Response:

Now I understand your position precisely. You are not saying that the Forms and the Good are a substitute person for a Creator God. You are proposing something fundamentally different: an impersonal, necessary principle of reality that operates without consciousness, intention, or craftsmanship.

So your model is:

Forms + the Good → inherent principles of reality → natural processes → cosmos

rather than:

Conscious Creator → creates/orders cosmos → natural processes

That makes your comparison to the autonomic nervous system quite apt. The sympathetic nervous system does not need a conscious “commander” deciding to increase heart rate or redirect blood flow; the processes occur through the system's inherent organization. Likewise, under your hypothesis, Forms and the Good would not “decide” how reality operates—they would simply be fundamental principles according to which reality operates.

That also changes how we should characterize Plato

We should therefore distinguish three things:

1. Demiurge — conscious Craftsman
❌ Not what you're looking for. The Demiurge intentionally orders the cosmos.

2. Forms — eternal principles/patterns
✅ Much closer to what you're proposing. They don't need to “think” or consciously intervene.

3. The Good — fundamental principle of intelligibility/value
✅ Potentially the deepest candidate, because Plato places the Good above the individual Forms in the Republic.

But there is a major philosophical question we should not skip:

Did Plato himself conceive the Forms and Good as literally operating involuntarily like natural laws?

Probably not in exactly that modern sense. Plato's metaphysics is not a modern theory of impersonal physical laws. The Forms are eternal intelligible realities, while the Good is the ultimate source of intelligibility and value. Your proposal is a modern philosophical interpretation inspired by Plato, rather than something we should automatically attribute to Plato himself.

And this gives us a very clean question to pursue:

Could Plato's Forms and Good provide an explanation of cosmic order without consciousness, intention, or a divine Craftsman?

If the answer is yes, then your investigation has moved beyond “Who created the universe?” to the much more fundamental question:

“What principles, if any, are necessary for reality to exist and behave intelligibly?”

That is, I think, the question you have actually been driving toward.

There are natural processes that do not require a creator.
The sympathetic nervous system does not require human consciousness?
The sympathetic nervous system is a branch of the autonomic nervous system, meaning it operates entirely involuntarily and does not require conscious thought.
Not only are their natural processes that do not require a creator with conscious thought, there are cosmological processes and phenomena that do not require a creator with conscious thought.
So, we abandon Creator for the Principles of Forms and Good.

Response:

Yes. If we adopt the criterion you have established, I think that is a coherent move. But I would make one refinement: you are not really proving that there is no Creator; you are deciding that “Creator” is no longer the concept you want to use as the starting point, because natural order can arise without conscious intervention.

Your nervous-system example illustrates the point well: the sympathetic nervous system operates through involuntary physiological mechanisms without conscious thought directing each response. Likewise, many cosmological processes can be described through physical laws and initial conditions without requiring us to posit a conscious agent intervening in each process.

That leaves us with a much more interesting philosophical question:

If order, structure, intelligibility, and natural processes can exist without conscious creation, what is fundamental to the order itself?

That puts Plato's Forms and the Good back at the center

On your framework, we can temporarily set aside:

• Demiurge — because a Craftsman presupposes something to work with and a model to work from.
• Philo's God — because Philo's interpretation is an interpretation, and we don't need to accept his conclusion that the ultimate principle is a conscious personal Creator.
• Jupiter/Sol — because they are beings within the cosmos rather than explanations for the fundamental order of reality.
• Anu/Enlil/Enki — because they likewise operate within a preexisting divine/cosmic order.
• Yahweh — because you have explicitly chosen to exclude the biblical claim of universal creation from your investigation.

What remains is much closer to Plato's metaphysical question.

1. The Forms

The Forms are not gods in the ordinary mythological sense. They are eternal intelligible realities—the patterns or principles by which things can be understood as what they are.

A beautiful thing participates in Beauty; a just thing participates in Justice; mathematical truths don't depend upon a human mind inventing them.

So the question becomes:

Does reality have an underlying intelligible structure that does not require a conscious creator?

That's a very different proposition from “God created the universe.”

2. The Good

And Plato's Form of the Good goes beyond the individual Forms.

