By Jason Smith

“If God created the universe, then who created God?” I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked this question when interacting with university students about the Christian faith. I must admit that I believe it is usually asked as something of a smokescreen, a convenient question to avoid facing the evidence for God’s existence. However, I always try to to deal honestly with questions and not disparage the one asking a question, even when the answer may be simple. God by nature is eternal, without beginning or end, and therefore was not created. In fact, created gods are everywhere condemned in the Bible as idols, and thus false gods.

The creation myths of the ancient pagans give an account of how the various deities came into being. These stories are called theogonies. The radically different fact about Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, is that He never had a beginning. “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2). God always has existed. “In the beginning, God” was already there (Genesis 1:1). So, there’s no need to account for His existence, because God exists in a category all on His own as the eternal and transcendent One.

There is a famous passage in the Torah, where God manifests Himself to Moses in the form of a burning bush that never actually burns up. Imagine Moses’s trepidation as he slowly approaches this strange sight. Then think of how shocked he must have been when this burning bush began speaking to him! God tells Moses his assignment is to redeem his people Israel out of slavery to the Egyptian empire. God promises to show His power over the Egyptian gods with mighty signs and wonders. Moses initially objects to God’s plan. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy, God. It’s me, Moses,” he seems to say. “You can’t possibly think that I can stand up to Pharaoh and demand he let my people go. After all, I have a speech impediment, and I’m already despised by the Egyptians.” God assures Moses that He will be with Moses and accomplish His rescue plan through him. But then Moses asks a crucial question.

“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?’” (Exodus 3:13)

This is a legitimate question. Moses may be looking for excuses here, but it seems reasonable that after telling Israel that he is their God-appointed deliverer, they are going to wonder who exactly this God is. It is not enough to say that he was the God of their fathers. They want to know His name. The Lord’s response is fascinating.

“God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And He said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: “I AM has sent me to you.”’ (Exodus 3:14)

Of all the names that God could have given, why did He say His name is “I Am” (Hebrew, ‘ehyeh)? God goes on to use a different form of the name when He tells Moses to say, “The LORD, the God of your fathers… has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:15, emphasis added). The Hebrew name that English Bibles typically translate as “the LORD” is actually Yahweh, meaning “He Who Is.” Significantly, Yahweh is the name most frequently used of God from this point on in the Hebrew Scriptures. So what is the meaning behind this sacred name? The point is actually quite simple. Every other so-called god had an origin — they all began to exist in time. But this God of Israel is utterly unique in that He alone has always existed outside the bounds of time. He’s not merely the God who was long ago. Instead, God is the eternal “I Am,” the changeless One “who inhabits eternity” (Isaiah 57:15). God’s name is Yahweh —“He Who Is” — because He forever lives as the one and only self-existent One. As Dennis Prager put it,

 “If God were created, God wouldn’t be God. God’s creator — we’ll call him God’s Dad — would be God. But the same people who ask, ‘Who created God?’ would then ask, ‘Who created God’s Dad?’ And after that, they would ask ‘Who created God’s Dad’s dad?’ Ad infinitum.”[1]

To ask, “Who created God?” is to commit a category mistake. God, by definition, is uncreated. So it is really a meaningless question, no different than asking, “Who created the uncreated One?” This point seems completely lost on many atheists. In The God Delusion, arch-atheist Richard Dawkins argues that Thomas Aquinas’s “Unmoved Mover” does not work because one still has to account for the existence of God.[2] But Dawkins fails to account for the fact that in order for anything to exist, you have to begin with something that is self-existent. As I argue below, there is powerful evidence for the universe having a beginning. Thus, some entity that transcends the physical universe must have brought it into being.[3] But once you have come to an eternal and transcendent First Cause, you don’t need to account for its existence. R. C. Sproul writes:

“The force of the First Cause argument is this: If something exists, something somehow, somewhere, at some time has the power of being intrinsically. It is not an effect. The only logical alternative to a First Cause is a No Cause.”[4]

However, as Sproul goes on to argue, to say that the universe came into existence without a cause violates the law of causality.

The law of causality is one of the most basic laws of logic. It states that every effect must have a sufficient cause. Whenever you come across spilled coffee, hear a knock at the front door, or hear a crowd burst into laughter, you intuitively know there must be a cause. Our rational minds come equipped with this recognition that every effect must have a cause. We simply cannot conceive of a scenario where footprints in the sand, for example, have no cause whatsoever. Our minds rail against the idea that an effect can exist without a cause. This also explains why even little three-year-olds begin asking the question “But why, Mommy?” Our minds hunger for explanations.

