Highway, God doesn't need to be infinite or to always have existed in order to have shaped the universe - see my last post. There's precedence for this stuff throughout many, many different mythologies. You're thinking of God as He must be to fit your worldview, when that isn't what God is about at all.

Now, as to why God can create somthing greater than himself: he already did.

The first thing that needs to be understood here is that most people's imagining of God (an invisible, omnipresent man in the skky who knows everything at once and can create or uncreate reality at will) is not in keeping with the original intent of the Jewish concept of Yahweh.

Dig this: in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 alone, God was neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He did not know that Adam and Eve had eatn of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge until he discovered that they were hiding from him: God actulaly had to deduce that they had eaten from the tree, and that was only after calling out to them so that they'd stop hiding from him, because people are almost impossible to find when they hide in Eden, apparently.

The only question is when God created somethign greater than himself, and the answer is that he already did that in man.

When Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis 32 (and this is the generally accepted interpretation if you know your Jewish texts, or so I am told) it was shown that God was literally unable to overpower Jacob, and that when he saw this he crippled Jacob in the hip, and even then could not overpower him. When the Sun rose and Jacob still had not been cast down, Jacob demanded two things: a blessing and the name of the being that he had just finished grappling with. To the former he was belssed with Israel, but the latter was refused him because no man can know or hear the name of God.

What this means is immensely important, and was explained to me by a Jewish friend.

The most literal and consistent interpretation of this passage is that God wasn ot wrestlign with Jacob's physical form but the force of Jacob's will, which in the end he was unable to overpower. He crippled Jacob's body to remind him always of humanity's frailty, but because Jacob showed his will as unbreakable to God he was blessed and given a name for his land.

The point here is that man's will is firstly absolute and secondly sacrosanct, the highest form to which man can aspire. We are all supposed to wrestle with God, to question God and His teachings and everything about Him, arriving at truth through our own paths as an exercise of our wills. To accept God blindly is itself a rejection of the greatest and most powerful of his blessings, and an immense insult to God - most people think of Abraham sacrificing his son as being a great honor to God, but this is not so. Abraham spent most of his life arguing with God, convincing him (more than once) to spare thel ives of people in spite of their inequities, and this is a part of why God loved him so much. it is only the, when he surrendered his will and was willing to sacrifice his son, that God stopped speaking to him. That's an important point that needs to be brought up: Abraham was one of the Biblical figures who used to walk around with God and chat with him about humanity, and that was taken away from him when he ceased to exercise his will.

So, yes. God can make such a rock. You're that rock.

More, God does not know everything all at once, (this is a fairly recent idea) God is not omnipotent, (this an almost exclusively Christian idea, I think) and God can be both reasoned with and overcome by the will of man.

I appreciate replies like this Khuutra. You've put thought and effort into this post. I'm just sorry that I edited the original post.

However, 

God by definition has to be infinite to be the true God. Because a finite being has a beginning and has an end, therefore at some point there must have been a moment where God was created, so is Gods creator the true God?

Anyway, I understand that the Abrahamic view differs slightly from my definition, but so do all Gods from all religions. I'm trying to define a single idea of God that encompasses most popular theologies (which is hard).

I'm afraid that as for the religious citations that you came up with, I'm not very comfortable accepting them as an argument because I don't see them as a point that I can accept being non religious myself. A personal God and personal beliefs are exactly that, personal. Jewish people have their own truths, Christians have their own truths, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and even Jedis have their own personal truths. None of which are mine I'm afraid. But I appreciate your post and it was an interesting read.

This is really, really off-topic at this point, buuuuuuut

A person who believes in free will necessarily believes that we are not just a summation of our body parts or chemical reactions that take lace inside of them. For instance, our bodies may just be conduits through which our soul or will acts on the world, and any reaction one sees in our bodies prior to our own "decisions" may in fact just be chemical signals of these interactions. The soul is not limited by the body, ergo there is free will in spite of our bodies being limited - they are biological computers, but they're hooked up to something much, much grander than that.

Yes, I know it's not falsifiable, but that hardly matters in this conversation.

(also read my above post and tell me what you think)

I know next to nothing about philosophy and even less about religions.  Just throwing my thoughts out there.

This is the only other consistent answer to this question I've ever seen.

I say God can create something greater than Himself, appolose says He cannot.

That's pretty much all there is.