If God Created Us, Then Who Created God
One of the top theological questions is where did God come from? If you believe that God created the universe, then logically you have to ask the question who created God and then you have to ask who created the God that created the God that created the God that created the God… and so ad infinitum. But let’s analyze it for a moment.
Who Created God?
If you ask that question, it shows that you immediately categorized God as created. So, you’re talking about a created God. This question is extremely interesting because it’s an illustration of a question that already ruins the explanation that’s most likely to be true. I think that, in some way, this is really a definition problem, because, as believers, our definition of God is: The uncreated creator of the universe. Now what about the non-believers? Do the Atheists have a better answer for this? Well, J. Warner Wallace was a non-believer, and here’s what he said:
“I was a non-believer until I was 35. I also believed in an uncreated creator. Maybe it was multiverse generator, maybe it was some quantum environment in which our universe merged spontaneously. Regardless of what it was that caused the universe, as an atheist, I would have told you that that thing was uncreated” [1]
So, it turns out that everyone, believers or non-believers, believes there’s an uncreated creator of the universe. So, to ask the question “Who created God” or “Who created the uncreated creator of the universe” is kind of asking “what sound does silence make!” It’s the definition of silence that precludes us from asking the question, and that is really what we are doing here when we ask the question “who created the uncreated creator of the universe”. A timeless eternal being cannot have a cause. As Keith Ward points out in his book “God, Chance and Necessity”:
“If one asks what caused God, the answer is that nothing could bring into being a reality which wholly transcends space-time and . . . which is self-existent . . . To fail to grasp such an idea is to fail to grasp what God is.”[2]
In his last speech Professor Wolpert says, “Well, the universe needs a creator therefore God needs a creator as well.” Not at all. That doesn’t follow.
“If something is eternal and timeless then it doesn’t fall under that false premise — it doesn’t need a cause. Even atheists like Daniel Dennett recognize that if eternal varieties exist like numbers or mathematical objects, they don’t need a cause because they never come into being, they don’t begin to exist. And the concept of God is the concept of an eternal self-existent, necessary being and therefore the answer is simply that God is uncaused. He is self-existent.” Dr. William Lane Craig [3]
The only real question is whether that uncreated creator is personal or impersonal? Is it an eternal force of physics? Is it an eternal personal being? Is it something else?
What is that Uncreated Creator?
Whatever we believe, we all agree that we can’t get something from nothing. “Once upon a time, there was absolutely nothing and then all of a sudden there is everything or anything”, it can’t be the case, and it just goes against all logic.
So, if you accept, as everybody does, that this option is ruled out, and you believe that you can’t get something from nothing, and you grant that there is now something (Which I’m hoping you do since I wrote this article and you are reading it, so I’m something and so are you), then there must have always been a something. Everyone has to believe that something has been forever, otherwise we’d still have nothing.
Now the question is: What is this something that has been around forever?
Here is the thing, everything we know about the physical world tells us that it’s not a good candidate for something that has been around forever, especially with the acceptance of the Big Bang Theory [4] which is telling us that the universe as we know it is a one-time one-way show.
Everything indicates that energy is been used up, and the Suns are running out of energy. They once hoped that perhaps there was enough gravity in the universe to reverse the process of the expansion, and perhaps that combustion of the reversing process would cause enough energy to go back to a super-condensed pinhead which would then explode again, and maybe we have this sort of oscillating universe. That was a theory that was pretty popular at one time. But we now know that there’s not nearly enough matter in the universe to have enough gravity to reverse the process of expansion.
So, it’s a one-time one-way show so far as we can tell, which lead us to the conclusion that the physical world isn’t a good candidate for the something that must have always been for there to be anything.
Whatever there was that is the cause of what is must be quite different than what is, because what is as far as we know it can’t always have been. I submit to you that all contingent reality, you, me the computer or the smartphone or whatever you are reading this on, everything you are seeing, came into being and it goes out of being, it’s not solid, it disappears in time. The totality of contingent things doesn’t explain themselves, and everything depends on everything else like dominoes, and at some point, you have to suppose that there must be something that’s very much unlike what we’re trying to explain, what we are in the process of.
Hence, something has to be eternal, and whatever is eternal must be very different than the nature of matter. This means that we really don’t know what is that uncreated creator, but what we do know is that there are two categories: The things that came to be (the created things), and the thing that already there that never came to be, and it’s called God. Now someone can ask: how do you believe in something that you don’t know what is? The same question was asked from a physicist to John Lennox. [5].
Lennox: Tell me what is consciousness?
The physicist: I don’t Know.
Lennox: That’s okay, let me try an easier one, what is energy?
The physicist: Well, I’m a physicist, I can measure energy, I could use it…
Lennox: You know that’s not my question. What is it?
The Physicist: I don’t know
Lennox: That’s very interesting, you don’t know. Now tell me, do you believe in consciousness? Do you believe in energy?
The Physicist: Yes.
Lennox: So, you believe in these two things even though you don’t know what they are! Should I write you off as an intellectual?
The Physicist: Please don’t.
Lennox: That’s exactly what you were doing with me five minutes ago. If you don’t know what energy is, and nobody does, don’t be surprised if energy, light, gravity, and consciousness are a mystery. Don’t be surprised if you are going to get an element of this in God. You are bound to get it. You believe in these things because of their explanatory power as concepts.
Final Thoughts
If you ask the question “Where did God come from”, then you’re thinking of the wrong God. Because God (The uncreated creator of the universe) is not affected by time, space or matter. If he’s affected by time, space, or matter, he’s not God. Time, space and matter is what we call a continuum. All of them have to come into existence at the same instant, because if there were matter but no space, where would you put it? If there were matter and space but no time, when would you put it? You cannot have time, space, or matter independently, they have to come into existence simultaneously.
So, you have time, space, matter created trinity of trinities. Time (Past, Present, Future), Space (Length, Width, Height), Matter (Solid, Liquid, Gas). A trinity of trinities is created instantaneously, and the God who created them has to be outside of them. If he’s limited by time, he’s not God! The guy who created the computer is not in the computer, he’s not running around in there, changing the numbers on the screen, right? The God who created this universe is outside of the universe. He’s above it, beyond it, in it, through it… He’s unaffected by it.
The God that I worship is not limited by time, space or matter. If I could fit the infinite God in my Three-pound brain, he would not be worth worshiping, that’s for certain. So that’s the God that I worship.
References
1- Who created God, J. Warner Wallace
2- Keith Ward, God, Chance and Necessity (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1996), p. 59
3- Who created God, Dr. William Lane Craig.
5- Who Created God, John Lennox at The Veritas Forum at UCLA
