Two Principles Leave No Room for a Creator

Classical Samkhya explains the world with only two fundamental principles, purusha, pure and plural consciousness, and prakriti, a single primordial nature that is unconscious but active, and holds that nothing beyond their interaction is needed to account for what exists. Ishvarakrishna's Samkhyakarika, the school's foundational verse text from roughly the fourth or fifth century, sets out satkaryavada, the doctrine that an effect already exists potentially within its material cause and merely becomes manifest rather than being newly created, so the entire twenty five category unfolding of mind, senses and elements from prakriti proceeds as a real transformation set off by prakriti's mere proximity to purusha, not as an act any agent performs or decides. Gerald Larson's history of the school describes this as leaving a creator god with, in his phrase, nothing to do: the unfolding is automatic once purusha and prakriti stand near one another, so introducing a further being to design or trigger the process would be explanatorily redundant rather than merely unnecessary. Samkhya was, on Larson's account, among the oldest of India's systematic philosophies, and its atheism was not a late departure from an original theism but built into the system from its earliest surviving formulation.