What is the creator like?
This is where it gets weird, my friends. There are many ideas about what God is. One thing is for sure: all ancient cultures conjured up gods to explain why they (the ancients) were here and why the world was the way it was. The ancient Greeks created immortal super humans as their gods and gave them all sorts of powers and human lusts. Greek gods lived on Mt. Olympus and they reacted with humans by manipulating them. These gods often had relations with mortal women, who gave birth to demigods or minor gods, if you will. The Romans borrowed the Greek gods and gave them Roman names.
Primitive man thought that different gods were associated with natural processes, such as lighting, volcano eruptions, storms, birth, the coming of Spring and so on. In other words they were polytheists like the Greeks and Romans. Ancient Egyptians had plenty of gods too, but one Pharaoh by the name of Akhenaten introduced monotheism, the belief in one god. Of course, he made everyone angry, especially the priests, and they eventually got rid of him. Some anthropologists believe that Akhenaten's idea spread to the ancient Hebrews. They are considered the forbearers of monotheism, and Muslins and Christians, which are, in effect, breakoffs from Judaism, adopted this idea from the Hebrews and altered it to suit their needs.
Muslins actually accept Moses, Abraham and Christ as prophets. Their founding prophet is Mohammed and he gave them the Holy Quran which is like the Jewish Torah. Both religions still accept that there is only one God. The Jews call God Yahweh, which in ancient times was only pronounced aloud once a year by a High Priest. Muslims call God Allah. In both of these cases, there is only one God.
Christians split the one Jewish God into three personas: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost or Spirit. This is what forms the Trinity, which is a biblical concept and comes from the New Testament. Jesus speaks of His Father in Heaven, and He told the apostles that when He was gone He would send someone (The Holy Spirit) to help them cope with persecution and the formation of a Church or union of believers. Jesus is often referred to as the Son of God, a blasphemous statement that got Him killed. Actually, He was killed for political reasons.
Atheism is a modern idea. It came about when men began to think that they were too smart for their own britches; that they didn't need a deity to explain why they were here and how the world works. We have Darwin to thank for that, but it wasn't his entire fault. It was the result of the Age of Enlightenment when modern science was born and we humans thought that we were the greatest thing since baloney. Cosmologists and quantum physicists have enhanced the idea that there is no creator, but they are just as confused as everyone else. There is no proof for the existence or the non-existence of God.
So where does that leave us? One thing is for sure: we really have no idea what God is like. The only way we can relate to God is through human experience. Think about it this way. God would be as superior to us as we are to the lowly ant only billions of times worse. We are not capable of understanding what it is that created this vast, complicated cosmos that we find ourselves in.
Movies and TV portray God as a human, usually an old grey haired guy with a beard. Some notable actors that have played God are George Burns, Morgan Freeman, Orson Wells, Groucho Marx, and quite recently Whoopi Goldberg. Actually, there have been hundreds, not counting those playing Jesus. Again, this is the only way to depict God that we humans could appreciate or understand.
Religions try to ease us into an appreciation of God and how God interacts with us. They do this by a process known as worship. Worship is what we're supposed to do when we attend church services. We hear scripture readings, which are testimonials by humans that God has prompted them to give about their faith. Again, this makes it a human connection. Christians have Jesus, their personal savior, who became human to explain to us how we should be behaving as humans. This is the ultimate human connection because we can picture Jesus as a man, a human like us. It's the only way we can appreciate God, and worship allows us to make that important connection.
But, is this a real understanding of what God is? I doubt it. The intelligence that created everything has to be something beyond our understanding. The creator of everything visible and invisible has to be a superior being outside of the spacetime continuum that we're in. Time is irrelevant to this Supreme Being, and that's where the idea of eternal came from. That's something we can't understand. It's beyond our human experience. God is what people call supernatural, a term that means it's not natural. This doesn't explain anything.
We humans like to label ideas and concepts and believe that a word or a name makes it understandable. In most cases it doesn't. Theology tries to explain what God is and how He works by applying these labels. I use the male pronoun here because I don't really know God's gender, if He has one. Maybe God is female. Who knows?
Theology is only a place marker for what must be a much more complicated concept. In the Niacin Creed, we say that Jesus is eternally begotten, not made and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. We also say that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father. What does that mean? Is God in a Throne room up in Heaven? If He is up there, is he in outer space? If Jesus is the Son of God does that mean that God the Father is married, and if so, to whom? These are archaic labels that harken back to Greek mythology. I have no idea what they mean in our modern world; although, I'm sure that they made sense to people back then.
I only know two things about God for sure: One is that He didn't create us because He needs us. He created us because He loves us. The second thing is that He doesn't need or demand our worship. We need worship to remind us that we are like the lowly ant in the grand scheme of things.
Thanks for reading.