“The false logic involved is: “We exist; therefore something—call it X—created us.””
Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways.
But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the same logic something must have created X—and so on. We are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have no meaning in the real universe.
Crusade, p. 878
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
