What if God created existence in the same way that an artist interprets a subject? I wrote this question on a strip of paper, followed by the thought that something might already have been there, something that inspired the rendition we inhabit. The proposition unsettles the familiar arrangement of creator and creation. It asks whether the world could be an expression of a reality more fundamental than the world itself, and whether our own acts of interpretation might participate in the same activity. A painting gives visible form to an encounter that precedes it. A piece of music makes an inward movement audible. Perhaps the existence we know bears a comparable relationship to something we cannot encounter directly. I find myself lingering over the possibility that what we call reality is already an interpretation, and that every attempt to understand it begins within an act of understanding older than our own.
An artist's subject need not be an object waiting patiently outside the studio. It can be an absence, an unsettled feeling, a relationship between shapes, or a possibility sensed before it can be described. Even an imagined landscape emerges from some encounter with experience, however thoroughly its ingredients have been transformed. The finished work acquires a life distinct from the conditions that made it possible. We can stand before a painting without knowing the room in which it was painted, the grief that altered its colours, or the small accident that determined its composition. Something of those conditions remains available through the work, although much has become inaccessible. To extend this relationship to the universe is to entertain an extraordinary thought: the world might carry the character of its making without disclosing the full nature of what occasioned it.
The phrase "existence before existence" contains an immediate difficulty. If existence means everything that is, anything preceding it would already belong to existence. The phrase becomes more coherent if its second use refers to this particular order of reality: the universe in which things occupy space, endure through time and become available to experience. What precedes that order, if anything does, would not necessarily resemble an earlier universe. Its priority might be logical or ontological, meaning that our world depends upon it, rather than temporal, meaning that it happened first. I want to retain the strangeness of the phrase without allowing its apparent depth to excuse a contradiction. The question concerns whatever makes this kind of existence possible, including the possibility that our familiar categories cannot adequately describe it.
Even nothingness becomes difficult when I try to imagine it honestly. A black expanse still has extension. An empty room retains its walls and the expectation that someone could enter. Silence can be experienced only within conditions that allow an experience to occur. Each attempted picture supplies a setting, and usually an observer, to the absence it claims to represent. That limitation does not establish that absolute nothingness is impossible; an inability to imagine something is a poor substitute for an argument about whether it can be. It does reveal how readily the mind carries the furniture of existence into its efforts to think beyond existence. The empty canvas is already a canvas. A divine artist standing before it would already be someone, somewhere, confronting a possibility. The metaphor has smuggled an entire world into the moment before the world.
Augustine encountered a related problem in Book XI of the Confessions, where he considered the question of what God was doing before creating heaven and earth. His answer places time within creation itself. There could be no stretch of waiting before time, because waiting already requires the succession whose origin is being questioned. God's eternity, in this account, cannot be measured as an exceptionally long duration. It belongs to a different order from the passing of moments.[1] I find the argument useful because it interrupts the little film that begins playing whenever I think about origins: darkness, a pause, a decision, an event. Every frame presupposes time. The possibility that time itself requires explanation asks me to relinquish the camera with which I had hoped to watch the beginning.
Once chronological priority loosens its hold, another kind of relationship becomes imaginable. A musical performance depends upon relations that cannot be located simply by asking which note came first. The opening note requires its physical conditions, certainly, but its place in the composition also depends upon a structure that extends beyond that instant. An analogy of this kind cannot explain how a universe exists. It can help distinguish a sequence of events from the conditions through which those events become possible or intelligible. Perhaps my imagined "before" is an awkward attempt to reach towards that distinction. I am trying to think about a source while possessing a language overwhelmingly suited to things that have already appeared.
Plato's Timaeus offers a close philosophical relative of the thought on my strip of paper. Its divine craftsman, commonly called the Demiurge, fashions an ordered cosmos with reference to an eternal intelligible model. The account describes order being brought to disorder, so that the visible world bears the likeness of a reality apprehended through reason.[2] Here creation involves a relationship between an original and its expression. The resemblance to artistic practice is substantial, although Plato's eternal model should not be mistaken for the private memories or preferences of a human painter. What attracts me is the possibility that the visible has an antecedent which is not simply another visible thing. A world can be understood as a manifestation whose source exceeds the form in which it becomes accessible to us.
That possibility differs from creation out of nothing as developed in classical Christian theology. In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas treats creation as the causing of being as such, without presupposing an existing material from which the universe is manufactured. On that account, God does not require an independently available substance or subject in the way a sculptor requires stone.[3] This places a genuine pressure on the artist analogy. If God encounters something independent and responds to it, the word "God" may no longer identify the ultimate source of everything. The subject has become part of what needs explaining. I can follow the thought in that direction, towards a maker situated within a greater reality, but I should recognise the commitment involved. Alternatively, the subject of creation might be understood as a possibility within the divine itself, which leaves a different and equally difficult question about the relationship between possibility and actuality.
