Who or What Made God?
Explaining the Unexplainable
It is one of the oldest objections to belief in God, and on the surface it sounds devastatingly simple:
“If God created everything, then who created God?”
Perhaps you have heard it asked by a skeptic. Perhaps you have wondered about it yourself. Perhaps you asked it in Sunday School when you were eight years old and caused your teacher to suddenly become very interested in refocusing your attention to the flannelgraph.
It is a fair question.
After all, Christians regularly say that everything must have a cause—in other words, be caused by something else. We point to the universe and argue that it could not simply have appeared from nowhere. We look at the staggering order, complexity, and intelligibility of creation and conclude that something or someone must be behind it all.
Then someone responds:
“Well, if everything needs a creator, then God must need one too.”
Gotcha!
Or at least it feels like a gotcha moment.
Except it isn't.
The question rests upon a misunderstanding of what Christians mean when we use the word God.
Christianity does not teach that everything has a cause.
Christianity teaches that everything that begins to exist requires an explanation for its existence.
God did not begin to exist.
And that distinction takes us into one of the most fascinating areas of Christian theology: the ontology of God.
Now, I realize the moment I use the word ontology, some of you are already wondering whether you accidentally opened a graduate-school philosophy textbook.
I know this is getting deep. But, hang with me to the end. I think you’ll get it. And if not, let’s have coffee and discuss it! I’m always up for a good cup of java.
Ontology simply deals with being—what something is and what it means for that thing to exist.
And when we begin asking what kind of Being God must be, something remarkable happens.
The God revealed in Scripture begins to look exactly like the kind of God our intuition or reasoning tells us must exist.
Everything We Know Depends on Something Else
Look around you.
Nearly everything you see exists because something else caused it to exist. The chair you are sitting in exists because someone manufactured it.
The tree outside exists because a seed germinated. You exist because your parents existed before you.
Everything we observe seems to exist in dependence upon something else. Philosophers call this contingent existence.
You exist, but it is possible to imagine a universe in which you never existed. The same is true of me.
The same is true of this planet. The same is true of our sun.
And, apparently, the same is true of the universe itself. Nothing about the universe explains why it had to exist. This raises one of philosophy's most famous questions:
Why, then, is there something rather than nothing?
That question is far deeper than it first appears.
If everything that exists depends upon something else, eventually we have to ask what the entire chain depends upon.
Imagine that I hand you a hundred-dollar bill. You ask me where I got it.
“I borrowed it from Dave.”
So you ask Dave where he got it.
“I borrowed it from Tom.”
Tom borrowed it from Eric.
Eric borrowed it from someone else.
And every person you ask gives exactly the same answer:
“I borrowed it.”
Now imagine that this chain continues forever. Have we explained where the money came from? No.
We have simply created an infinitely long line of people who are apparently very bad at personal finance.
At some point, there must be someone who actually possesses the money rather than borrowing it.
Something similar occurs when we think about existence.
Everything in our universe appears to be, in a sense, borrowing its existence.
Philosophers would call us a contingent being. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for someone else existing first and birthing us. The stars wouldn’t be visible unless someone or something created them and put them where they are.
Again, we exist because something else existed before us.
If every being ultimately depends upon another dependent being, we have never explained why anything exists at all. We have only demonstrated the result of being dependent on something else for existence.
An infinite chain of dependent beings is still just a chain of dependent beings.
Eventually the explanation must end in something that does not receive existence from something else. The borrowed money, in the prior example, had to come from somewhere initially.
That somewhere person or thing, is absolutely critical or necessary in order for the chain of borrowers (likened to the chain of people born from someone who already existed) to have happened.
The Necessary Being (the Person who first gave the money)
Philosophers refer to this as a necessary Being.
Unlike contingent beings, a necessary Being does not merely happen to exist because of someone or something else.
He cannot fail to exist. It’s in its very nature to exist.
He does not receive existence from another. He does not begin.
He is not caused.
He is not sustained by anything outside Himself.
Christian theologians have traditionally described this quality using the word aseity. It comes from a Latin expression meaning, essentially, “from Himself.”
But we need to be careful.
Aseity does not mean that God created Himself. That would be logically impossible.
For God to create Himself, He would have to exist before He existed in order to cause Himself to exist. Clear as mud?
Even theologians are not allowed to do that much damage to logic. Rather, aseity means that God never needed to be created at all. He simply exists.
His existence is not derived. It is not borrowed.
It is not dependent. It is who He is.
And suddenly our original question begins to unravel.
“Who made God?”
No one.
Because if someone made Him, He would not be God. The maker would be greater.
And then, of course, we would have to ask who made the maker.
And before long we are back to our line of people borrowing the same hundred-dollar bill.
The Christian claim is that when we finally reach the ultimate explanation for existence, we arrive at a Being who Himself requires no external explanation.
Everything else says:
“I exist because…”
God simply says:
“IAM.”
And that Is exactly What Scripture says.
Now the philosophical argument becomes particularly interesting. Thousands of years ago, Moses stood before a burning bush in the wilderness.
God told him that he would return to Egypt and lead the Israelites from slavery. Moses asked an understandable question.
If the Israelites asked who had sent him, what name should he give them? God responded:
“I AM WHO I AM.”
—Exodus 3:14 In Hebrew:
ֶאְהֶיה ֲאֶשר ֶאְהֶיה
EhyehAsherEhyeh.
There is tremendous depth in that declaration. God does not identify Himself through ancestry. He does not say:
“I am the son of…”
He does not tell Moses about the divine beings who came before Him. He does not explain how He came into existence.
He says:
I AM.
The name points us toward the utterly unique nature of God's being. He is.
And He has always been.
