This is essentially the plot line of Frank Herbert's The Jesus Incident and its prequel, Destination: Void, but add clones and multiple attempts at creating a ship, then infinite attempts by that entity "Ship" to teach humans how to worShip. ;)

Herbert touches on Ship's ability to manipulate time, but doesn't go so far paradoxically as it being the original Creator. That's one of the philosophical Big Deals about Einstein's spacetime solutions: once you question whether God plays dice with the universe, you need to ask if the universe(or humans) played/will have plays dice with God. That is the basic ramification of spacetime: that cause and effect may not happen in our perception of order. It explains why God would be so much of a human-like dick, but then, so does Marketing Science.