Did One God Create All Gods?

Written by Dyami Millarson

It is possible that the Germanic Creator Trinity (or Trinities) is actually one Deity, namely Othin (see this article). Plato considers that one Deity the demiurge, i.e. the Primordial Craftsman or Primordial Creator (Dutch: oerschepper). If the Gods are the creations of one God or trace their descent to one common divine ancestor, then they are equally legitimate; on that basis, we can only affirm that these beings, who are not as old as the Primordial Creator, are, by their very nature, as equally deserving of being called Gods as the Primordial Creator. All Gods are Creators, because all Gods inherently possess creative potential, just as all humans do; consequently, after the Primordial Creator produced many Gods somehow, there ceased to be only one Divine Creator. After the cessation of the primordial situation where there was only a single creative being, creation ceased to be monopolised; the creation of other beings like oneself inevitably leads to the cessation of the monopoly on creation. The Primordial Creator invariably creates beings in its own image; this is the natural theme of reproduction, because the Primordial Creator has the magical ability to reproduce through creation. After all, creation and reproduction are closely linked.

Followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assert that one God created all and that the creations of this one Deity are sacred. As a logical consequence, they must also believe that the other Gods, which peoples from around the wotkd believe in, are created by one Deity. Since all Gods must be creations of the one God, they must be sacred creations. After all, the process of creation is sacred, and therefore what is created is held sacred. Since monotheists assert that one God created everything, they cannot escape that other Gods are also sacred creations of God. Either that, or the one God did not create everything and is not as all-powerful as claimed.

Thus, either monotheism regards itself as inevitably creating polytheism, or it rejects polytheism as having nothing to do with itself, in which case it chooses to abolish itself. Out of self-preservation, monotheism needs to openly admit to some link with polytheism. Some 19th-century monotheists ascribed to the idea that monotheism is the father of polytheism, as they claimed that peoples must originally have been monotheist and then became polytheist. Yet other people living in the 19th-century suggested on evolutionary grounds that polytheism preceded monotheism, and that monotheism was simply a more advanced evolutionary stage; in other words, polytheism is the mother of monotheism. Monotheism cannot define itself without polytheism; it tries to define itself as opposed to polytheism, but is ultimately part of the human polytheist ecosystem. Polytheism does not need to define itself as opposed to monotheism because it is the original situation; monotheism sprang originally out of polytheism, and was originally a young revolutionary sect opposed to polytheism which was elder. The original state of human religiosity is polytheism, and humans are constantly returning to that original state, hence monotheism has to define itself as opposed to polytheism, and will always inevitably have a relationship with polytheism, even to the point that, despite all efforts to define itself as different, monotheism always still ends up being fundamentally indistinct from polytheism (see previous article).

In any case, if one believes that one God created all other Gods, then rejecting the other Gods means rejecting God’s creations. Therefore, the thesis of the all-powerful Deity runs into the issue where rejecting other Deities delegitimises itself; if some creations are illegitimate and others are legitimate, then God is not infallible. Therefore, creating other Gods must be part of an infallible plan, and rejecting belief in those Gods must consequently be rejection of an infallible plan. In other words, monotheism cannot escape polytheism; there is no way for monotheism to deal with the reality of polytheism except for embracing polytheism, and coming to terms with the self-debunking of monotheism. The situation of monotheism is actually both believing in multiple Gods and claiming to believe in only one God; this means that monotheism is in reality anti-polytheistic polytheism.

However, being anti-polytheistic is being anti-creation, because polytheism is the inevitable result of creation (which I explained in my previous article). So either creation is sacred because it comes from God or it is not sacred because it does not come from God, and if polytheism is not the result of one Deity responsible for all creation, then polytheism must be the result of another Deity or other Deities, and in that case, there is a primordial polytheism, which birthed polytheism and monotheism. We were not there during the primordial situation and so all we can do is reason logically. Whilst it is relevant to philosophise logically about this primordial situation, we have to take into account the present situation as well, where polytheism is the ultimate reality; and as I have explained here, monotheism plus monotheism is still polytheism. Even if there were only multiple purely monotheistic religions and sects, there would still be polytheism; the plurality of monotheisms amounts to polytheism, or in arithmetic terms, the sum of monotheistic religions equals polytheism.