Humans appear to have split off from a common ancestor with apes maybe around 7 million years ago. The Earth is roughly 5 billion years old. Our universe is slightly less than 14 billion years old. The first scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths were written about 3 thousand years ago.

If we do the math, humans emerged roughly 1/2000 or, to put it another way, we were not here 99.5% of the time since the universe emerged. And the moral codes established by the Torah were absent more than 99.5% since humans split from the apes.

If we were created, why did God take so long to get around to creating humans? And if living by biblical standards is so important, then why did we exist as humans for so long before these scriptures were even written?

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

I was at a conference Saturday where they compared the whole history of the earth to a 300-volume encyclopedia set, each volume with 500 pages. (That works out to about a million years a page.) The existence of H. sapiens corresponds to about the last two words on the last page of the last volume.

An interesting thing about writing is that it was not necessarily welcomed at first. Apparently the Egyptian gods were not pleased with Thoth for inventing it. Socrates apparently had a dim view of putting things in writing--claimed it made the mind lazy. Some native elders hold that it would be against their tradition to collect the elders' wisdom in writing.

In the Tanakh, Jeremiah speaks of the need to have the law written on the heart rather than on stone.

Maybe having God's teaching in written form is not as valuable as we tend to think.

I hope no one minds if I quote a couple of scriptures here:



The theme here is that understanding (cognition) comes toward the very end of a long road. Why?

Tough to say. Aristotle said that any unified action (referring to literature) that creates a whole must be made up of a beginning, middle, and an end that are linked by necessary and probable causes. Perhaps this is true for the universe.

If so, then the universe could be governed by a literary plot. I have a book that identifies 20 master plots. Each of them ends with some type of revelation. For example, the quest:


The Riddle master plot has a type of revelation too:


The Underdog:


Metamorphosis:


Maturation:


Love:


Sacrifice:


Is the universe a best-seller?

Hi everybody .

Metis , you stated ,,,

" If we were created, why did God take so long to get around to creating humans? "

God being in infinite reality would have no concept of 'time' when Creating the World we see and live . When God realised His Creations were living by 'time' God realised 'time' was defined by the stars , suns etc and God then realised what He had Created ,,, perhaps .

Why do you think that everything should be arranged to assauge the human ego?


I do not see the connection, at all. The delay (so called) in creating humans does not have any relevance whatever to the question of whether humans were created or not.

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Grassaf, Eolas

This sort of fits in with Kaballah's statement that one can find the essence of Torah in nature.

The implications of what you are saying are significant in that maybe the need for scripture, ritual, messiahs, ministers, rabbis, etc. is overblown-- maybe a walk in the woods may be more inspirational and spiritual than attending services or Bible study.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

But if all of creation, especially human creation, is important, weren't those who lived before the revelations worthy enough to be given directions on what's right v wrong? Didn't God care about the Australopithecines, Homo erectus, or even the vast majority of Homo sapiens sapiens?

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Maybe I'm a deity then-- I lose track of time a lot!

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

But there are many in the Abrahamic faiths that hold humans to be the epitome of God's creation, so this is especially a question for them.





It certainly doesn't directly answer the question of whether humans were created or not, but it is a possible consideration concerning how humans could or should be viewed in the context of creation. However, if I look at this from a Buddhist perspective, there simply is no problem at all.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

But, not only Abrahamic faiths hold the World to have been created; others do, too.

But, even if you assume that humanity is the epitome of creation, still I do not see it as an especially problem. I think it is akin to asking Shakespeare why his first play wasn't Hamlet, or Michaelangelo why he painted the Sistine Chapel after he carved the David; it is impertinent at best, and irrelevant in all likelihood, and certainly -- in neither case -- any sort of objection.

After all, allowing there is a Creator god, it is surely up to him when, and how, to create?

That human being may (or may not) be the acme of the creative act does not preclude the fact that the gods may have other business, and that out creation (or existence) may not be the totality of things they care about. We may assume so, but that is juvenile conceit.



I do not see it even as a side issue. It's a bit like saying that train travel between New York and Chicago is impossible because the ticket was printed at 10:30. It's a temporal fallacy; not post hoc but something rather inverse to that.

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Grassaf, Eolas