The doctrine of creation, then, means that our created environment is touched by the hand of God, is a place where we can encounter God, and still in someone way bears the traces of the paradise of delight that God intended his creation to be. Human sin obscures our perception of this, and encourages an attitude to the created order that cease to take seriously the fact that it is created, seeing it rather as a resource to be exploited for our own purposes. As we do that, we begin to misconstrue the world around us, our own attitude becomes destructive, we cease to see the world as a gift, and instead begin to compete one with another in fashioning our own worlds which encroach on one another, so that it becomes a matter of contention whether this is mine or yours, as we forget the reality that it is God’s—and so both mine and yours, as a gift to share, or neither mine nor yours, as a possession to grasp and hold.