It's pretty amazing how what the Israelites did under Aaron's leadership (while Moses was up on the mountain with God receiving His commandments) closely resembles the idolatrous idea that God didn't create the universe, but instead all this physical and non-physical (spiritual) order and meaning simply produced itself by chance, without any intelligent direction and for no purpose. It sounds a lot like Aaron's defense to Moses that he merely put the gold the people had brought him into the fire, and out came the golden calf.
"And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them? And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief. For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.
"And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf." Exodus 32:21-24
I don't know if it's been determined whether the calf really came out of the fire without human shaping, in which case God allowed Satan to produce it himself, or if Aaron was simply lying, but either way, the people's sin of unbelief created it, and it certainly wasn't created by the random actions of nature.
And it's revealing, too, that the people clamored for the calf "god" as they began to fear and lose their faith because their leader and chosen intermediary between themselves and God had, to them, gone missing. Whenever it seems like the Lord might not be there in our problems, Satan tries to tempt us into believing that He doesn't exist. But His Word teaches and assures us that faith means believing that He is, and that He's a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6).
In the golden calf, we see, too, that even when people end up denying their creator, they end up recreating a false one, and that one, with Satan behind it, in some ways can deceptively imitate the true, living God.
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