The second possibility draws me towards the peculiar interval in which an artwork has been sensed but has yet to take form. There may be a pressure towards a shape, an impression whose identity becomes clearer only through making it. Human artists often discover what they were trying to do while doing it. To project that discovery onto God would be a substantial theological speculation, since it would allow uncertainty or development into the divine life. Still, the resemblance need not be exact for the question to remain fruitful. Perhaps the universe could express an inexhaustible possibility without exhausting it. Perhaps the source of a world could contain more than any single world makes manifest, just as a subject remains available after an artist has found one convincing way to express it.
My original note went further. If we experience reality through our own subjective minds, might the same be true of God? The inference is tempting and uncertain. A resemblance between a creator and a creature does not establish that both share the same limitations. Human perception is selective, embodied and exposed to error. A divine mode of knowing, if there is one, need not possess those characteristics. Yet imagining a divine perspective brings an unexpected intimacy to the question. It allows the universe to be considered as something seen, understood and expressed, with the coherent character that an act of attention can give to its subject. The risk is that I have invented a very large human being. The interest lies in asking whether creativity tells us something about the relationship between being and intelligibility, even after that obvious projection has been acknowledged.
The language of being made in God's image, which my note borrows from Genesis, gives the question another direction. Genesis 1:26-27 associates humanity with the divine image, although the passage does not itself settle what that resemblance consists in.[4] I am drawn to a creative reading: our capacity to receive the world and give it a new expression might belong among the ways that resemblance can be imagined. This is an interpretation of the religious image, with no claim to be its exclusive meaning. It would give the artist's work a particular dignity. The human being who draws water, composes a lament or invents a creature would be exercising a capacity related, however distantly, to the activity through which a world becomes manifest. The scale is incomparably smaller. The relationship between encountering and making remains recognisable.
The everyday experience of looking already complicates the assumption that the world arrives whole and unchanged inside us. My attention falls on certain features, moves past others and returns under the influence of memory. A familiar street can become strange after an absence. A room acquires a different emotional temperature when someone is missing from it. These changes need not alter the objects they concern to alter the reality of an experience. An account of the room's dimensions and an account of its loneliness can both be faithful to something, although they answer different questions. The artist works within this interval between what is there and what its presence becomes for a particular consciousness. Giving form to that encounter can make an aspect of experience available that description alone had failed to communicate.
Kant gave the dependence of experience on our way of knowing a rigorous and demanding philosophical treatment. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he distinguishes things as they appear under the conditions of human cognition from things considered in themselves. Space and time, on his account, belong to the forms of our sensibility.[5] His argument does not license the conclusion that each personal impression establishes its own facts, and my artistic analogy should not borrow his authority for that purpose. It does sharpen the question of access. We encounter a world through conditions of experience that cannot simply be stepped outside. My further speculation is that art can make some features of this encounter perceptible. A painting offers its subject together with evidence of a way of seeing, allowing another person to enter a relation they could not otherwise occupy in quite the same way.
Water makes the thought easier to feel. A photograph might record the surface of a river with extraordinary detail. A drawing of three curved lines might communicate the movement that stayed with someone who watched it. A sustained musical phrase might recall the sense of depth or suspension associated with being near it. None of these works contains the river, and each can disclose a feature of our encounter with water that the others leave undeveloped. Their differences arise partly from what their media permit and partly from what the maker has noticed. If creation itself were a rendition, perhaps our arts would continue this movement of disclosure within the conditions of the rendition we inhabit. The world provides the encounter, and the artist makes another encounter possible.
In my note I listed fire, earth, water and air, followed by darkness, light and reflection. I was thinking of subjects that seem available for endless reinterpretation, rather than proposing a physical inventory of the universe. Fire can be approached through its movement, its capacity to destroy, or the peculiar comfort of watching it from safety. Darkness can offer shelter or deprivation; reflected light can suggest distance, instability or an opening in an otherwise solid surface. A particular arrangement of marks may find a convincing form for one of these experiences. Its truth resides in the encounter it articulates and in the precision with which it does so. The subject has remained available across innumerable works without being used up, as though each sustained act of attention discovers further relations within it.
