God is Not an Artist & Other Disagreeable Ideas about Art

What do you mean God is not an artist?

Of course I realize the statement is on the verge of blasphemy. Even so, when we consider all the wonders God has made in the vastness of creation it is ludicrous to minimize His magnificence by calling Him an artist. Most certainly God has manifested systems of light that stretch across the sky every single day forming colors that capture our hearts. There is a symphony of bugs that plays in the southern woods that tell of His splendor and laud His creativity.

The crashing waves of swelling seas

The Grand Canyon

The Painted Desert

The turquoise waters of Santorini

Ants and plants of the Amazon rainforest

Merely the circulatory system of the human body, just one system!

YES, I know! We could list to infinity the beauty of all of the vastness of God’s imagination and skill to generate, to originate. In fact, all we are as artists is replicators, mild imitators. We can take ten thousand pictures of every sunrise and every sunset with every color of every temperature, intensity and saturation, but to call Him an artist would certainly not be big enough a descriptor. He is beyond all that we can think or imagine. God is not an artist simply because the word is too small an identifier of all He has done and is capable of doing.

Therefore, the question is: why is it repulsive to consider that God is not an artist? Why do we want our God, Father of the Universe, to be an artist? In some parts of us we want to minimize His greatness. We want our God, Creator of all that is made, to be like us. In truth, this desire is understandable, however, oh so minimizing.