Hi, I’m Josh Anderson, a Graphic Designer and I’ve never designed anything.
One time I was drawing an alien (which I do a lot) I love the challenge of trying to come up with a strange character that no one has ever seen or contemplated before. This girl looked at my drawing and said “Did you know that humans cannot create something that God hasn’t already made? Anything we ‘make up’ is only a combination or reorganization of things already created.’
My first reaction was ‘No way, my creature is way different than anything we know’. She then pointed out that he has legs, a head, eyes, etc. I finally had to say, ‘You’re right’.
This thought has interesting implications when applied to imagination. One will say ‘He or she is very creative’, meaning we think they have a talent for coming up with new ideas. But what does it really mean to be creative if we cannot really create?
I think in light of this thought, we have to think of imagination and creativity more like exploring realms of existence already created by God. So then a creative person is more like someone who is open to exploring new/unusual/different thoughts or ideas.
It’s fascinating to me to find new and different or even strange expressions in art, music, philosophy because I think of it as discovering unexplored frontiers of God’s creation.
This by no means places less significance on the types of people we don’t generally consider to be “creative”. I believe each one of us was created to explore creation in different ways based on our talents and interests. More logically minded people who have strengths in mathematics and sciences have discovered truths about our existence that “creative” or “artistic” types have a difficult time understanding.
It is awesome how collective humanity seems to have been designed to discover God in our vast array of experience, interests and talents, and then glorify Him by bringing these discoveries to light.
JoshStories 