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Questions about G-d: Who Made G-d?
I made a short series of videos considering questions about G-d that I have noticed get asked from time to time. Below is a rewriting based on the script for the first video, followed by the video itself.
I hardly know what to say about this question, but it does come up sometimes, and it needs a response. It seems to arise in response to cosmological arguments for the existence of G-d. The response “Who made G-d then?” seems to be a sort of “Gotcha!” response. Or maybe it’s an honest question.
Either way, it’s based on a serious misunderstanding of arguments like this. These arguments don’t say that everything needs a cause. They say that things that do need a cause have one.
G-d does not need a cause. G-d is the Uncaused Cause, the Unmoved Mover, the Uncreated Creator.
Now you can say that you think there is no such thing as an Uncaused Cause, and hopefully explain why you think that. But there’s no point asking who created the Uncreated Creator or who caused the Uncaused Cause. It’s a little bit like asking why 3 is a bigger number than 17, or who put all the right angles in a circle.
The first thing is just to understand what Christians (or other classical theists) are talking about when we talk about G-d as the Uncaused Cause. One good way of putting this is: Most things are caused, and everything that’s caused needs an explanation, and there is no explanation unless there is something that is not caused.
Another good way of putting it is: Everything needs an explanation. Most things need something else to explain them, but the First Cause or the Uncaused Cause is His own explanation.
And the second thing is to understand why we think this way. In terms of biblical history and ancient literature, the idea of G-d as the Uncreated Creator comes originally from the Torah. “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth.” G-d creates by speaking. He has that kind of power. “Let there be light. And there was light.” He is not creating out of any preexisting matter, like the gods in creation myths of the polytheistic religions of the cultures by which the ancient Hebrews were surrounded.
And He is not Himself a being who comes with a past, a beginning, a backstory like the gods of those creation myths tend to.
And in terms of philosophy, or philosophical theology, there are only a few ways we could possibly try to explain cause and effect.
There are chains of causality—me, my parents, their parents, and so on. We could say that these chains go on infinitely into the unlimited past. But then there’s no explanation for anything, because every explanation has to come from somewhere, and it can’t come from anywhere if it never begins anywhere. My parents can’t explain me unless they are explained. If there is no beginning to the chain of cause and effect, nothing is explained: Every supposed explanation is based on the link in the chain before it, but ultimately based on nothing at all, so that nothing is actually explained.
Let me try another way of saying this: My parents cannot explain me unless they are explained, and they cannot be explained unless their parents are explained, and so on. Nothing in a chain of cause and effect is explained except by an explanation that gets passed on from one link to the next. But if every link in the chain needs an explanation, then no link in the chain has one.
This is the sort of thing Thomas Aquinas is thinking of when he talks about G-d as the First Cause in the beginning of his Summa Theologiae.
It’s a little bit like changing some Hong Kong dollars for some US dollars, changing them for Pakistani rupees, changing them for Kenya shillings, changing them for Emirati dirham, changing those for South African Rand, and continuing indefinitely without ever expecting to change any currency at all for any gold, or even using it to buy a Coca-Cola.
And there are other issues with talking about infinite sets of causes, or scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning such that there was not an infinite amount of time for this to happen in anyway.
Those are all concerns with saying there is an infinite chain of causes.
What are our other options? Well, we could try saying that there is something which is the Cause of Itself, but this makes no sense either. It can’t be caused unless it is not there yet, but it can’t cause itself unless it is there. So nothing is the Cause of Itself.
And that leaves us with the idea that something is an Uncaused Cause.
Of course, that’s just a beginning. Proving there is a First Cause does not prove the existence of G-d as such, much less prove that an entire religion like Christianity or Islam or Judaism is true.
The next step might be to argue that the Uncaused Cause is a personal G-d, like my friend Andrew Loke does in one of his books. Or arguing for a MASSIVE amount of other information about What and Who the First Cause is, like Aquinas does in the rest of his Summa Theologiae. Or telling the story of how this Creator G-d interacted with his creation, like the Torah and the rest of the Bible does.
Please don’t misunderstand the beginning.
And please don’t stop at the beginning.
Published in Religion and Philosophy
It’s turtles all the way down.
Nonsense: It’s four elephants, and then A’Tuin the World Turtle, and the rest is space.
There is something unique about the Torah or if you like the biblical Old Testament creation story. Most of the creation stories from other ancient stories of creation involve two or more characters wrestling around in the primordial muck. That of course begs the question how the primordial muck came into existence, much less the combatants.
Many Hebrew scholars interpret Genesis 1:1 to have originally meant: “When God began creating the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void…” Meaning there was something already there that God brought order to. The bringing of order to a pre existing formless void was the act of creation. So not creation ex nihilo.
The text was later “pointed” (meaning the vowels were added which weren’t part of the original Hebrew), in a way that changed it to mean what we now understand it to say.
I’ve always thought that either way you read it, the intent does not seem to support creation ex nihilo. At least, that doesn’t seem to be what the author is emphasizing. The entire chapter describes the act of creation which merely begins with the formless and void earth. The creation itself doesn’t begin until God first speaks to create light, and then continues with the parting of the deep etc.
Reading it the traditional way, the complete act of creation happens in the first sentence, and then voila! there is the newly created earth, which is formless and void. It makes more sense to read the first sentence as a summarizing introduction to the whole chapter that follows: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and here’s how. The earth was formless and void…”
That’s why Gen. 2:1 says “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished…” which doesn’t fit with the idea of it all happening in 1:1.
Well, the original written Torah did have no vowels. But adding written vowels–a project done sometime later in the Masoretic Text–is not changing the original. Not exactly. It’s disambiguating the original.
The Septuagint (ancient Greek translation) is clear enough; it looks to me like a simple “In the beginning G-d made the heaven and the earth.”
I don’t know Hebrew, so I can’t comment on how good might be an alternative reading of the original script with different vowels filled in. But the Masoretes plus the Jews who translated it to Greek even earlier join forces to make a pretty strong case that the traditional reading is (at least) a very good one.
No, on the traditional reading the creation begins in verse 1: G-d made the heavens and the earth.
Strictly speaking, that’s fine–on the traditional reading, the creation ex nihilo could be considered complete after verse 1; the rest is a matter of completing or perfecting or rearranging the new creation.
Ok, I admit that there is a way of reading this passage as not explicitly telling us that G-d did not begin with any preexisting raw material.
The “official” Jewish interpretation based on the Masoretic text is creation ex nihilo, yes.
The vowel question is about how you point the second word bra which means “create”.
The MT says bara, which means “created”.
But if you point it to say baro, that’s an infinitive which could lead to the other translation. “In the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and earth, the earth was without form…”
But as I said even the MT reading can be understood the way I see it. However, the author did want to differentiate his God from other gods who were believed to have created the world out of the body of a primordial sea monster which pre-existed those gods for example. That’s why he says in 1:21 “So God created the great sea monsters…”
Well, if your point is that there is a way of reading this passage as not explicitly telling us that G-d did not begin with any preexisting raw material–I believe we agree.
Sounds right.
Once upon a time before time, all the nothing that was coalesced into a huge blazing ball of something and exploded into everything that is.
I hope this clears it all up.
I recall reading (years ago; I can’t recall where) that an alternate translation is that “the earth became void and without form.” I have no idea if there is anything to this.
Thanks for the OP and the ensuing discussion.
I’ve heard it phrased by more than one Jewish mystic as something like “With beginningness, created-it the Heaven and the Earth.” I doubt I’m recalling it perfectly. I was never sure what they were trying to convey, but they were probably talking more about the psyche than the immanent world.
Dang, you beat me to it!
For believers who are troubled by the question “Then who created G-d?” that answer should be adequate: No one created G-d, because G-d did not need to be created.
For non-believers (who probably aren’t in your intended audience), it carries no useful explanatory power, and we’re left with what seem more plausible naturalistic explanations for our existence.
I’ve never heard of a believer troubled by that, but that is the right answer.
The primary intended audience is people who ask the silly question. As far as I know, all of them are atheists.
If you have a problem with cosmological arguments, feel free to present it and not just allude to it.
Whether or not it’s a silly question depends at least in part, I think, on why it’s asked.
If one asks it in hopes of prompting the believer to say to himself “My goodness, it never occurred to me that something must have created G-d!” then, yes, it’s a pretty silly question, given that we all know that G-d is understood to be eternally pre-existing.
But if one asks it to draw attention to the irony of invoking one eternally pre-existing entity (G-d) in an effort to explain the existence of another entity (the universe) that may, for all we know, also be eternally pre-existing, then maybe it isn’t a silly question.
Because there’s no compelling reason to believe that the universe is not itself eternally pre-existing, and so no need to, as it were, add turtles to the explanatory stack.
Yes.
An absurd rhetorical strategy. One should generally do one’s best to say what one means rather than hope that a question about a square circle will enable an interlocutor to read one’s mind.
And there we go. Just say that!
Working response, borrowed from a book draft:
Everything evolved from nothing. I told you already.
It does seem from what we believe* we observe that the universe is expanding. But if the universe has expanded to its current size at time X, then at X-n it was smaller. A thing that grows (or shrinks) can’t be steady state.
Maybe it oscillates. It grows from an initial state to some final state, then shrinks back down to the initial state again. Great. Now we have two causes we don’t understand: what made it expand, and what made it shrink.
* We could be wrong.
That’s nice. But verbosity isn’t the same as knowledge.
We know neither the physical nor the temporal scope of the universe. We can reasonably believe that we know lower bounds for each — approximately 95 billion lightyears across and 13.8 billion years old — but we can set no upper bounds for either dimension, nor even state with confidence that either its size or its age is finite.
We know that the universe exists. We don’t know whether it came into existence — was caused to exist — or whether it always existed. If the universe we observe was caused to exist, what that suggests is that we observe only a portion of the universe — and we’re right back where we started, wondering if the portion of the universe we don’t know about always existed or is itself a smaller part of a yet greater unseen universe that caused it to exist.
It seems inescapable to conclude that either eternal preexistence of something or uncaused creation of something must be the case. For those of us who don’t believe in G-d, it seems no more incredible to think that the universe is that something — particularly given that we actually have a lot of compelling evidence that the universe actually exists.
Most things are caused.
I believe that that is not a true statement.
Why do you think it’s false? It seems obvious.
I don’t think it is false. It just seems to me to be a grammatically correct statement to which no meaning can be attached, because it contains a false implicit premise:
But why does it matter if it’s true or not?
Because I believe that to base one’s faith upon a nonsensical statement is a grievous error.
But why bother trying to persuade anyone of this, simply to be made fun of? Psalms 1:1 says among other things, ‘Blessed is the one who does not sit in the company of mockers’, and yet you say all this in the company of mockers.
I am not rejecting G-d’s blessing. I am not sitting. I am an itinerant agricultural laborer.
Where’s the error exactly?
Who’s basing his faith on a cosmological argument?
Indeed. The knowledge is in the content.
Finitude in the past is enough.
We don’t know it had a beginning?
You are correct at least to the extent that this is something a good cosmological argument would need to rule out.
Good!
The fact that the universe began is a good reason to think it’s not the universe. There are other reasons too.
And if the universe has the G-dlike quality of being an Uncaused Cause, are there any other G-dlike qualities it has?
Correct. We don’t know that it had a beginning.
This is properly described as “begging the question.”
And this is a different kind of sophistry. We might as well ask:
If the hypothetical G-d has the universe-like quality of being an Uncaused Cause, are there any other universe-like qualities the hypothetical G-d has? For example, does the hypothetical G-d expand at a velocity proportionate to its distance from the center of G-d? Did the hypothetical G-d experience a brief period of extraordinary inflation during which three of His fundamental forces differentiated as His temperature dropped from several trillion trillion degrees to something less torrid? Etc.
The facts are that the universe exists; that we don’t know if it began or if it has always been; and that, if it did begin — that is, if it appeared somehow in the context of something having no qualities at all of the universe, no space or time, or any other quality we associate with existence — then we can say nothing about the rules, if any, that pertain in that peculiar nothingness.
Invoking G-d may be satisfying, but it is neither parsimonious nor, upon reflection, explanatory.
What else from science do we not know about? Macroevolution? Electrons? Viruses?
Um, no; no, it’s not.
No, the sophistry is with you–or at least the unclear argument, the confusion, or something a little off. Terms like “G-d” and “the universe” have definitions, and the things we’re talking about have natures. As far as we know, the universe does not have the nature of being an Uncaused Cause, and this is not part of its definition; what’s more, it appears to be composed 100% of parts that are effects, and, since it has a beginning, is an effect itself. G-d is, by classical definitions, the Uncaused Cause.
And here you are openly welcoming the idea that universe itself is inexplicable. It follows that all of its contents are inexplicable. It follows that we know nothing at all about how trees grow or how protozoa are involved in malaria–all apparent explanations rest on the surface of complete inexplicability.
Are you really that skeptical about science? We religious folks aren’t.
I tend to get lost as these types of conversations unfold, but for the moment I’m trying to follow along.
So, the first point of contention is whether the universe had a beginning. SA says yes; Henry isn’t sure.
Assuming I have that right, can each of you can briefly elaborate on why you hold your respective positions. I’m more interested in Henry’s take on this because SA’s take is the norm for a Christian, whereas Henry is (I think) more aligned with the science crowd — a crowd which (I think) pretty uniformly believes that the universe had a beginning and has spent a lot of time and energy trying to sort out the details.
Well, there’s probably more than that going on, but there is at least that. I think the universe had a beginning, and I think we can know that it did, and this is normal for theists and for contemporary science.
I think you probably don’t have such a procedure. If you don’t, then that’s the error.
I don’t understand the question.
What kind of procedure do you want? Cosmological arguments are a procedure for knowing what is uncaused, and observations are how we know what is caused.
What were you talking about when you said the thing about basing faith on an error?
That’s an odd question. Are you trying to suggest that only a “science denier” would suggest that we don’t know that the universe had a beginning?
In fact, we don’t know that the universe had a beginning. We’re pretty confident that it was once very small: the young Catholic priest George Lemaître suggested that almost exactly a hundred years ago and subsequent observations strongly confirm the theory. We’re pretty confident that it expanded with almost unimaginable rapidity during a very brief period of “inflation”: the struggling young physicist Alan Guth came up with that idea in a eureka moment the year I graduated from high school.
But there is no reason to believe that the “big bang,” as the already-famous astronomer Fred Hoyle mockingly called Lemaître’s proposed expanding universe in an attempt to discredit the theory in what was certainly the greatest professional error of Hoyle’s justifiably acclaimed career, was the beginning. Evidence strongly supports the idea that it was the beginning of the expansion — of the expansion that is still continuing and accelerating. But there is no evidence that the thing that began expanding about 13.8 billion years ago, that thing that was, we think, a seething ball of quantum fields far smaller than a proton, actually came into existence — actually began — at the moment of expansion.
No one knows when, how, or if the universe had a beginning in the true sense — in the sense of coming into actual existence, versus expanding and becoming the congenial place it is today.
There are proponents of eternal cyclical models, including big names like Roger Penrose with his conformal cyclic cosmology theory. There is the Ekprotic Universe theory and its kin, popular among string theorists and their descendants (who are all crazy, but who may nonetheless be correct).
There are any number of theories that revolve around quantum fluctuation in a vacuum — something actually implied by some models of conventional Big Bang expansion theory. These posit that matter and energy arise spontaneously — but not from nothing. Rather, that they are the product of preexisting quantum fields that create matter and energy from nothing but the fields themselves. This sounds crazy too, but there is some evidence for the creation of matter/energy in a quantum vacuum (e.g., the Casimir Effect and the Lamb Shift).
The late Stephen Hawking, in his posthumously published final paper co-authored with Thomas Hertog, proposed a version of an eternal inflation model that he believed addressed some of the challenges brought up by his previous ruminations on cosmology.
To the extent that we can truly know things (or, put differently, to the extent that we’re willing to use the word “know” to mean “have a high degree of confidence in, based on evidence and reason”), we know that the life around us is the product of evolution; we know that viruses exist and are little protein-encapsulated bundles of parasitic nucleotides; and we know that the electron is the instantiation of the collapsed electron quantum field.
We don’t know, nor even have a basis for a strong belief about, what was the origin of the universe, if it had an origin, if it had many origins, or if it has been forever preexistent.
I said all that already.
That’s a leftist slur, and what you may imagine I would mean by it is beyond my ability to guess.
It is scientific knowledge that the universe had a beginning. Evidently you deny this. Do you have specific concerns with this bit of science, or do you generally think that science is not a source of real knowledge?
There we have it: You just have objections to the claim that we really do know this particular thing from science.