Who created God?

The question sounds devastating the first time you hear it. If everything needs a cause, and God is the cause of everything — then what caused God?

The question “Who created God?” assumes that God is the kind of thing that could be created — a being inside the universe, subject to its rules, standing in the same line of cause and effect as stars and planets and people. That is not the God the Bible describes. Scripture describes God as not the first item in the chain of created things. He is the One who made the chain.

This is what theologians call God's aseity — His self-existence. Everything in creation is contingent: it depends on something else for its existence, and traces back to a cause. God depends on nothing, derives from nothing, and has always simply been. He told Moses His name from the burning bush — “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14) — not “I became” or “I was made,” but the eternal present tense of a being who never came into existence because He never was not.

To ask what created Him, then, is to make what philosophers call a category mistake — judging something by a standard that cannot apply to it. It is like asking what a musical note smells like, or what colour the number seven is. The question is grammatically tidy but conceptually empty, because it applies a property to something the property cannot touch. Time, cause, and beginning belong to the created order. God does not stand inside that order; He stands over it.

Modern physics has, almost accidentally, sharpened the point. Scientists describe time, space, and matter as a single fabric — a continuum that had to come into being together. Matter has to exist somewhere, which requires space; and any change, including coming into existence, requires time. Strip away any one and the other two collapse. They began as a set, at a single beginning. Which is precisely what the Bible said in its opening sentence, written long before anyone had the vocabulary for it:

Genesis 1:1 (NKJV)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

There is time — in the beginning. There is matter — the heavens and the earth. And there is the space that holds them. The God who created that continuum cannot be contained by it. He is before it, outside it, and unaffected by it, because He made it.

Augustine saw this sixteen centuries ago, long before modern cosmology. Pressed with the old riddle — what was God doing before He made the world? — he answered that the question dissolves on inspection, because God did not create the world in time. He created it with time. Time itself is part of what was made. There is no “before” creation in which God sat waiting, because “before” is a measurement of time, and time had not yet begun.

The Bible never strains to defend God's eternity. It simply declares it:

Psalm 90:2 (NKJV)

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.

Which leaves the sceptic with the harder question, the one his own worldview cannot escape. Something has always existed — that much is not in dispute, because you cannot get something from nothing. The only real choice is what. Either an eternal, personal God who has always been and who spoke creation into existence, or some eternal, impersonal matter that somehow arranged itself into galaxies and minds and the moral law without intending any of it. Ultimately, we have to choose between believing in an eternal, personal God or believing that lifeless matter somehow created everything.