Created Equal

Last week I summarized Thomas Aquinas’ argument that there can be only one God. A necessary step was showing that God has no restrictions.
He’s not restricted by time, He is eternal. This does not mean simply that He lasts for all time. He exists also before time and after time. He’s not restricted to experiencing time sequentially and uni-directionally as we are. He has no past, present, and future. He just is.
He isn’t restricted by space, He’s ubiquitous. He doesn’t fill space exclusively as matter does, He coexists with matter. He’s not physical, He’s spiritual. He isn’t restricted in power, knowledge, intelligence, wisdom, or anything. He’s omnipotent.
What can we glean from this?
Firstly, God has no need of anything. He is complete in Himself and nothing adds or subtracts from Him. He creates everything solely for the good of His creation. Since we perceive existence as good we can say God wills everything into existence for the good of itself with no benefit to Himself. This we call pure love.
Secondly, God does as He wills. He can’t be forced or coerced into doing one thing rather than another, or at one time rather than another. Everything in the universe exists as it does when it does because God can’t conceive anything better for that time and place in this universe.
That’s the basis of our claim that all people are created with equal dignity. God creates each and every human as and when they were born because they are exactly who His universe needs at the time. What right does any human have to question God’s judgement?
In contrast, an atheistic, naturalistic society based purely on the theory of natural selection would, to be consistent, have to accept competition between unequal beings as proper. Weaker beings could only survive in order to increase the advantage of their superiors.

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