At church last Sunday (15 Nov 09) morning the sermon considered part of James 1.
I was particularly taken by James' phrase referring to God in verse 17: "father of lights".
Clearly harking back to Genesis 1, where God is shown as the creator of the lights of the sky. But the word 'father' suggests to me a directness in creation that notions of intermediate steps, or machinery between God's creation and its result do not permit.
Also Jesus telling us to address God as 'our father' in the Lord's Prayer makes similar suggestions; not only of directness, which is congruent with Genesis 2:7, but of a fatherly love and kindness which does not line up with the notion of God creating us by an interposing machinery...considering fatherlyness, this becomes quite a repugnant idea, given the Genesis data. It would also make it difficult to make sense of the useage 'father'; if father, then how so, if the linkage between us as creatures and God as creator was not amenable to any evidence of his direct involvement in our origin (thus if the evidence points to our existence independent of God's creation it is hard to see how 'creation' would square with the real world). Suggestions of an indirect involvement have no biblical substance, but are typically derived from a utilitarian alignment of the biblical creation with materialist dogma: atheistic at worst, deist at best.
