It occured to me today that a god (of the prime-mover type, not merely the Superman type) could never conceive of a creator god because It could never have had the experience of up-looking that we the created (or creatures, if you will) have in considering our parents and dieties.
This reminded me of a blurb I read on some atheist message board years ago, one of many such paradoxes meant to distress the faithful: "Could God ever create a stone so heavy that He could not lift it?" This neatly expresses the contradiction of an entity having absolute power over everything that existed while existing itself. More than once, I admit, I've delighted in using this to upset people who believed in God but not contradictions.
But then both of these remind me of an example Wittgenstein gave of the deceptiveness of language (in paraphrase): Scientists tell us that the ground is not as solid as it seems, that it is practically nothing but empty space between the microscopic nuclei of atoms held apart by repellent magnetic fields. This is of course rubbish, for if these nuclei were each the size of a grain of sand, and as close together as such grains would be if they made up the floor, this floor would not be the more solid for being more completely filled. The confusion here comes from a misinterpretation of the idea of empty space between nuclei: it is not meant to disprove the fact of solidity, but to describe it, to explain how it works.
In applying this analogy to my original thought, that someone with no awareness of their creator could not invent the idea of a creator because they had no model for such a thing, I come up with the rough conclusion that to be a creator Is Exactly That, to be one who believes that everything comes from something else. It follows, then, that for God to exist as a creator, He would necessarily have to believe that He came from something else, in other words that He was not all-powerful, regardless of whatever the reality of the situation might be. To make a stone too heavy for you to lift is, in part, to manufacture false limitations on yourself for the sake of the final product.
To be omnipotent, then, is to immediately to place the burden of omnipotence onto something else. Feeding this idea into my own existential beliefs, I realize that our maintaining the concept of a creator god is both necessary and inevitable, regardless of whatever the reality of the situation might be. "In the beginning there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God" is an oversimplification (the fatal flaw in most religious ideas I've encountered), but true insofar as the idea of its own God would necessarily be the first thing a god would create.
