MadIce,
That's pretty much the 64 million dollar question
.
Human beings tend to anthropomorphise what they perceive and speculate about.
It is often difficult to imagine that something can exist without creation, because the only direct knowledge we have is of things that already exist or that we create. As a result, we think that what already exists was not only created, but was created by someone very much like us, only more powerful or knowledgable, because that is really the only context we have.
As we start to wonder where we came from, where the earth came from, where the universe came from, we're in the position of either believing that each was created, in one fashion or another, or that each always existed. Thing is, when we imagine a creator, we're still left with an origination problem. Either the creator was created (and so on, ad infinitum), or the creator always existed. If we then argue that the creator always existed, it is also logically consistent to argue that the universe (for example) always existed, in essence, substituting two complexities for one complexity (one case of eternal existence + creation or simply one case of eternal existence).
Some argue that if there was no creator, but that there was an origination point, then we become compelled to state that this origination sprang from nothing. But what is nothing? Some will say it is the absence of all things, which is intuitive, but possibly simplistic. But take the number zero, for example. For many, it represents an absence of something, i.e., it is a placeholder to represent no objects. But mathematically, zero is not necessarily empty. It can be expressed as the sum of two equal magnitudes of opposite direction (positive and negative numbers in the set of integers are one example of this).
On a physical level, what we generally consider as the quintessential representation of nothing is the vacuum of outer space. Thing is, a vacuum isn't empty (even if we're not counting any stray particles of matter that may exist). It literally seethes with energy, and this energy can be measured. At this point in our knowledge, the general framework does not include the existence of an area or time where literally *nothing* exists (or existed).
There's no way to even really begin to answer the question of created as opposed to simply instantiated. All the same arguments about which came first, which always existed (or not) and so on, apply pretty much equally to both points of view.
However, all of the above notwithstanding, my position is that the anthropomorphic God described in dogma was created by man. That does not argue that God does not exist, but that the God that really exists is as far beyond the dogmatic God as we as humans are beyond the simplest single celled forms of life.
