Creation

God had a choice when he created us and our reality. He could create us from His own substance and separate Himself from that substance. We would therefore be perfect and good, but two perfect beings would seem to be a contradiction. I am convinced that God could have done this if He had wanted, but it seems unlikely that He would. God already is. There would be no reason to create another.
His second choice could have been to create us and our reality as part of himself. We would live out our lives in paradise and we would be part of God and parts of God would be us. Some of us predict such an event on our death. I suspect this is wishful thinking. Since we were not created as part of God, there is little reason to suspect we would become part of God when we die. I could be wrong of course.
You may be able to suggest other possibilities, or you may believe He actually did make one of the above choices.
Assuming, however, that He made the choice to create us and our reality separate from Himself and of something He created out of nothing rather than out of Himself, a problem arises. If God alone is good, then what is not God is bad by the very fact of its being not God. Can a good God create something bad, even evil, like us? If He is indeed omnipotent, then of course He could, though to us it would appear a contradiction to the idea of a perfectly good God. I believe God can and has created contradictions. We haven’t accepted any yet, and we possibly never will, but God can do what He wants. That must be accepted if God is all-powerful. I think we will find contradictions. We may already have begun to find them. If we have found them, we have made up rules explaining why they are not contradictions.
Let’s assume God did create existence and that He created it from scratch, and not from His substance. Being separate from God, we are not good and have the potential for evil. We were, however, created in God’s image. Not from His substance, but in His image. Though we are not God and never will come close to being God, we are God’s reflection. A not very good analogy, but the best I can come up with, is a mirror. There is, of course, no real mirror and perhaps a holographic image would be more acceptable. The point is, we are a reflection. In a God sense, we are not real. We are only a reflection of what is real, in the sense that only God is really real rather than in the sense that our reality is real.
Since we do not really exist in a God sense, the bad that we are and the evil that we can become only exists in our perception of it. We are what we are. We are not God, but we are enabled as the image of God to see God in our own reflection and in the reflection of others.
Now comes the hard part. God did not create just us. He created creation. We are only part of that creation; the part of creation that is not us is also God’s reflection. The only difference between rational creatures and the rest of creation is that when God looks at His reflection, we look back. To think that God looks at His image and sees only us is an arrogance born of being made of something other than God. We have been blessed beyond other life on this planet (and I emphasize this planet) with an enhanced ability to see through God’s eyes, so to speak, to step out of ourselves and view the world with some degree of objectivity. I say an enhanced ability, because I do not really know whether other life on this planet has this ability to some lesser degree. Since we have so much trouble exercising this ability for any extended period of time, I think probably not. So we are alone facing God.
How do we know we are facing God? We pretend we have confronted God through some rational realization, or we accept hearsay evidence that others have met God and, even though rationally we find that extremely unlikely, we accept the possibility. It is difficult to understand why we do and yet we believe these people, even though we know that people lie. A natural consequence of our determination to stay alive becomes a determination to dominate, and what better way to dominate than to claim access to something beyond the control of others, something that could enhance or threaten their continued existence. Yet, knowing this, we accept their assertion despite the lack of any evidence to support their claims, often despite the fact that those making such claims have long been dead.
Why do we repeatedly claim to prove something which has been repeatedly proven false? Why do we make up stories that are obviously not true, certainly not verifiable, contrary to everything we have experienced, and which apparently contribute nothing to our survival? (From an evolutionist point of view such an unjustified but universal and persistent pretension must contribute something to our survival, or at least in some way be associated with our determination to stay alive.)
I would suggest that our awareness of God is an apprehension rather than a comprehension, that it is intuitive rather than deductive, that it is irrational (instinctive) rather than rational, and that we are so embarrassed by being irrational (by having instincts) and thus not set apart from the animal kingdom that we rationalize the irrational. We pretend we know God’s presence when we actually only feel His presence. We are consequently forced to prove His existence no matter how foolish the proof may be, and we will defend that proof as if our very lives depended on it.
That is the danger of rationalizing the irrational. It creates a conflicted reality, subjective (which we are) against objective (which we strive toward). When our subjective self cannot successfully adapt objective reality to our expectations and we are unwilling or unable to adapt, we become nihilistic. We wish the termination of objective reality. We create Heaven as the realization of our rationalized irrational yearnings and/or turn to prophecy and revelations, however absurd, as our justification and our hope, and we consequently waste what could be a productive and joyful life yearning for something that is not and never will be.