Creator deity

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Template:Globalize A creator deity is a deity responsible for creating the universe or specific aspects of the world. Creator deities are found in the mythologies of nearly all theistic religions.

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Abrahamic religions

Template:Sect-stub Christianity, Judaism, and Islam teach that Creation is the origin of the universe by the action of God. Even more particularly, every type of existence is a result of God's act of creation.

Among monotheists it has historically been most commonly believed that living things are God's creations, and are not the result of a process inherent in originally non-living things, unless this process is designed, initiated, or directed by God; likewise, sentient and intelligent beings are God's creation, and did not arise through the development of living but non-sentient beings, except by the intervention of God.

  • Rouvière, Jean-Marc, Brèves méditations sur la création du monde L'Harmattan, Paris (2006), ISBN 2-7475-9922-1.
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Christianity

It is a tenet of Christian faith (Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant) that God is the Creator of all things from nothing ("from nothing" is usually understood in an absolute sense), and has made Man in the image of God, who by direct interference is also the source of the human soul. Within this broad understanding, however, there are a number of views regarding exactly how this doctrine ought to be interpreted.

  • Many Christians, particularly Young Earth creationists and Old Earth creationists, interpret Genesis as a historical account of creation.
  • Other Christians, in contrast to both of these views of acts of the Creator, may not understand any of these to be statements of historic fact, but rather, spiritual insights more vaguely defined.
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Catholicism

The Catholic Church allows for both a literal and allegorical interpretation of Genesis, so as to allow for the possibility of Creation by means of an evolutionary process over great spans of time, otherwise known as evolutionary creationism.

It believes that the creation of the world is a work of God through the Logos, the Word (idea, intelligence, reason and logic):

In the beginning was the Word...and the Word was God...all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." The New Testament reveals that God created everything by the eternal Word, his beloved Son. In him "all things were created, in heaven and on earth.. . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. [1]

Surrounded by a pervasive culture of rationalism, relativism and secularism, the Catholic Church is questioning the validity of reason basing itself on an evolutionary origin of mere chance, and thus basing itself on irrationality. In a 1999 lecture at the University of Paris, Benedict XVI said:

The question is ... whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true: "In principio erat Verbum" — at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority of reason and of rationality. [...] there is no ultimate demonstration that the basic choice involved in Christianity is correct. Yet, can reason really renounce its claim to the priority of what is rational over the irrational, the claim that the Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself?
Even today, by reason of its choosing to assert the primacy of reason, Christianity remains "enlightened," and I think that any enlightenment that cancels this choice must, contrary to all appearances, mean, not an evolution, but an involution, a shrinking, of enlightenment.
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and others within Mormonism, believe that physical reality (space, matter and/or energy) is eternal, and therefore does not have an absolute origin. The Creator is an architect and organizer of pre-existent matter and energy, who constructed the present cosmos out of the raw material.

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Islam

The fundamental concept in Islam is the oneness of God. Muslims believe that God (Allah) is the creator of all living and non-living things in the universe. This monotheism is absolute, not relative or pluralistic in any sense of the word.

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Judaism

Orthodox Judaism affirms that one God is the creator of all things, and that God created the first man and woman in his own image — Adam and Eve.

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Hinduism

Hinduism holds that Brahman is the foundation of all being, and that the universe has a definite origin from Brahman; and yet at the ultimate level, all assertions of a distinction between Brahman and creation are meaningless. This is not to say however, that in some more superficial sense the assertion is not true, that Brahman is distinct from the creation brought forth. Therefore, according to Upanishadic teaching, it is not false to speak of Hindu Creationism.

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Classical Greece

Plato, in his dialogue Timaeus, describes a creation myth involving a being called the demiurge.

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See also

de:Schöpfer nl:Schepper simple:Creator pl:Stwórca

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