So what was there before there was time, or before the creation of the world? God didn’t need human beings?

He needs human beings at the point in time when they were created. You are looking at Him at each moment of time in isolation. But His “needs” can extend across the entire time axis. The whole function is the fulfillment of His need. And perhaps His need is for human beings to emerge out of the Big Bang. This whole process is His need.

Okay, so there is a supreme entity. How do you move on from here in the direction of the religious God, and so on? And that certainly isn’t a necessary being in the same way this entity is. By the way, is the reason it must always have existed also because there is no eternal matter, and the world is material, so it must have been created by something eternal?

I can’t write a whole book here. See my book "The First Existent," which deals entirely with this.

The fact that the existence of the world requires, according to human reason, a supreme entity that always existed—otherwise we would ask what came before—can be written in two lines. [As I wrote at the start of the thread.] As for the religious God, which requires a whole book, I don’t know how many pages. It reminds me of processed food, where you need to write out a huge list of ingredients on a single product in order to explain what it is. Unlike a carrot, cucumber, egg, chicken, etc., which don’t need explaining and speak for themselves—everyone knows that this is an egg, etc. Don’t you think that’s a similar comparison?

Then you write it in two lines. I’m not smart enough for that. Good luck.

Fine. I’ll read it and we’ll see. But the very fact that it (the book) gives the answer that there is a religious God, who created the world for a specific purpose, as Torah and commandments and so on—that choosing this long answer over the short explanation of a supreme entity that merely created the world and nothing more, doesn’t that conflict with the principle of Occam’s razor? And I’d also be glad for an example from the Talmud, the Mishnah, Jewish law, or something else, where the principle of Occam’s razor appears, of course without that conceptual label. And is it similar to what Maimonides wrote: “A person should always teach his student by the short way”?

I understand that according to Occam’s razor, we should prefer the shorter explanation, but that does not necessarily mean it is the correct one. The explanation of the processed product as opposed to the natural one shows us how far from nature that product is. Even though it is egg salad, or carrot salad, or chicken salad—these are all as far from nature as east is from west, even if there is still a bit of naturalness present in them.