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of dependence upon God for what one is, However, long one exists. xii A human being therefore depends upon God for more than the fact of his or her birth: he or she remains dependent upon God in the same way ever after. God’s creation of the world in general is simply not temporally indexed; it is no more closely associated with the beginning of things than with what comes later. A preoccupation with temporal origins therefore commonly drops out of Christian accounts of creation: the world is just as dependent upon God for its existence whether it has a beginning or always exists. xiii Belief in God’s creation of the world for these reasons blurs into belief in God’s supportive maintenance of it at every point in time.

Also enabling belief in God as creator to form a general backdrop to all one’s experience—to be relevant on every occasion as a universally applicable worldview--is the fact that God is thought to be responsible as creator for the whole of what happens in the world at any one time. To believe that God is the creator of the world is at the very least to believe that God holds into existence the entirety of the world in any and all respects in which it is good. In the case of one’s own life, therefore, every aspect of value at every moment—one’s existence, fine qualities and capacities, enjoyments and achievements, beneficial connections with natural and social environments, and so on—is to be attributed to God’s agency as creator. While there is a good deal of disagreement within Christianity on this matter, Christians, moreover, not uncommonly affirm that God is equally behind the bad things that happen, at least insofar as those bad things can be turned to good account--for example, harm suffered turned into a salutary

pedagogical correction, just punishment for sin, the necessary testing of one’s faith, or simply a beneficial form of sympathy with God’s own suffering on the cross. For both the general reasons just mentioned—because of its holism and temporal inclusiveness--belief in God as the creator of the world encourages love, gratitude, and trust toward God, and toward the world that God brings about, as constant Christian dispositions, basic Christian attitudes of wide-ranging applicability, whatever might be going on in one’s life.

Social Connectedness and Invisibility

The same all-inclusive causal dependence upon God at all times is what ensures individuals are never left on their own, never abandoned to their own devices. Christian theologians (especially in the Protestant tradition) usually develop the psychological implications of this in terms of avoiding either anxious or arrogant self-concern. xiv According to this theology, one does not believe he or she ever operates independently of God. Therefore, one should never attribute successes and achievements in a prideful way to oneself, but rather one should always give the glory to God as their ultimate source. For the same reason, one should never despair of failings, as if one’s own inadequacies were the last word; one believes a supremely powerful and loving influence, God, remains an operative force in one’s life, However, desperate the situation otherwise appears to be from the standpoint of one’s own powers and capacities to improve one’s lot in life.

By discouraging isolated self-regard or self-understanding generally, the same nexus of Christian ideas about God as creator has clear consequences

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