If you read the Bible from cover to cover, the very first thing that you discover about the character of God is that He is a Creator. In Genesis 1:1-2:4, the Bible describes how God created the universe in six days (and rested on the seventh). Each aspect of the universe comes into being by the simple command of God, from the light that burst through the darkness (Genesis 1:3), through night and day (Genesis 1:4), sky and sea (Genesis 1:6-10), the sun and the moon (Genesis 1:16-19), and all living beings (Genesis 1:11-12;20-25) until finally, on the sixth day, He made human beings in His image (Genesis 1:26-30).

One of the things that we can learn about our relationship with the Creator God is that we are intrinsically His. He Created us, therefore we belong to Him. At the end of Genesis chapter 1, God gives the world to humans to "subdue it", to control it. Nevertheless, the fundamental truth is that the One who created the world which has been given to us is stronger than us; He created us as well, and therefore He has the ultimate authority and control.

As a writer, I am always conscious of the fact that I hold a rather scary amount of power over the fictional world I have created or - in the case of fanfiction - 'borrowed'. With a flick of my pen, all of my characters can drop down dead. This is because the plot - maybe not the characters of world, again in the case of fanfiction - is entirely mine, and I can form it into whatever I like: up to and including killing off everyone within the narrative without reason or warning.

This is the same for Creation. God, as the Creator, as complete control over Creation in a very central way. The world may belong to us, may have been given to us by God, but we belong to God, having been created by Him, and are therefore ultimately His.

This begs the question that if we are in fact no less under God's ownership than the animals, plants and every other thing - living or not - in the universe, how are we different to any other living thing on the planet? The usual response to this question is that we have the ability to think and reason, and that - most importantly - we appear to possess a free will that animals and plants do not. The latter are fundamentally controlled by their instincts and their needs to procreate and survive, whereas we can choose our paths in life and even decide to seemingly shirk our 'animal' natures, for example by choosing not to have children. Indeed, this would seem to point towards us being made - as it is described in Genesis - in the "image of God", whereas such an attribute is not accredited to any other living being on Earth.

God has the ultimate free will - He, being omnipotent, can choose to do whatever He wants. I'm not going to go into the implications of this regarding the Problem of Evil, but it cannot be denied that God has free will, which is also evident in the Creation. The very first passage of the Bible declares that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters of the unformed world: God, and no one else. There was no one else coercing God into creating the world; He did it of His own volition. And if we are created in the image of God, then surely we possess a human version of that same free will.

Furthermore, if being created in the image of God means that we share His free will, then surely it means that we share His creativity. While studying for my AS Philosophy course, there was a unit all about what ideas can be truly innate in humans. For example, does the fact that most people seem to have an idea of God i.e. an omnipotent being who cannot visibly be seen, indicate that the idea of God is innate? For the record, I personally think that it does, but that is going slightly off-topic. The basic argument is that if we all seem to share something, does that mean that that something is innate, that we are born with it? I would argue that this is true of our creativity. Some people profess to being thoroughly uncreative beings, that they make more use of the analytical, mathematical right side of their brains. Yet I believe that creativity is something that is ingrained in each of us, and can even be expressed through culturally unimaginative mathematics.

My secondary school maths teacher loved the subject that she taught, and was determined to make her students love it as well. One of the ways in which she attempted to do this was to make maths fun, while not losing the true essence of just what maths is. In this way, she created maths challenges that would go on for whole terms, with prizes at the end for the person who could come up with the neatest and - for lack of a better word - best way of solving whatever problem it was. One of these challenges, and probably the longest-lasting challenge, was called Four Fours. A massive sheet of paper was put up on the wall of the classroom and had the numbers from one to one hundred written on it. The aim was to use four fours and any mathematical symbol, but no other numbers, to make all of the numbers from one to one hundred. To do this, you sometimes had to get quite creative:

These are probably not the only ways of making 1, 2, and 3 using only four fours, and if anyone has a better way of making them, I would be happy to change the examples. I was never that patient with mathematical problems such as these.

Creativity is not limited to words and pictures, but is also reflected in the seemingly uncreative worlds of science and mathematics. We can also see this within Creation. Mathematics and science are an integral part of God's Creation. The number of chromosomes in our DNA is a part of Creation, a part that was made by the creativity of God even though it is mathematical and scientific. Therefore, even those who are more partial towards the less traditionally creative subjects nevertheless also possess that innate creativity that makes us human; that makes us made in the image of God.

Creativity is the first characteristic that we see God to have, and it is a creativity that is infinitely more powerful than our own. It is a creativity that brought the world and the universe into existence with a single command. And it is one that we - sharing in the image of God - possess innately, one that we can tap into and use in our every day lives, that spurs the creative exploits of our modern age in the form of film, music, dance, art, literature, and even mathematics and science. It is the first thing we see as being part of God's character, and the fundamental part of our being that sets us as humans apart from all other living things.