I have previously discussed the plausibility of a creator god in the post "A Functional Deism". I realized sometime later that if I just assume that my speculation is correct, then I can write a creation myth similar to past creation myths. This is useful from a psychological perspective, because the values of a culture are embedded in their stories and myths. So, in writing this, I am creating my own religion. The story:



Before the beginning, there was God. Nothing was before God, and neither does God depend on anything else. It is difficult to say much about God, because he is before logic and before matter. God has no body, and he exists neither in time nor space. Yet in God, in the abstract, exists all else that could be.

God decided that he is good, because otherwise, nothing else could be. So, he created a Great Garden. He spoke math into the void, and existence sprang into being. In this garden, all that could be springs into existence in turn of its own accord. God loves everything that is in his garden.

In other stories, existence is a battle between good and evil. But this is not so. Humans made these stories from their own experience. God has no equal, so there is no one for him to do battle with. God is not vulnerable, so there is nothing that he needs to accomplish. He made the Great Garden to simply exist, and he made it exactly the way he liked on his first try.

It is a feature of this garden that new forms are created from death and destruction. This is sad in a limited sense, because of the loss of what was good. But new comes, and it is often better than the old. Also, sitting outside of time, God sees all that ever was or will be forever before his eyes. Nothing is ever truly lost to him.

There are living beings in this garden. Like everything else in the garden, they each bloom, dance, and wither in turn. The purpose of these beings is similar to the purpose of a flower. The gardener plants them because he believes that they are beautiful. It is not necessary that the flower understands its purpose.

It is a lesser good for living beings to do what they can to exist. This is pleasing to God, because he likes existing things. But the goodness of God is incomparably greater, and living beings have no power to affect this in the slightest. Existence as a whole is also greater by far than any individual part of existence.

God has no need of covenants, but it is still possible for living beings to commune with him, in a limited sense. When a being practices virtues that build his life up, and avoids vices that tear his life down, then he is participating in the immortality that existed before he was born. To explain further, abstracts ideas are immortal in the sense that they are true (or false) regardless of what time it is. Virtues, in particular, allow us to exist. So, to whatever degree a being instantiates a virtue in the particulars of his life, he is, in a certain sense, participating in the immortality of the abstraction. Also, God loves all that exists. So, doing what one can to exist while he can, and doing what he can to provide for his successors is pleasing to God. But do not worry one's self over doing more than one can, because it was not given to us to do everything that we might dream of. Also, when we see existence as it really is, and see beauty in that, then we see the world in small part the way that God sees it.

The only way it is possible to rebel against God is to destroy one's self by one's own foolishness. But this is of little concern to God, because doing so will only cause you to be replaced sooner by those who will do his will better.




The motive for writing this was dissatisfaction with the Christian religion. The confusion in the church(es) makes it difficult for me to believe that they are being guided by the Holy Spirit as Christians claim. Certain Bible passages do not make sense to me (such as how the lineages in the Old Testament are compatible with the scientific evidence for an old Earth), which makes it difficult for me to take the Bible as an infallible source of knowledge. Also, to be a Christian, I have to believe in a bunch of promises that I have no way of verifying. This creation myth teaches value in existence for its own sake without requiring (so far as I know) any faith in unscientific doctrine, or in unverifiable promises. Christians believe that there is both natural revelation and special revelation, but my religion is basically Christianity if you throw out all the special revelation. You know God by doing your best to infer from what he created.

There is a psychological problem that people have, in that we'd like to believe that existence is good (otherwise being alive really sucks), but we have the experience of many bad things happening. It seems to me that different religions address this problem in different ways:

• Christianity teaches hope for an unverifiable better future
• Buddhism teaches detachment from desire
• My religion teaches that reality is good as it is right now, but that the goodness of this existence might have little connection to our personal desires.

In general, there is no difference between believing that you hold a value and actually holding that value (except in the case of self-deception, which is a whole other topic I'm not going to address at the moment). So, for instance, if I believe that chocolate is my favorite flavor of ice-cream, then my belief makes the belief true. Therefore, it ought to be possible, in general, to believe in any arbitrarily asserted value, and such a belief cannot be disproven, so long as it does not contradict sensory evidence or contain an internal contradiction.

I think it is possible without internal contradiction to assert that existence as a whole is good. If I imagine the worst thing that could happen, it's something like a meteor striking the Earth and killing everything. Or what would be even worse would be if the laws of physics broke somehow and existence simply stopped existing. But nothingness doesn't seem to be morally evil; it just seems to be morally neutral. So, one can think of every positively existing thing as being good, and bad as being only the loss of good. And it doesn't seem possible to lose anything that you haven't been given first. For instance, pain is usually a sign of decreasing health. But you can't lose health that you don't already have.

The only way I could imagine a world that would seem to be objectively evil would be that if God were actively malicious and sent everyone without exception to hell to be given excruciating torture forever with no possibility of relief. But I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case, and in the natural world view, this would not be expected.