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.