The Million Dollar Question

[Confused Ape]

God is the creator, everything else is created. He is unlike anything created. Nothing resembles him. No mind can grasp and comprehend His reality. He is God, the One; God, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; and there is none like unto Him

Its as simple as that.

Humans haven't always agreed on the concept of God being the creator of our physical universe.

The Gnostics

In the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word “create” is ordinarily understood. While this True God did not fashion or create anything, He (or, It) “emanated” or brought forth from within Himself the substance of all there is in all the worlds, visible and invisible.

The basic Gnostic myth has many variations, but all of these refer to Aeons, intermediate deific beings who exist between the ultimate, True God and ourselves.

When it comes to our physical universe, however -

One of the aeonial beings who bears the name Sophia (“Wisdom”) is of great importance to the Gnostic world view. In the course of her journeyings, Sophia came to emanate from her own being a flawed consciousness, a being who became the creator of the material and psychic cosmos, all of which he created in the image of his own flaw. This being, unaware of his origins, imagined himself to be the ultimate and absolute God. Since he took the already existing divine essence and fashioned it into various forms, he is also called the Demiurgos or “half-maker” There is an authentic half, a true deific component within creation, but it is not recognized by the half-maker and by his cosmic minions, the Archons or “rulers”.

So where does that leave the creator God of the Old Testament? The Marcionites had an interesting point of view.

Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible (known to some Gnostics as Yaltabaoth) was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering; the God who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge.

So, one religion's loving creator God was another belief system's malicious demiurge.

What is a god? Maybe it all depends on which religion one looks at for a definition.