Inevitably, when explaining the existence of all reality, you have to go back to the First Cause. Einstein demonstrated that the space-time universe had a beginning, so we cannot say that the universe has eternally existed and is the First Cause. You have to go back to something supernatural, something that transcends the universe. And the more you investigate what this supernatural, transcendent First Cause must have been like, the more you come away with something — or Someone — looking very much like the God of the Bible.

In recent years, William Lane Craig has been the biggest proponent among Christian apologists for what is known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument.[5] The following syllogism captures this argument:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

This simple argument is logically valid, but many have challenged its first two premises. We should hope that most everyone would accept the first premise, but, alas, even highly esteemed scientists, at times, deny the straightforward notion that every event has a cause. The late physicist Stephen Hawking argued in his book, The Grand Design, that the laws of physics have dispensed with any need for a Creator. He writes, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”[6] I find it somewhat shocking that Hawking, who had such a brilliant mind, could have said this. To say that something can “create itself” is logically incoherent. In order to do anything — let alone create — the universe would already have to exist. Therefore, to say that the cosmos created itself is simply absurd. Regarding Hawking’s statement, Oxford mathematician John Lennox observed, “What this shows is that nonsense remains nonsense even when talked by world-famous scientists.”[7]

Contrary to doing away with God, the laws of physics actually point up the need for a Designer and Lawmaker. When Hawking speaks of the laws of physics having creative power, he makes a category mistake. For example, the law of gravity is merely a description of the way the physical world behaves under normal conditions. However, the laws of physics are not actual entities and therefore can actually do nothing. Furthermore, the very precision and mathematical elegance of these laws demonstrate the hand of God, as even the famous atheist-turned-deist, Anthony Flew, recognized.[8] 

Many atheists in the last hundred years have recoiled at the idea that the universe truly had a beginning because of its obvious theistic implications. Cambridge cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) said, “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant… I should like to find a genuine loophole.”[9] Nevertheless, the evidence for a beginning of the universe is powerful. For example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics — or the law of entropy — states that usable energy in the cosmos is running out. Whenever your phone battery goes into the red, your once hot coffee becomes lukewarm, or you stop your car to refuel, you are experiencing the law of entropy. If usable energy is running out, then it is obvious that there has never been an infinite supply.

Consider this illustration. If you were to come across an hourglass with half the amount of sand still in the upper portion, it is clear that at some point someone turned the hourglass over. In other words, at some definite point in time, the sand began to trickle down to the bottom portion. If the amount of sand in the upper portion is decreasing, you can know with certainty that it could not have been there forever. In the same way, the fact that entropy is increasing (usable energy is decreasing) proves that the universe had an absolute beginning — much to the chagrin of many atheists.

So, who created God? No one, because no one ever could. God is the First Cause that gives explanation to everything else. As the American lawyer and Christian apologist, John Warwick Montgomery affirmed, “Nothing in this world is able to explain its own existence; thus, there must be a God in order to explain the world in which we find ourselves.”[10]

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[1] Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis (Washington, DC: Regnery Faith, 2019), Kindle edition.

[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 77-78. The quality of Dawkins’ arguments throughout this book are so poor that, in his review of The God Delusion, Marxist philosopher Terry Eagleton remarked: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, flailing, mispunching,” London Review of Books 28(20), 19 Oct. 2006, www.irb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_html, 25 Jan. 2007.

[3] The word for “created” (Hebrew, bara) in Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) suggests an absolute beginning, with God creating the cosmos out of nothing. Bara (create) is only ever used of God and suggests He alone preexisted creation.

[4] R. C. Sproul, Not a Chance: The Myth of Chance in Modern Science and Cosmology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 179.

[5] William Lane Craig and Paul Copan, Creation out of Nothing (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker and Apollos, 2004), chapter 6.

[6] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (London: Bantam Press, 2010), 180.

[7] John Lennox, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are Missing the Target (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2011), 32.

[8] Anthony Flew, There Is a God (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 121.

[9] Sir Arthur Eddington, The End of the World: From the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics (Nature, 127, 1931), 450.

[10] Quoted in Steve Kumar, Christianity for Skeptics (Atlanta: Creation Book Publishers, 2012), 12.