Prime motivation MIA?

[NeverByte]

Ok, I'm posting questions / an argument here for general discussion - some of the war-weary vets of this board may remember it from my days as LordSord.

Context:
The state of play before the act of creation.

Assumptions:
A1. God is perfect.
A2. God is self-sustaining, ie has no need of any external materials or stimuli.
A3. The only thing that exists is God.

Deductions: (if I may be so bold)
D1. God has no knowledge or conception of anything other than himself, as there is nothing else.
D2. God has no interaction with anything else, for the same reason as D1.

Questions:
Q1. What prompted God to create anything, given that he had no motivation?
Q2. Where did God get the ideas to create everything from, given there was nothing for him to draw inspiration from?

Conclusions: (Mine, anyway.)
If God existed as stated in the context and assumptions above, he would have no reason to create anything. Therefore, the very fact that we exists disproves either God's existence, or A2 and A3.
If A2 and A3 are not valid, then A1 isn't either - at the very least, it would mean that God lied about what happened before the act of creation.

Try this at home:
Draw a creature that bears no resemblence to anything you've ever seen before. ;)

[graymouser]

Q1 is one of the strongest proofs for atheism, all told. Q2 is interesting, but the Christian has a custom response: mankind was made in the image of God.

Also, it strikes me that a theist could defend on the grounds that a perfect God would be perfectly creative, and could (for instance) design a Jabberwocky that was nothing like anything it had seen before.

-Wayne

[NeverByte]

Ah, yes, the "image" of God. However, as God is essentially all there is, how does God know what God looks like? No mirrors or still lakes, as they haven't been created yet.

As for being perfectly creative, even a perfect, divine being cannot logically conceive of something with no stimulus. Nothing in = nothing out. While this may be an unfounded assertion as I've never met any perfectly creative divine beings, I'm willing to bet my (non-existant) soul on it.

:D

[graymouser]

Introducing complete omniscience into the equation, God is then cognizant of all possible futures (e.g., every possible thing he could ever create). This provides a nice pseudo-solution for divine creativity, but it introduces a dual problem.

One, it actually means that God is incapable of any creativity - because his mind contains everything that could ever possibly be, he knows everything and cannot create something more. There is no real creativity, just selections from what has always been in God's mind. I would not say a being that could never be creative would neither be omnipotent nor perfect.

Two, it means God is not really omnipotent, because he has the full force form of omniscience where he knows everything he will ever do (necessarily). No free will, no question of even potential omniscience.

So, the solution is much worse than the problem.

-Wayne

[Stephen T-B]

This doesn’t take the thread any further forward, but NeverByte’s OP prompted me to think of “A Salvation Story� by Christ-on-a-Stick (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72552)

It occurs to me that there are two things you can do with the God bag:
Tie it to a stick and carry it around over your shoulder AND NEVER LOOK inside, as her husband did,
or open it up and have a look inside, as she did.
Anyone who subjects its contents to even the most rudimentary analysis, however, will see that they are nothing but smoke and mirrors.