One of the ideas supporting the theology of a personal God is that the Creator of person must be a Person. It's an argument from essence that, philosophically speaking, is pretty easy to agree with. After all, a person--or people as a whole--must have come from something which is is the essence of personhood.
--Except that it's awfully limited.
If the creator of people must be a person, then the creator of trees must be a tree; the creator of ants must be an ant: tree-ness and ant-ness have their own essences, which must come from somewhere. (Is the creator of hydrogen a hydrogen atom?)
Here's an alternative: The creator of persons is a person. The creator of trees is a tree. The creator of ants is an ant. A jillion separate creators, all working together to make this wildly varying world. Of course, that flies in the face of the monotheism that produced the idea in the first place.
Here's another alternative: The creator of persons also created trees and ants and everything else. Therefore the creator of persons contains the essence of all of those things, in equal measure. God is person, and tree, and ant, and hydrogen, and snow, and sand, and parrotfish, and blue jay, and most definitely puppy dog.
Behind all these essences, or substances, there must be a single essence/substance. It would have to be something inseparable from everything else, something that everything shares in.
Pantheists call it God.
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