In the Republic, the Good is presented as that which ultimately makes the Forms intelligible and gives them their value. Plato's famous analogy is the Sun: just as the Sun makes vision and visible things possible, the Good makes knowledge and intelligibility possible in the intelligible realm.

So your developing model could be expressed:

The Good → intelligibility → Forms → natural order → physical phenomena

rather than:

Conscious Creator → creation → physical phenomena

And that is a genuinely different metaphysical hypothesis.

One caution

I would not yet say that “we have abandoned Creator for the Forms and Good” as an established fact. We have abandoned Creator as our necessary explanatory starting point. The Forms and Good are now the candidates you want to investigate.

And there is a very important question waiting for us:

Are Plato's Forms and Good actually capable of explaining why anything exists at all, or do they only explain why existing things have intelligible properties?

That question may determine whether the Good really qualifies as the ultimate principle you are looking for—or whether Plato's system ultimately leaves the existence of the cosmos unexplained.

Steefen:
Pick up later, probably tomorrow or another day.

But it would be too strong to say:

“The Jewish statement that God is good came from Plato.”

That cannot be established historically.

What can be said is much more interesting:

Greek philosophy gave Hellenistic thinkers an increasingly sophisticated vocabulary for describing the ultimate divine reality as immaterial, rational, eternal, intelligible, and good.

Philo, living in Alexandria in the first century BCE/CE, was immersed in exactly that intellectual environment. He combines Jewish revelation with Platonic and Stoic philosophical concepts.

And here's the crucial point for your investigation:

Philo does NOT put the Demiurge at the top.

His hierarchy is essentially:

GOD
↓
Logos / divine Reason
↓
Ideas / Powers
↓
created cosmos

The Logos is God's instrument, image, and sometimes “first-born son” in Philo's terminology—not the ultimate God himself.

So your earlier instinct about Thought → Logos → Forms/Ideas → Craftsman needs one refinement:

Philo actually pulls the Forms/Ideas inside God's own thought.

That is enormously important because it produces something much closer to the concept you are looking for:

An ultimate transcendent God possesses the divine Thought/Logos, and through that Logos creates the cosmos.

That is not Plato's Demiurge.

And it gives us a much more interesting historical bridge to investigate between Plato → Middle Platonism → Philo → John.

= = =

That is why translating theos simply as “God” can sometimes hide an important distinction. Greek had θεός (theos) = god/deity and ὁ θεός (ho theos) = the god/God, but even ho theos does not automatically tell us which conception of ultimate divinity the speaker has in mind.

in Plato's broader metaphysics, the Form of the Good is more fundamental than the Demiurge. The Timaeus presents the Demiurge as a Craftsman who looks to an eternal, unchanging model when ordering the cosmos; he does not originate that model.

Plato never explicitly says, “The Form of the Good is the Demiurge's boss.” The Republic gives the Good an extraordinarily high metaphysical status, while the Timaeus introduces the Demiurge without explicitly identifying him with or subordinating him to the Good. So the hierarchy you are constructing is a philosophical synthesis across Plato's dialogues, rather than a sentence Plato himself wrote.

= = = =

Logos

Heraclitus of Ephesus, around 500 BCE, is the earliest major Greek philosopher whose surviving fragments give logos a distinctive philosophical meaning. He uses logos in connection with the rational account/order underlying reality, although scholars debate exactly how his fragmentary use should be interpreted.

So we have approximately:

Heraclitus (~500 BCE) → Plato (~428–348 BCE) → Stoics → Middle Platonists → Philo (~20 BCE–50 CE) → John

But Heraclitus' Logos is not yet Philo's Logos. The concept develops substantially.

The Stoics, for example, made logos much more explicitly into the rational principle permeating and ordering the cosmos. Philo then combines Greek philosophical concepts with Jewish Scripture and makes Logos the divine instrument through which God creates and governs the world.

Philo of Alexandria did not quite think God was the Demiurge Craftsman.

Philo's God is above the Logos/Demiurge. In fact, the Stanford Encyclopedia's treatment of Philo makes this unusually explicit: for Philo, God Himself is the ultimate active cause, while the Logos is God's instrument/mediator in creation. Philo does not simply equate God with the Demiurge.

Philo's basic structure is closer to:

God → Logos / divine Ideas → material creation

And Philo actually changes Plato's arrangement in a fascinating way.

