Creator deity and Related Topics

Kobayashi Eitaku painting showing the god Izanagi (right) and Izanami, a goddess of creation and death in Japanese mythology.

Deity

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Hypothetical supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred.

Pantheists believe that the universe itself and everything in it forms a single, all-encompassing deity.

Statuette of a nude, corpulent, seated woman flanked by two felines from Çatalhöyük, dating to c. undefined 6000 BCE, thought by most archaeologists to represent a goddess of some kind.

Egyptian tomb painting showing the gods Osiris, Anubis, and Horus, who are among the major deities in ancient Egyptian religion.

A 4th century BC drachm (quarter shekel) coin from the Persian province of Yehud Medinata, possibly representing Yahweh seated on a winged and wheeled sun-throne.

The Kirkby Stephen Stone, discovered in Kirkby Stephen, England, depicts a bound figure, who some have theorized may be the Germanic god Loki.

Vellamo, the goddess of water in Finnish mythology, pictured as a mermaid in the coat of arms of Päijänne Tavastia.

4th-century Roman sarcophagus depicting the creation of man by Prometheus, with major Roman deities Jupiter, Neptune, Mercury, Juno, Apollo, Vulcan watching.

The zoomorphic feathered serpent deity (Kukulkan, Quetzalcoatl)

Deities of Polynesia carved from wood (bottom two are demons)

Holy Trinity (1756–1758) by Szymon Czechowicz, showing God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all of whom are revered in Christianity as a single deity.

The tetragrammaton in Phoenician (12th century BCE to 150 BCE), Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE to 135 CE), and square Hebrew (3rd century BCE to present) scripts.

Investiture of Sassanid emperor Shapur II (center) with Mithra (left) and Ahura Mazda (right) at Taq-e Bostan, Iran

The Greek philosopher Democritus argued that belief in deities arose when humans observed natural phenomena such as lightning and attributed such phenomena to supernatural beings.

Nontheistic religions deny any supreme eternal creator deity, but may accept a pantheon of deities which live, die and may be reborn like any other being.

The Mesha Stele bears the earliest known reference (840 BCE) to the Israelite God Yahweh.

God

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Trinitarians believe that God is composed of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

God Blessing the Seventh Day, 1805 watercolor painting by William Blake

Thomas Aquinas summed up five main arguments as proofs for God's existence. (Painting by Carlo Crivelli, 1476)

Isaac Newton saw the existence of a Creator necessary in the movement of astronomical objects. Painting by Godfrey Kneller, 1689

99 names of Allah, in Chinese Sini (script)

And Elohim Created Adam by William Blake, c. 1795

Ahura Mazda (depiction is on the right, with high crown) presents Ardashir I (left) with the ring of kingship. (Relief at Naqsh-e Rustam, 3rd century CE)

Use of the symbolic Hand of God in the Ascension from the Drogo Sacramentary, c. 850

The Arabic script of "Allah" in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith.

Egyptian gods in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Polytheism

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Belief in multiple deities, which are usually assembled into a pantheon of gods and goddesses, along with their own religious sects and rituals.

Bulul statues serve as avatars of rice deities in the Anitist beliefs of the Ifugao in the Philippines.

It is sometimes claimed that Christianity is not truly monotheistic because of its idea of the Trinity

In religions that accept polytheism, the different gods and goddesses may be representations of forces of nature or ancestral principles; they can be viewed either as autonomous or as aspects or emanations of a creator deity or transcendental absolute principle (monistic theologies), which manifests immanently in nature (panentheistic and pantheistic theologies).

Elohim

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Hebrew word meaning "gods".

Friedman's distribution of materials by source of the first four books of the Hebrew Bible, including a redactor (black), according to the documentary hypothesis.

An exact cognate outside of Hebrew is found in Ugaritic ʾlhm, the family of El, the creator god and chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon, in Biblical Aramaic ʼĔlāhā and later Syriac Alaha ("God"), and in Arabic ʾilāh ("god, deity") (or Allah as "The [single] God").

Yahweh

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The national god of ancient Israel and Judah.

