This section of posts in the God Series explores the meaning of the term “In His Image” and then offers an alternative meaning and discusses the implications of that alternative meaning.

IN HIS IMAGE

Review of previous posts

The previous post investigates the attributes of imagination and the advantages an imagination provides to man over the other entities created in Genesis.

Preview of this post

This post investigates the attributes of imagination and the advantages an imagination provides to man over the other entities created in Genesis.

Attributes and characteristics given by God to humans in Genesis

(1) Imagination

(a) Imagination Defined

The first skill among these skills is imagination. Imagination is defined in other posts^[1] as the ability to form a mental image of what the senses cannot detect. Imagination begins where the senses end. When we think of an orange, we can form a mental image of what it looks like, its smell, its taste, and its feel without having an orange physically present. We can also imagine how the taste or smell of an orange will change if another element, such as sugar, is added to that orange. We can form a mental image how a song sounds even though we cannot physically hear it, and so forth. While an animal may learn to avoid certain actions by having an undesirable, and perhaps survival-threatening, result occur, that does not mean that they can imagine the connection between an act and the undesirable consequence.

(b) How man uses his imagination

Imagination allows humans to efficiently learn from a trial and error process and also to apply lessons learned by others to themselves. Humans make mistakes both as individuals and as societies. Mistaken actions lead to undesirable consequences. Humans learn from those undesirable consequences so that the next time a choice of actions becomes necessary, man can form a mental image of potential consequences using his imagination and can extend what he learned previously in other situations to the new situation and take action accordingly to reject actions which he imagines will be unsuccessful and adopt actions which he imagines to be successful whereby such trial and error process will lead to learning, change and development.

(c) Imagination vis á vis Memory

Memory is not imagination, memory is a component of imagination and it is necessary for one to exercise imagination, but memory by itself is not imagination. Memory connects a sensed impression to another sensed or sensible impression. Memory takes as its object an expression referring to a particular past event or action. In the case of an animal, the object is a particular past event or action which was directly sensed by the animal. Memory does not supply a sensed impression to an impression that is not, has not, or cannot be, sensed. Yet another way of differentiating memory and imagination is to understand that in imagination, ideas may occur in any order and need not occur in the same order as did the original sensed impressions; whereas, in memory, the order of the ideas in memory cannot vary and must preserve the original order and form of the original impression. For example, an animal may learn not to eat a particular food because it made them sick once; but this is not the same thing as imagining that a particular food is bad, especially if the food being considered is not the same as the food which previously made the animal sick. Merely knowing that a particular food is poisonous is not the same thing as envisioning how that food would taste, smell or feel especially if the physical object is not present, or imagining how the consequences might change if a particular factor is changed. For example, an animal cannot envision how a previously bad result connected to taste might change if the object in question smells different from the previous object having the taste associated with the bad result. Further, an animal can only connect sensed impressions with what it has in its memory, it cannot extrapolate as that would require imagination. For example, an animal smelling an orange can connect that smell with the taste of an orange but it cannot imagine how a lemon would taste by smelling an orange, that requires imagination. Humans can do this, animals cannot. Furthermore, an animal cannot apply a bad result which happened to another animal to itself. That is, if a first animal ate a food that made it ill, a second animal will not know to avoid that food based on the result experienced by the first animal. That second animal will only know to avoid the bad food if it experiences the bad result for itself.

Nor can an entity with only a memory and without an imagination envision a range of consequences. That is, for example, an imaginationless entity cannot decide if the undesired consequence could be avoided if a particular food is eaten in combination with another food. The entity only knows to avoid this particular food. For example, the sour taste of a lemon is undesirable and an imaginationless entity will only remember that a food that looks and smells like a lemon will have an undesirable taste. The entity cannot envision how that undesirable taste might be altered into a desirable taste if sugar were to be sprinkled onto the lemon before eating it. The entity only knows that this sensed item is associated with an undesirable taste. The entity cannot imagine other results, it only knows a direct sense/memory result.

In this case, the entity (in the case of Genesis, an animal) merely as a matter of rote learning remembers that, for example, a particular smell is connected to a bad consequence and avoids the source of the smell. No further actions are taken and no further steps are required. Some natural selection may also play a role in that animals which eat deadly food do not survive while animals that instinctively avoid such food do survive. This is survival instinct “(be fertile and increase”) and rote response, it is not imagination and is quite inefficient at best and ineffective at worst. It certainly is not the imagination associated with humans nor is it the imagination necessary to efficiently progress. In some cases, no progress at all will result from survival instincts because once a survival result occurs, no further changes or actions will be taken and the “progress” will cease at that point^[2]. If God did not want the experiment^[3] of the universe He created to progress, He would not have even created it. Why would a living God create something that was going to remain totally stagnant in the very form He created it? Thus, it can be concluded that God created our universe with the objective that it would change and progress. Survival and rote response instincts need direction to produce progress. In Genesis 1:28, God charged man with the duty of providing the leadership necessary for this directed learning by the living entities created in Genesis^[4] .

Preview of next post

The next post continues the investigation of the attributes provided to man by his imagination.

^[1] See the series of posts titled “Imagination and the mind of man”.

^[2] Even then, the progress will be extremely inefficient and haphazard.

^[3] As used in this work, “experiment” refers to the universe as we know it. As discussed in the “God” series of posts, our universe ends where our senses can go no further. Our imagination might go further, but whatever we might imagine cannot be confirmed or refuted because our senses cannot test what has been imagined. As also noted elsewhere, the “experiment” has Jews as the main protagonist because the Bible was written by Jews, for Jews and to instruct Jews. Hence, placing the Jews at the center as being the main protagonist and the ones “chosen” by the Jewish God was merely a literary technique for the authors of the Bible and one that is quite common, even today. The authors considered the world occupied by Jews in partnership with their god as being the experiment. This is no different than any other work of literature. The authors had no intention of making Jews the chosen people beyond the four corners of the Bible.

^[4] It should be noted that such guidance does not make man superior to animals, it only give man an extra duty and responsibility. Therefore, the mastery over the animals given to man by God in Gen 1:28 should not be interpreted as superiority.