The Demiurge

"When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void."

-- Genesis 1:1. (RSV)

The situation described in the first verse of the Bible is reflected in Plato, in Timaeus, where he proposes that the material world is created by a powerful being that he calls the Demiurge. Plato thinks the Demiurge is good, and intended the world to be as good as possible (as close as possible to the Ideal), but could not make it perfect, because the raw material was Chaos. This neatly deals with the Problem of Evil, but wouldn't work for conventional notions of the Christian God, because that God is supposed to be almighty, which the Demiurge is not. At least one theologian, David Griffin, uses the idea of pre-existing Chaos to explain evil.

A major problem of this approach is that it makes the idea of God redundant. We don't need to posit a Demiurge to explain how pre-existing matter was shaped into the world we know and live in, because modern physics gives us a better account (in that it explains more things in more detail with a better foundation in empirical evidence). An advocate of belief in the Demiurge cannot say, for instance, "Physics only takes you as far back as the Big Bang, but what happened before? You need God to account for what happened before." The reason being, of course, that God's creative role would have been played after the Big Bang.

A Gnostic cosmogony has it that there is an overall Creator, and the Demiurge is responsible for the creation of the Earth, but the Demiurge and the overall Creator don't quite get along. The Demiurge is a malign spirit, so it creates a world full of evil and suffering and destructive desires. It is also contended that the Demiurge doesn't know about the overall Creator, but mistakenly believes itself to be the ultimate creator of things. Some Gnostics argued that the Old Testament God was this evil Demiurge, while the New Testament God was the good Creator. This Gnostic idea finds its way into the writings of William Blake, and also the recent His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (except that in His Dark Materials, there is no overall Creator, and the Gods and Angels have all emerged spontaneously from the "Dust", which seems to be the material substrate from which all consciousness is formed.)

These Gnostic ideas were very popular once, but were almost completely suppressed after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. In modern times, they have become fairly popular once more (The Gnostic Society). They remain blasphemous to most conservative Christians, though.

Aside from the redundancy of the Demiurge, mentioned above, there's also the problem that once we decide God is not almighty, it becomes open to speculation just how mighty he is, how he came to be, and whether or not other beings like him might exist. The questioning mind finds itself looking for a theogony to go along with the cosmogony. If God "just emerged", there's no obvious reason why other Gods wouldn't "just emerge" at around the same time, as they do in Hesiod's account of the origin of the Greek Gods, or in traditional Japanese accounts of the origin of their Gods.