Light

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Can you imagine walking into a dark room, and with hardly any effort (as easy as, say, flipping a switch) causing the room to become brightly illuminated?  Ok, sure with modern technology....

Still, it's an awesome line.  Speak and it is done; word into deed.  Again, God is seeming mighty impressive.

So, we now have God having created 3 things: heaven, earth, light.  But here's an interesting point.  God didn't say, "Let there be the heaven."  God didn't say, "Let there be the earth."  But God created the heaven and the earth.  So it raises this odd question: did God not create the light?

Also, this gives us another data point about God.  He speaks.  He gives commands.  This doesn't sound like an abstract non-corporeal God; not like the sort of God who might be around before The Beginning.  This seems more like a human God, albeit a regal and powerful one.  This seems like a God with lungs, vocal cords, tongue, teeth, lips.

So, let's try some parallels.  The king said, "Build me a castle."; and they built him a castle.  Kennedy said, "Let's go to the moon."  And we went to the moon.

Taken that way, God seems powerful in some sense, but not quite as impressive.  In this interpretation, it's not much better than: God looked up "Lighting" in the Yellow Pages.  God called a specialist who gave him an outrageous estimate, but they bargained down to something more reasonable.  The specialist drove his pickup truck to the Home Depot, and loaded up on fluorescent bulbs.  With a couple of assistants who probably weren't technically legal, the job was done in a few hours.

You can almost interpret this as: God is the leader of a group, or even the group itself.  God is a committee.  The planning subcommittee said, Let there be light; and the action subcommittee made the light.  Think about it this way: why speak unless you're communicating to someone?

Ok, we've gotten this far without bringing Philip K. Dick into it at all.  But now I'm obligated to quote from his classic book VALIS.  For a little background, Fat is one of two characters in the book who are Phil Dick himself.  Dick was (as you can read below) into German, in which "dicke" means "fat".

"That's the existential position," Fat said. "Based on the concept that We are what we do, rather than, We are what we think. It finds its first expression in Goethe's Faust, Part One, where Faust says, `lm Anfang war das Wort.' He's quoting the opening of the Fourth Gospel; `In the beginning was the Word.' Faust says, `Nein, Im Anfang war die Tat.' `In the beginning was the deed.' From this, all existentialism comes." Maurice stared at him as if he were a bug.

In case you weren't paying attention, that was me quoting Dick supposedly quoting Fat quoting Goethe supposedly quoting Faust quoting a bible.  Ta-da!