Index > What is God? > The first day

Yes and no.

No in the straightforward sense: The coalescence of stars and planets, abiogenesis, natural evolution and speciation, and for the most part humans, all came about due to causes (of every kind) that don't include God. Physics is complete, insofar as it goes; the universe had no use for God in order to develop.

Yes, in two senses.

The first sense: Humanity does shape itself, e.g. through mate selection (which affects evolution) and by constructing our social and spiritual worlds. Those are important elements of the cosmos. God (as well as non-God forces) acts through the humans as they shape those elements of the cosmos.

The second sense: God "gives things meaning". This isn't mysterious. It's the same sense in which you give things meaning. A table without you looking at it, seeing it, thinking about it, using it, breaking it, fixing it, making it, modifying it, talking about it, remembering it, loving it, selling it, etc., is still a table in the sense of having the same atoms in it, but when you say "table" you're not meaning "those atoms", you're meaning the whole Thing of the table in its tabley fullness. In that same way, God provides key elements of the meanings of things.

When a young child learns to apprehend the sky and the earth, the beasts, and other people, ze is participating in God and drawing from God--in exactly the same way (indeed, partly in that) ze is participating in Science and drawing from Science (broadly construed). To say it another way, God is part of the context in which things are what they are.