Late Bronze Age statuette of a storm god from Phoenician Antaradus

Early Iron Age bull figurine from Bull Site at Dhahrat et-Tawileh (modern West Bank, ancient Ephraim), representing El, Baal or Yahweh

Painting on a jar found at Kuntillet Ajrud, under the inscription "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" (c. 800 BCE)

The Second Temple, as rebuilt by Herod c. 20–10 BCE (modern model, 1:50 scale)

Solomon dedicates the Temple at Jerusalem (painting by James Tissot or follower, c. 1896–1902).

Towards the end of the Babylonian captivity, the very existence of foreign gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the one true God of all the world, giving birth to Judaism, which has c. undefined 14–15 million adherents today.

Allah

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Common Arabic word for God.

Medallion showing "Allah Jalla Jalaluhu" in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey

Allah script outside the Old Mosque in Edirne, Turkey

Silk textile panel repeating the name Allah, North Africa, 18th century

The first dictionary of Dutch-Malay by A.C. Ruyl, Justus Heurnius, and Caspar Wiltens in 1650 recorded "Allah" as the translation of the Dutch word "Godt".

Gereja Kalam Kebangunan Allah (Word of God Revival Church) in Indonesia. Allah is the word for "God" in the Indonesian language - even in Alkitab (Christian Bible, from الكتاب al-kitāb = the book) translations, while Tuhan is the word for "Lord".

Christians in Malaysia also use the word Allah for "God".

The word Allah written in different writing systems

Flag of Iraq with the Takbir written on it

Flag of Saudi Arabia with the Islamic holy creed written on it

Flag of Afghanistan with the Shahadah written on it

The 12 stars in the Flag of Uzbekistan form the inscription "Allah" in Arabic script<ref>{{Cite web |title=Flags, Symbols & Currency of Uzbekistan |url=https://www.worldatlas.com/amp/flags/uzbekistan |website=WorldAtlas |language=en-US}}</ref>

Some authors have suggested that polytheistic Arabs used the name as a reference to a creator god or a supreme deity of their pantheon.

Pandeism

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Pandeism (or pan-deism), a theological doctrine first delineated in the 18th century, combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism.

Physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein wrote that 6th-century BC philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon spoke as a pandeist in stating that there was one god which "abideth ever in the selfsame place, moving not at all" and yet "sees all over, thinks all over, and hears all over."

Giordano Bruno, identified by several sources as a pandeistic thinker

Cartoonist and pundit Scott Adams wrote God's Debris (2001), which lays out a theory of pandeism.

It holds that a creator deity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate entity (deism holding that God does not interfere with the universe after its creation).

The Greek word αθεοι (atheoi), as it appears in the Epistle to the Ephesians 2:12 on the early 3rd-century Papyrus 46. It is usually translated into English as "[those who are] without God".

Atheism

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Absence of belief in the existence of deities.

Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, an 18th-century advocate of atheism."The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error."

Epicurus is credited with first expounding the problem of evil. David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) cited Epicurus in stating the argument as a series of questions:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

A statue of the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, 1208, Kofukuji Temple, Nara, Japan

Buddhism is sometimes described as nontheistic because of the absence of a creator god, but that can be too simplistic a view.

Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841) would greatly influence philosophers such as Engels, Marx, David Strauss, Nietzsche, and Max Stirner. He considered God to be a human invention and religious activities to be wish-fulfillment. For this he is considered the founding father of modern anthropology of religion.

1929 cover of the USSR League of Militant Atheists magazine, showing the gods of the Abrahamic religions being crushed by the Communist five-year plan

Nonreligious population by country, 2010.

Percentage of people in various European countries who said: "I don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force." (2010)

Countries with punishment for blasphemy.

Countries with the death penalty for apostasy

People who self-identify as atheists are often assumed to be irreligious, but some sects within major religions reject the existence of a personal, creator deity.

The circled dot was used by the Pythagoreans and later Greeks to represent the first metaphysical being, the Monad or The Absolute

Monism

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Distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonism everything is derived from The One. In this view only the One is ontologically basic or prior to everything else.

A diagram with neutral monism compared to Cartesian dualism, physicalism and idealism.

Pandeism or pan-deism (from and deus meaning "god" in the sense of deism), is a term describing beliefs coherently incorporating or mixing logically reconcilable elements of pantheism (that "God", or a metaphysically equivalent creator deity, is identical to Nature) and classical deism (that the creator-god who designed the universe no longer exists in a status where it can be reached, and can instead be confirmed only by reason).