Thank you John for your kind words and clarifying question.
By “co-creator” I don’t mean “co-equal.” I mean a “co-operator” or a “co-llaborator” or a “co-worker” with God, Who in His humility invites us to be willing participants in His ongoing work.
I think a “both/and” approach can clarify what it means to be both of common descent with the rest of creation, and to be co-creators with God. He reveals Himself through both faith and reason and through both divine revelation and scientific inquiry. Science alone cannot suffice, because the scientific method cannot discern the ethical preconditions necessary for science to take place, but at the same time science can inform a correct interpretation of Sacred Scripture and clarify our understanding of it.
Science, apart from divine revelation, can risk extrapolating from our common descent to reduce human beings to one kind of animal among other animals. This has been a trend in the thinking of some people, who, through what I think is a misguided sense of humility, can place human beings on a level of moral equivalency with other evolved biological forms, even going so far as to see people as a sort of scourge upon an ecosystem which will continue with or without human involvement. There can be a tendency to see humans as one species among many, denizens of one planet among many, of one star system among many, of one galaxy among many, insignificant inhabitants of a pale blue dot.
Scripture, on the contrary, says in Hebrews 2:6-8:
“What is mankind that you are mindful of them,
a son of man that you care for him?
You made them a little lower than the angels;
you crowned them with glory and honor
and put everything under their feet.”
In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them.
Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them."
By saying that God made humans a little lower than the angels, the author of Hebrews implies a sort of hierarchy of creation that establishes people above the rest of the creatures, even as we share the same biological origins through the evolutionary mechanisms through which God creates.
Yet we should remember the sort of servant leadership that Jesus exemplified both through His teachings and through the conduct of His life.
In Mark 10:43-45 He says,
“Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Therefore the sort of dominion that human beings have over creation must be rooted in service, both because this promotes our own survival in a symbiotic ecosystem and because we have a moral duty to practice benevolence.
As far as our status as “co-creators,” I think you are right that we have to be very careful in how we define this term. It should not imply that we stand on a par with God nor that we think that equality with God is something to be grasped. The Genesis narrative itself draws a distinction between our creation imago dei and the temptation of the serpent to become “like gods.”
However, the Genesis narrative also invites comparison between God’s creative power and that He has endowed us with. When God creates, He divides the things, puts the things in their proper place, and then names them. He then puts the man in the garden and has him tend the soil (necessarily practicing right division by breaking up the soil), plant the seeds (putting the things in their proper place), and name the animals (studying creation to discern how best to care for it). The actus humanus of labor and study embodies God’s image and likeness in the world, and carries on His creative work in the service of creation.
In my way of thinking this is the difference between seeing human beings as being like Zeus, with power displayed as with an arm outstretched to hurl a thunderbolt, and seeing human beings display power like Jesus, who saved us through the power of His outstretched arm by willingly stretching out His arm on the cross. The power of God is the power of patience, self-emptying, and humility.
Both ironically and fittingly, the massive problems we face stem from the desire to be like the gods of our own imagining. The narrative of the fall in Genesis 3 shows that the more we try to exercise power through force and worldly means, seizing for ourselves easy and attractive “knowledge,” the less like God we become and the more abject the misery that we create.
As co-creators, we cannot create from nothing, as only God can, nor can we sustain what we have created in its being. Even in the act of writing, of creating a universe and putting it on paper, we work from pre-existing materials, from the physical stuff of the pen and paper, from the letters and words and literary tradition we have received, from the education received from our parents and teachers, and from the cognitive abilities God has crowned us with.
However, we do have a unique ability among all of the other creatures to consciously shape our own environment, even transcending our genetic biology and environmental conditioning through the free exercise of our will.
This is evident throughout our history, as human beings have even bent evolution to suit our purposes. Various animals (dogs and sheep come to mind) and also plants have evolved not through natural selection alone, but increasingly through human selection. This will be even more so the case through application of CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing techniques, and is a powerful reason why scientific inquiry must be informed by divine revelation and its attendant moral/ethical lessons. Otherwise, such technologies will create suffering rather than alleviating it.
Even without technological application, human beings are co-creators with God through our sexuality, as He has given us the means to join with Him in creating new human beings created in His image and likeness, as well as ours. In a way that is similar to how the Love that exists between the Father and the Son and the Son and the Father is the Holy Spirit, a Person within the Holy Trinity, the love that exists between a man and a woman can under the right circumstances come to exist as a unique human person when the two become one flesh.
So I agree with you that “There is a God, and we are not God.” We do well to remember that when we try to be like gods, we become less like God, and create suffering. But when we allow the Holy Spirit to conform us to the image of God, incarnated in Christ, we become His presence in the world.
