In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and after He considered that Evolution had proceeded far enough, He created Man in his own image. Meister Eckhard in the 14th century declared that God had made the human soul infinite, like Himself; and that was why we could say that He had created us in His own image, because the human soul was infinite like Himself.
Goethe asked about infinity:-
| “Was ist unendlichkeit? | What is infinity? |
| Wie kannst du dich so qualen? | How canst thou so torture thyself? |
| Geh’ in dich selbst. | Look within: |
| Entbehrst du drin Unendlichkeit | If there thou lack’st infinity in being |
| in Sein und Sinn | and thought, |
| So ist dir nicht zu helfen”. | No help for thee. |
More recently Mr.J.R.Lucas has reminded us in an eloquent exposition of Godel’s Theorem that the human mind can always out-trump any machine you confront it with, constructed or imaginary. So the two worlds of Natural Science and the mind and imagination lie side by side; science will continue to produce its mechanical descriptions of creation, which may well be illuminating, and the human mind will continue to indulge in the infinite variety of its inventions untroubled by pedestrian science.
Godel’s Theorem simply states that in any consistent system, which is strong enough to produce simple arithmetic, there are formula which cannot be proved-in-the-system, but which we can see to be true. Godel’s second Theorem states that it is impossible to prove in a consistent system that it is consistent. In ordinary English, if you feed a problem into a computer, and the computer says the answer is XYZ, it does not go on to say, “And you have my personal assurance that this is the correct answer”. Or if it did, you would know that some bright spark had fed this addition into the computer, and it was not the computer genuinely speaking.
There were of course difficult problems facing the Creator, prior to the creation of Man. For example, there were the problems of unicellular division, and later the much more difficult problem of division of cells by the operation of male and female components. Probably it would be wrong to think that when the time came for these miracles to take place, the Creator devised His answer, and gave Nature or Evolution a little push in the right direction; rather that He had devised the correct answer at the beginning of time, and potentially the answer was already there when the need for it arose. Some people might say that the answers to these problems were worked out by natural selection and survival of the fittest, whatever that means. (Who survive? The fittest of course. Why are they the fittest? Because they survive of course. And so we go round the mulberry bush, and allow the meaning of words to dictate our views). But I understand it might have taken longer to achieve the solution by those means, than creation has existed. How much longer? I don’t know; perhaps a million times longer, than the 4½ billion years that we think our earth has been here. Probably it is best to think that Space, Time, Matter was all created at the beginning; and potentially, Man was created then too, although it took him a very long time to make his appearance on the world stage. Although Man has only been around for a million or two million years, potentially he was planned from the beginning.