The strongest sentence in my original thought was that a person's rendition could be as valid and profound as God's own. I still feel the force of that claim as an assertion about creative dignity. A human interpretation has the capacity to become a complete experience on its own terms, even though its maker possesses only a minute portion of whatever can be known. Calling it true requires care about the claim being made. A painting of fire that feels cold may be perceptive about estrangement; a factual assertion about the temperature of a flame remains answerable to evidence. Equal human dignity also leaves room for criticism, revision and differences in achievement. I want an account of creativity generous enough to honour a private vision while retaining the attention through which we distinguish an insight from a careless assertion.
There is something moving in the possibility that finitude contributes to an artwork's value. A particular consciousness notices from a particular place, within the pressure of a life that cannot include every other life. The restrictions produce omissions and mistakes, but they also make specificity possible. The slight asymmetry that holds someone's attention may never have been noticed in quite that way before. When it enters a work, another person can encounter the consequence of that attention. To call such a work derivative because it draws upon an existing world would overlook what has happened between receiving and expressing. The artist has made a new thing available within existence. However modest its materials, it can enlarge the range of experiences that other people are able to recognise.
The relationship becomes more intricate when I imagine art within a creation already understood as art. A drawing of a tree would be an interpretation made from within another interpretation, yet the additional relation need not weaken the encounter. A melody played on different instruments acquires qualities unavailable in its first performance. A remembered landscape can disclose the pressure of memory alongside the forms of the landscape itself. Each expression bears something of what preceded it and something of the conditions under which it has been remade. If a divine rendition were the condition of our existence, human creativity might add further possibilities of relation within it. I find that idea more interesting when I keep the individual work in view, with its actual marks and decisions, than when it expands into a vague claim that everything is sacred.
Dreaming offers another analogy, although an analogy must remain distinct from an explanation. A dream can give the felt coherence of a place to forms that have never shared a location in waking life. Experience is reorganised until the invented environment seems capable of being entered. Reflecting upon this afterwards can make the ordinary relationship between mind and world feel newly uncertain. The analogy concerns the experience of inhabiting a world whose generative conditions remain beyond view. An originating condition might be difficult to recover from within an experience whose every feature already belongs to that condition. An inhabitant of a painted room would have no straightforward route from the room's depicted window to the painter's actual window. The thought has the melancholy of trying to remember a place whose existence may depend entirely upon the remembering.
Cosmology introduces a different discipline into these reflections. NASA's account of cosmic history describes an early universe approximately 13.8 billion years ago and explains the proposed role of cosmic inflation, while explicitly acknowledging uncertainty about what preceded inflation and what powered it.[6] Those uncertainties leave work for physical theories and observations. They cannot by themselves establish a divine artist, an eternal subject or a reality composed of interpretation. A physical account of an earlier state would also leave open the philosophical question of why that state, and the conditions it requires, obtain. I want to keep these questions in conversation without assigning one the authority of the other. The possibility of wonder survives a careful distinction between what an observation supports and what an image allows us to contemplate.
The image of a divine artwork also encounters the world's suffering. To call the universe a beautiful rendition can become morally evasive when the lives within it contain pain that nobody chose. An artist's freedom with a canvas provides a disturbing model for a creator's freedom with beings capable of suffering. I cannot resolve that difficulty by appealing to a perspective so vast that individual distress becomes aesthetically convenient. If the metaphor has any value for me, it must allow a creature's experience to matter in its own right. Our interpretations would then carry a responsibility towards those whom they represent. An account that makes existence feel coherent by making another person's suffering disappear has failed to attend adequately to its subject.
I return, finally, to the strip of paper and the hesitation within its question. There may be no divine observer, and no original behind the world waiting to be recovered. Existence may demand descriptions that render this entire analogy inadequate. I can accept that uncertainty while remaining interested in the experience from which the question arose: making something can feel like responding to a possibility whose presence has preceded its visible form. If that relation extends beyond us, perhaps a world expresses something that remains greater than its expression, and our small works continue the encounter from within it. I cannot picture an existence before existence without carrying some part of this world into the picture. Even so, when I look again at water, at a branching shape, at light returning from a surface, I find myself wondering what was seen there, and what might still become visible.
Sources and further reading
[1] Augustine. Confessions, Book XI, chapters 12-14. On creation, eternity and the absence of time before time.
[2] Plato. Timaeus, 27d-30c. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. On the divine craftsman, the eternal model and cosmic order.
[3] Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 45, articles 1-2. On creation without presupposed material.
[4] The Bible. Genesis 1:26-27. New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. The passage on humanity in the divine image.
[5] Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic. Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. On the forms of human sensibility and the distinction between appearances and things in themselves.
[6] NASA Science. Overview of cosmic history. On the early universe, inflation and the limits of present knowledge. Accessed 27 October 2026.
