Tertullian, Against Marcion 13

When we push God to this extreme—to the One for whom nothing is more proper or worthy than the testimony that marks Him as Creator—the most shameless Marcionites, recoiling in disgust, turn to demolishing the Creator’s works.

‘Certainly,’ they say, ‘the world is a great work and worthy of God!’ Is the Creator then not God? Clearly He is God. Therefore the world is not unworthy of God: for God would not have made anything unworthy of Himself, even if He made the world for humanity, not for Himself, though every work is inferior to its maker. And yet, if it is unworthy of God to have made something, how much more unworthy is it that He made nothing at all! Or is it unworthy, so that one could even hope for a more worthy author.

So let me speak of something even from this supposedly unworthy world, which even among the Greeks bears the name of ornament and cultivation, not filth. The very substances that the self‑styled professors of wisdom—whose minds animate every heresy—have declared to be gods: Thales called water a god, Heraclitus fire, Anaximenes air, Anaximander all heavenly bodies, Strato heaven and earth, Zeno air and ether, Plato the stars, which he calls the fiery kind of gods. When they considered the world—its magnitude, power, authority, honor, beauty, and the help, faith, and law of the individual elements that conspire to bring forth, nourish, complete, and restore all things—most physicists feared that the world’s substances, so vast, would be deemed less than God, the very substances worshipped by Persian magi, Egyptian hierophants, and Indian gymnosophists.

Even common, vulgar idolatry, ashamed of the names and myths of ancient dead men in its images, flees to a naturalistic interpretation and masks its disgrace with cleverness: it portrays Jupiter as a fiery substance, Juno as an airy one, following the sound of Greek words; Vesta as fire, the Camenae as water, the Great Mother as earth sown with seed, plowed by oxen, watered by baths. Thus Osiris, who is always buried, sought among the living, and found with joy, testifies to the faith of recurring crops, living elements, and the returning year, just as the rites of dry and burning nature philosophize about the lions of Mithras. And indeed, substances that are higher in position or status are more easily regarded as gods than as unworthy of God. Shall I descend to humble things? A single tiny flower from the hedges—not from the meadows—a single shell from any sea—not from the Red Sea—a single feather of a partridge, I say nothing of the peacock—will declare to you a sordid craftsman, the Creator.