That is why the Bible can begin with the astonishingly simple words:
“In the beginning, God…”
Notice what Genesis does not do.
It never explains God's origin.
It does not tell us where God came from.
It does not introduce some earlier reality that produced Him. When the beginning begins, God is already there.
Before light. Before matter. Before space. Before stars.
Before time as we experience it. God.
The universe has a beginning. God does not.
God Is Not Part of the Universe
This is where many misunderstandings about God arise.
People sometimes imagine God as though He were simply a very powerful creature living somewhere beyond the edge of space.
Perhaps enormously intelligent. Perhaps immortal.
Perhaps sitting behind a very large desk with the universe spread out in front of Him. But that would not be the God of Christianity.
That would simply be an extraordinarily powerful creature. The God of Scripture is not one more thing inside reality.
He is the One upon whom everything depends.
God does not belong to the same category as stars, angels, human beings, atoms, galaxies, or anything else that exists.
There are ultimately two categories of being. There is God.
And there is everything God created.
That distinction changes the entire question.
Asking “Who created God?” becomes somewhat like asking:
“What is north of the North Pole?”
The question contains a mistaken assumption.
The North Pole is the point beyond which “north” no longer applies.
Likewise, when we arrive at the necessary, eternal, self-existent source of all being, the question “What created Him?” no longer applies.
If He were created, He would belong to creation.
And then we would still have to ask what ultimately explains creation.
God's Attributes Begin to Make Sense
Once we understand God's necessary existence, many of the traditional attributes of God stop looking like a random list of supernatural abilities.
They flow naturally from what God is.
God is eternal because a necessary Being cannot come into existence. God is self-existent because He depends upon nothing outside Himself. God is independent because nothing sustains His being.
Paul says in Acts 17 that God is not:
“served by human hands, as though he needed anything.”
Think about that.
God needs nothing.
He does not need creation. He does not need humanity.
He does not need worshippers.
He did not create us because something was missing in Him.
God was not sitting in eternity thinking, “You know what would really complete Me? People.”
God created out of the abundance of who He is, not because of some deficiency within Himself.
God is also unchanging in His essential nature. He does not gradually become more divine.
He does not improve. He does not mature.
He does not discover new dimensions of Himself. He does not have a five-year personal-growth plan. He is eternally and perfectly God.
The Psalmist writes:
“From everlasting to everlasting you are God.”
—Psalm 90:2 Not:
“You became God.”
Not:
“You grew into God.”
Not:
“You were appointed God.”
You ARE God.
“But Where Did God Come From?”
Sometimes people still feel uneasy with that answer. “But everything has to come from somewhere!” Actually, no.
That is precisely the point.
If absolutely everything required a prior cause, nothing could ever ultimately exist.
At some point, there must be something that exists necessarily rather than dependently. The real debate, therefore, is not whether there is an ultimate reality.
The question is:
What is that ultimate reality like?
Is it mindless matter? An impersonal force? An eternal multiverse?
Some unknown physical mechanism?
Or is the foundation of reality a self-existent, intelligent, personal Being? Christianity answers:
God.
And the extraordinary thing is that the biblical description of God fits remarkably well with what reason tells us the ultimate foundation of reality would have to be.
Eternal. Uncaused.
Independent. Necessary.
Transcendent.
The source of everything else.
Then Christianity Makes an Even Greater Claim
The New Testament takes this discussion somewhere astonishing. John opens his Gospel by deliberately echoing Genesis:
“In the beginning was the Word…”
Not:
“In the beginning the Word began.”
The Word was. John continues:
“All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
—John 1:3
That verse creates two categories. There are things that were made.
And there is the One through whom they were made.
John places Jesus Christ on the Creator side of that distinction. Then Jesus Himself says something extraordinary in John 8:58: “Before Abraham was, I am.”
That wording matters. Abraham was.
Abraham came into existence. But Jesus says:
I AM.
The connection with Exodus 3 is difficult to miss. Christianity is making an enormous claim.
The One who entered our world at Bethlehem did not begin His existence at Bethlehem. Bethlehem was the beginning of the incarnation.
It was not the beginning of the Son.
The eternal One stepped into the creation He Himself had made. Or, to put it another way:
The One who gives existence to everything experienced human existence Himself.
That is the staggering claim at the center of Christianity.
So Who Made God?
No one.
God is not the last link in a very long chain of causes. He is the reason there is a chain at all.
He is not merely the oldest being. He is the eternal Being.
He is not merely more powerful than everything else. Everything else depends upon Him for its existence. He does not borrow being.
He does not receive being.
He does not discover being. He simply is.
And perhaps that is why God's words to Moses remain among the most profound words ever spoken:
“I AM.”
Pause & Reflect
There is something deeply comforting hidden inside all of this philosophy. Nearly everything in our lives is contingent.
Jobs change. Health changes.
Relationships change. Churches change.
Nations rise and fall. Our bodies grow older.
Our plans succeed and fail.
The things we once thought were permanent often prove remarkably fragile.
Even the things we are convinced will never change have a rather annoying habit of changing anyway.
But Christianity says that underneath every changing thing stands One who does not change. God does not wake up tomorrow hoping that He will still be God.
He does not depend upon the cooperation of the universe. He does not depend upon the stability of governments.
He does not depend upon economic conditions.
And He certainly does not depend upon whether you and I have managed to keep our lives under control.
He is.
He always has been. He always will be.
And the great comfort of the Christian faith is not merely that we believe strongly enough. It is that the One in whom we believe is strong enough to carry the full weight of our trust.
The question may begin:
“Who or what made God?”
But Scripture eventually leads us to a far greater question:
What does it mean that the infinite, always-existent God who knows me also loves me and has invited me to know Him?
That question no longer leads merely to philosophy.
It leads to worship.