It is the age-old school playground argument.
“You believe God created the world? Ha! Who made God then? Huh? Can’t answer that one, can you? Gotcha.”
In other words – belief in a creator God is absurd. And therefore – so is the question – “who made an eternal, un-caused God?”
While I don’t agree that belief in an eternal creator God is absurd – I understand where the sentiment’s coming from. After all – we live each day interacting with people, we live in homes, we Google for stuff online, we feed the dog and take her walkies. In other words – we are constantly interacting with things that had a beginning. There was a moment in time when my dog was born, when the Google servers first appeared online, and so on. We are beings with a beginning. We have a first cause. And so we view everything around us thru those lenses. And it makes belief in an eternal God feel absurd.
It is natural for people to assume that everything that exists today had a first cause.
This sounds logical – but actually it’s not.
It sounds scientific – but it’s not provable.
To be logical – we actually need to say – whatever BEGINS to exist has got a first cause. Our friends, pets, houses, websites etc. That feels right and proper, doesn’t it?
So here’s an interesting thought.
We also live each day with a bunch of things that DO NOT have a first cause. And they feel right and proper to us too. So what am I talking about?
Well – think about the laws of logic. The simplest is the law of identity, which states X=X. In other words – the chair you are sitting on IS a chair. It’s not something else. We work our way thru life – whether we know it or not – relying heavily on the laws of logic to make sense of our surroundings and what is happening. But these laws were not created by anyone – they were discovered. They were uncovered – and a label was given to them. But the laws themselves have always been there. A similar thing could be said about Mathematics, Morality, Music and so on. Humanity has not created these things – they never began to exist – but people naturally choose to use them. What caused Logic, Mathematics, Music or Morality? Nothing caused them – they just are; they are un-created. And we rely on them in our lives too.
Many of us will wrestle with this concept. But you know, it’s not so long since many scientists thought that something really big in our lives was also eternal and uncaused. Less than 100 years ago – Scientists believed that the Universe our planet spins thru was eternal. In other words – they rationally believed and defended the theory that the universe had been around forever. That there was no first cause of the Universe. That it was uncreated. Now – today cosmologists and physicists point to evidence of a moment of creation in the past. But for a long time, rational human brains argued for an eternal universe.
So here’s my point – if our best and brightest thinkers believed in an eternal uncaused universe just a few decades ago – why is it suddenly so irrational to point to evidence of an eternal, uncaused creator today?
Our lives are full of things that had a beginning – and therefore they had a cause. Our lives are also filled with things that never had a beginning – and therefore don’t have a first cause.
In the light of all that – and coming back to the playground question “who made God?” - lets re-phrase the question a slightly different way.
“What caused the self-existent, uncaused Cause; who is by definition unmade?”
When we look the question that way – we might just as well be asking “Why does the color green look green? Why does a G chord sound like a G chord?” Well – it just does. We’ve been living with it for all our lives so far…why make such a big issue out of it?!
Who made God? No one made him. As the Bible tells us…He just is.
“The eternal God is your refuge, and his everlasting arms are under you.” Deuteronomy 33:27, NLT