Creator’s Prerogative – Purpose and Intent Premise

Over several blog posts I have begun discussing this idea of the Creator’s Prerogative: that the inventor/designer/creator of any thing, including God creating us, has the right to place expectations on his/her/its creation. If this argument is biblically the case, then it has some severe weight as to why Christianity and evolution are irrevocably incompatible.

Here again is the Creator’s Prerogative argument:
P1: The Creator has invested everything needed to make their creation
P2: The Creator has a specific purpose and function intended for their creation
P3: The Creator continually provides everything needed for the creation to function according to the Creator's intentions
C: Therefore, the Creator has Creator's Prerogative, the right to expect and require the creation to function according to the purposes and intentions of the Creator, and even to create consequences in the event of failure to do so.

In my last post on this subject I proved that the Bible, from all corners, supports the first premise, the Investment Premise. Next, I need to show that the Bible supports the second statement, which I call the Purpose and Intent Premise.

So, did God have a specific purpose and function that He intended for us when He made us?

The Bible’s immediate answer, as you may know, is yes:
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in our own image, according to our likeness.” – Genesis 1:26

God made us in His own image; He intended us to be like Him. Many arguments have been put forward as to what this means, whether it means that God, as religious studies scholars would put it, is anthropomorphic, or whether we were supposed to be spiritual beings or creative or holy, or something else. What exactly in us is like God isn’t specific here, but it IS clear that God had intentions as he created us. Job asks, “Did you [God] not…clothe me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews” (Job 10:11)? If our sinews, muscles, and body systems work a certain way, then it would seem, based on this verse and others like it that God “assembled” us to work that way: He knit us this way on purpose.

The boldest statement made to this end may just come in Proverbs, when the Wiseman writes that “The LORD has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Proverbs 16:4). What a claim of intention! However, we must remember that God is omniscient, which means He was allowed to plan a lot in greater detail than a more shortsighted creator would be capable of. Finally, Romans 8:28 tells us that those who love God are “called according to His purpose.”

Clearly, if God did create us, then He did indeed have and still has intended functional qualities and purposes for us, thus supporting the Purpose and Intent Premise.