Welcome to a question-answering node of the Pandeism index!!
This
question often comes up in the course of
theological debate, whenever it is proposed that there are two possibilities as to the origin of our Universe --
either it arose through some spontaneous process which did not require a
Creator,
or it was intentionally created. Ah, but if so, who created the Creator? In theological discourse, this is a question commonly raised by Atheists, as if debating theology is a parlor game. If a Creator is to be posited, it follows that this Creator must have itself either come into existence through some spontaneous process which did not require a Creator, or was itself intentionally created (perhaps by an
UrGod). If it came about spontaneously, the argument goes, then why can't a Universe (which is itself contended to be perhaps less complex even than the proposed Creator) simply come about in exactly the same way? Worse yet, such a Creator
can't even know if it was created, because it might have been manufactured complete with memories of an interminably long existence.
From a standpoint of criticising
Theism, this is legitimate gripe, because Theism generally proposes no especially rational basis for
Creation itself. Oh, theists will tell you that their gods created our Universe out of love (because it loved us even before it brought us into our inevitably
suffering-laden existence). But such a basis for our specific experience of Creation is as arbitrary as any other -- including Creation by a being arbitrarily created by a greater being created by a still greater being. (Or even a being which believes itself to be the "one true God" actually having been created "out of love" by a hidden greater being waiting to be discovered by its Creation's
free will.) And so this proposition does not excuse the god so described from needing a Creator of its own.
But for the Pandeist, the objection is overcome by the pandeistic proposition of a rational motivation for Creation.
Pandeism proposes a Creator which has become the Creation itself so as to learn from the experience of existing in lives arising therein. From this pandeistic perspective, there is simply no logic by which one Creator would create
another Creator -- already being a Creator (or potential Creator), it could learn nothing thereby which it could not better learn by becoming the Universe which such Creator could create. The proposition forwarded by Atheists cuts both ways when the theological model is Pandeism. If a Universe can spontaneously arise, why not the simplest model of Universe-generating
consciousness?
It must be pointed out as well that the "who created" question, assuming a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other
sequence of creation, inherently assumes that
time is linear. This is itself a questionable presumption -- many models of
physics support the possibility of
nonlinear time, in which a true
paradox is possible: that of a Creator travelling backwards in time to the "beginning" of time to create itself!! (But let's not go quite so far as to propose that the "Who" who created was
The Doctor".) Our own small, brief, localized experience of linear time can be compared to the experience of the flatness of the world from the
viewpoint of an
ant at the center of a
basketball court. While the possibility is not the same as an argument of that being so, it is one of many intriguing models by which there can indeed be a Creator preceding anything else, including itself.
----
lizardinlaw adds: my daughter's big question after thought was "Who thought up the idea of God?" .....
Azul-din adds: For my part, I think the attempt to envision a Being as separate from everything that exists, while it may be interesting mental gymnastics, is in the end no more than that. I fail to see the necessity for an active force- A is A, existence exists, in all its ordered complexity. We are a part of the most tremendous mystery conceivable- surely that is enough, and to be gifted with the ability to solve a portion of that mystery is challenge and glory enough for a lifetime.