Who Made God?

Who made God?

The Question
Most people take it for granted that everything has a cause. If the kitchen stinks, it may be because someone left leftovers on the counter or forgot to take out the trash. But we all agree that there is a reason why the kitchen stinks!

Christians often point out that creation also has a cause. Creation exists because a Creator created it. If you were to find a working watch in the middle of the desert, you would never claim that the wind and the sand just happened to put it together. You’d reason, rightly, that someone had made the watch. The world is much more complex than a watch and so it is reasonable to think that someone made the world as well. This evidence for God is sometimes called the design argument.

But a skeptic might respond, “If the design of a complex creation makes you think there is a designer, then who made God? After all, surely a being like God is more complex than a watch or even a world!” In fact, this is the very argument made by one of the world’s most famous atheists in his best selling book The God Delusion.

But it is also a question asked out loud by little children and, we suspect, pondered by thoughtful adults. Who made God? How is it possible that God has simply always been?

The Answer
If you’re looking for a short answer to the first question (who made God?) then the answer is nobody. God is, by definition, the un-made Maker, the un-caused Cause, the un-created Creator.

But how can this be? How could someone so complex simply exist? The first question is answered by the doctrine of God. The second question wants to know the details.

The important detail here is the wording of the problem. It is not technically true that everything has a cause. Scientifically, we can only insist that everything that has a beginning has a cause. Big difference!

There is plenty of evidence that the universe had a beginning (even most atheists will now grant this point). So what do they think caused the universe? Most would suggest something called Big Bang Theory. But who/what caused the big bang?

It becomes obvious that something had to exist originally without a cause. Christians call this something a Someone: God. God is someone who had no beginning and, therefore, needs no cause. God is eternal. Granted, God’s eternal existence is hard to fathom, but that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, God is awesome!

To our minds, it makes a lot more sense to believe in an eternal God than to believe in eternal matter. What do you think?