According to one Egyptian account, the formation of the world was the realization of a concept first developed within the mind of the Creator. Leibniz had a similar idea. He imagined God as a kind of super computer, calculating every possible world and scoring them all according to some divine scale or metric. Once the Creator had analyzed all possible worlds in his mind (all potentialities), he made actual the world that had scored highest and was thus the best of all possible worlds. If you think this world is bad, you should see the alternatives!