God said or did, which helps to narrow it down.

In fact, there are relatively few direct statements about what God actually is. I haven't decided yet if that makes this job harder or easier.

The Eternal God

Arguably, one of the most fundamental qualities of God is that God has always existed and is not something that was created or came into being. (oh ... another nice feature of Bartleby is that it provides hyperlinked cross-references ... so if you find one statement in a reference, you can easily find related statements. Nice.)

Isaiah 44:6 "I am the first, and I am the last" and Isaiah 48:12 "I am he; I am the first, I also am the last". (according to Bartleby, this is also repeated in Revelations, but I'm only looking at the Old Testament).

That is fairly unequivocal as a statement: God existed before anything else.

The Creator

This one is easier. God is referred to as a creator in many many places.

Isaiah 40:28 "the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth"
Isaiah 45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

(I did look further than Isaiah, honestly. It is quite a good book though.)

And of course there is the whole of Chapter 1 of Genesis.

There are some slightly more equivocal statements which refer to God creating more specific and limited things like 'Israel' or 'righteousness', but overall the Old Testament has an uncontroversial position that God created everything.

An aside: there is a whole wealth of material on the internal consistency of the various creation stories in Genesis. I might delve into those at some point, but the intention at the moment is simply to list God's attributes and provide their biblical justification.

God the Trinity.

Happily, I've said that I am only using the Old Testament definition of God. The Trinity is one very good reason for doing that. It has spurned more brain aching theological debate than probably all other biblical questions combined and caused more splits in the church than anything else. It also narrows the scope to mainstream Christianity, as Judaism, Islam, and many smaller branches of Christianity do not accept that Jesus and God are one and the same. In short, I'm not touching it with a barge pole.

Definition 1: God

It is quite tricky to determine whether something exists until you have decided what the something actually is. So we'd better get that out of the way.


Religions, to their credit, have a long history of writing things down. And religions have a natural ownership of the concept of God, so the sensible place to look for a definition of God would be in the writings of a religion. Clearly there are many religions and they do not necessarily share a common definition of God, so I am going to take the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and take their shared definition of God from the Torah/Old Testament.


There is an added complication, of course, in the fact that the Torah/Old Testament exists in various translations and versions, and the precise interpretation of its contents is debated within and between the religious groups and subgroups and offshoots. I'll have to cross those bridges when I come to them.


(Small but important aside: I'm not going to attempt to define God myself, and I'm not going to attempt to address other people's more recent definitions of God. It is quite easy to invent something that can be cunningly disproved and dismissed, and it is equally trivial to invent something that is next-to-impossible to dismiss. But it's not interesting or useful or big or clever. If I wanted to burn straw men, I'd have invested in an ill-judged remake of a classic horror film. More on this later. Even if it isn't interesting.)