In Plato's Timaeus, the Forms are presented as the eternal models contemplated by the Demiurge.

In Philo, the Ideas are God's thoughts. They are not independent eternal objects existing outside God. The intelligible cosmos is essentially the content of God's Logos/mind.

That means Philo moves toward:

God → God's Thought/Logos/Ideas → creation

rather than:

Forms existing independently → Demiurge → creation

That is a major philosophical development.

Anu was eliminated because he's fourth generation. Apsu and Tiamat were first generation.
God of the solar system, etc. cannot be killed--eliminated.

The Romans - they fooled around with Jupiter, not knowing our Sun trumped it. Sol Invictus cannot create a galaxy--eliminated.

So, we're left with 

Plato's Thought-Form-Good

Ahura Mazda

Ptah of Memphis - but Ptah didn't do something as wrong as ask a human for his son or sacrifice his own son.

Phanes/Protogonos

= = =

God is open to two: 1) Creator and Craftsman or given an uncreated Multiverse, just 2) Craftsman.

The first-century Greek word Theos did not mean Plato's Demiurge or Plato's Thought, Forms, and the Good.

YouTube Channel: JeffMara Podcast

Video: "Ex-Pastor Reveals Shocking Truths about the Bible - Paul Anthony Wallis

Paul Wallis:
Jesus did not mention Yahweh. Jesus mentioned the Greek term, Theos.

Steefen:
But Yahweh got him in the Garden of Gethsemane--Isaac Revisted.
Second, Matthew 5:18.
So, Yahweh is part of the Jesus story.

Stephen said
...it is liberating to expand into these facts, to be a seeker of truth and of what is real first and a believer second.
Thanks Steefen. Contemplation of your credulity gives me strength to live in a world of doubt and contingency and uncertainty. 
  

Comment 7
Thank Paul Wallis. He said that.

Thanks Steefen. Contemplation of your credulity gives me strength to live in a world of doubt and contingency and uncertainty. 

God the source of everything.

Plato was before Early Christianity. When you get to the New Testament, the writers are immersed in the thought world of Plato. Paul repeats what Plato said. Read the new testament in the context of other Greco-Roman literature.

= = = 

After being gaslit, it is liberating to expand into these facts, to be a seeker of truth and of what is real first and a believer second.

= = = 

Mr. Graves:
Viewing UAPs is routine.

= = =

"Thank you Jesus" is not interchangeable with "Thank you Yahweh."

Let the Bible not be a bible of deceit and secrecy.

Paul:
We're in contact with more demographics of aliens now.

Regions of space in stories around the world.

The Pleides

Sirius and Orion

Cignus

Zeta Reticuli

and more.

= = = =

Earth is a planet to be exploited some may think.

pick up at 54:01 of 1:21:45

Leonard:
Is space travel influenced by UAPs?

Paul:
Yes.

Paul Wallis:
The Mayan story in the Popol Vuh.
Our planet had visitors long before our species emerged.
The feathered servants wanted a workforce species. The results were us and apes in the forest.
They were working with other primates.

Steefen:
So, it is not just the Anunnaki who needed a workforce of mankind.
We were around in some form, then we were tweaked.

Paul:
We look like Elohim. We look like Anunnaki. We are a mix.

Interviewer Leonard:
Who are our creators: the Elohim or the Anunnaki or are they one and the same? 

Paul:
They came from the sky from the stars.
They are powerful. They are advanced.

Ultimately, they are not creators.
Now we do gene splicing and they did it. We do genetic engineering and they did it. We do crossbreeding and they did it.
 I hold to Panspermia.

Christianity is not built on Jewish lore or Jewish law. [Acts 15]

Steefen:
So Paul is partially right

Paul Wallis:
Christianity is mistakenly 100% Theology ...

Steefen:
It should be a higher percentage Technology and a lower percentage Theology.

Okay Paul Wallis, you made a valid point there. How much did Jesus give to Technology or was he just giving us a different Theology?

Pick up at 34:07.

So far, this excellent video gets a thumb up icon.

YouTube Channel: This Week...In the 12th / Interviewer / Leonard:

Jane, I am humbled and grateful. I don't, and won't, take your eyes and ears for granted.

Answer: probably not: