Who created God?

Richard Dawkins

At the centre of Richard Dawkin's "God Delusion" book is the question "Who created God?" It's supposed to be a devastating blow to the credibility of Christianity rendering speechless those who believe in a creator God. It has always baffled me as to why that is such a problematic question. The answer is "no one created God. He is uncreated. Why is that a problem?"

John Lennox

John Lennox points out that the question can just as well be asked of naturalists : "Who or what created matter and energy?" If the answer is that they have always existed then they obviously have no problem with something being uncreated. If the answer is that matter and energy came into being at some stage then something must have caused their appearance and we either have to take that as eternally existent or the thing before that or before that and so on but the buck has to stop somewhere. Something somewhere must have been eternally existent and the first cause of everything. You can't have an infinite sequence of past causes or we would never arrive at the present.http://johnlennox.org/index.php/en/resource/who_created_the_creator/

I think the real sticking point though is Dawkins' view that something cannot be a valid explanation or cause if it is in fact more complex. That seems to be a firmly held presupposition, and is in fact at the heart of a reductionist worldview. While it has proved a very fruitful expectation in understanding many things, there is no reason to think it is true of everything. Can you reduce personhood, consciousness, love, information or  morality? There is nothing wrong in trying but do we want to rule out the possibility that a person is the source of person hood ahead of time? Could there not be some highly complex, beautiful, loving and morally perfect being behind everything? Looking for simpler explanations of more complex phenomena is a very valid pursuit and one that works because the universe does seem, in many ways, remarkably ordered but it is a step of faith, or at least a big inductive jump, to say that all valid explanations are in terms of simpler phenomena.

One final point: I have heard people argue that when we find ancient ruins we ascribe intelligent design to them, i.e people made them. This is helpful in that it gives an example of a more complex cause (a person) for a simple phenomena (some scratches in a stone) but it fails to be relevant here because it is not a closed system.  Dawkins and others would simply say that there is a series of increasingly simple explanations for the person, in terms of evolution, and therefore there is ultimately a simpler explanation for the scratches. When we are talking about an uncreated creator there is no possibility of a simpler sequence of causes behind his apparent complexity because there is, by definition, nothing before him. That is why the assumption that "a valid explanation must ultimately be in terms of a less complex cause" needs to be challenged.


I might be missing something but it seems to me that the "who created God question" is not the deal breaker that people think it is.