Lately I am increasingly facing the realization that for evidence of a Creator I need look no further than my own creativity. Oh, I’ve read a fair share of books presenting this or that other apologetic. Given my engineering background, the design argument used to hold a lot of appeal. All of those arguments seem to have a counterpoint or rebuttal. Though I’m sure creativity as evidence of a Creator will engender its own array of counterpoints, before you conjure them up, consider some questions:

1. Why are you creative? Where does creativity come from, and what purpose does it serve?

2. If like the rest of the bio-critters, your primary driver is to propagate your genetic material, what evolutionary advantage, exactly, does the development of creativity confer on our species? And if creativity is such a hot advantage, why haven’t any other species random-stepped their way into it?

3. When you are creative, can you honestly point to one instance where your innovation is 100% all yours, never before seen, not in the least derivative from or related to any other innovation or act of creativity? If you stipulate to the derivative nature of creativity, as you step back to the long string and build up of innovations and creations, do you by chance happen to land on a source innovation whose creator borrowed from no one before him?

As my rather rhetorical questions suggest, I see my own creativity and that of everyone I meet as an imprint of the Creator’s image. Yes, that means that I see us all as “creatives.” In our own ways and for our own purposes, all of us are creative. It may be in the way we design how a satellite’s solar panel unfolds during deployment, or in the way we devise a web search algorithm, or in the way we paint with water colors or sculpt our favorite flower from a piece of granite. We all have it, that creative drive. And since in many cases, especially in art, I cannot see what big species-furthering benefit my creativity really produces, I have to wonder why it’s there, and how it got there unless it reflects and mirrors to some extent the one who invented me.

The second pointer comes from that third set of questions I asked above. As I look at my own creativity and trace back what my efforts, technical or artistic, build upon, I always find a predecessor creator. Back when I wrote software code, my innovations came about as improvements or enhancements of what someone before me had previously invented. And if all of us in Computer Science ran a full trace back to the original source materials that made computing possible in the first place we’d find someone else’s creation. As for creativity in the arts, how much of it is representative of or in some other way portrays first creation? When you photograph a reflection of a snow-capped mountain in a still, clear lake, or when you paint a flaming red sunset, what part of what you’re portraying, exactly, did you create?

If you weren’t convinced before, you’re probably not convinced now. After all, we are extremely creative at dreaming up ways to avoid the Creator question (insert smiley face here). Still, maybe the next time you ask yourself whether there is a Creator with a big C, you’ll at least acknowledge one with a little c is staring back at you from the mirror. Maybe you’ll wonder whether a little c means a big C also exists.