Earlier this evening, as I was idly surfing the Internet, I came across the site GotQuestions.org, a fundamentalist Christian website that purports to provide “Bible-based” answers to questions about Christianity, God, and Jesus, etc.
Okay then, I thought, let’s see how well they answer one of the biggies:
Well, it’s really no surprise that their attempt to answer this question turns out to be pretty lame. Read on to see why.
A common argument from atheists and skeptics is that if all things need a cause, then God must also need a cause. The conclusion is that if God needed a cause, then God is not God (and if God is not God, then of course there is no God).
Yes, it is a common argument, because it is a good one. There is no particular reason why God should be automagically exempted from this inquiry, no matter what believers say.
This is a slightly more sophisticated form of the basic question “Who made God?” Everyone knows that something does not come from nothing. So, if God is a “something,” then He must have a cause, right?
Well, it’s a reframing of the same question, but it’s not really any more sophisticated. A more sophisticated form of the basic question is: assuming for the moment that there is a “first cause,” why does it have to be an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent supernatural being that demands to be worshiped? I go into this question in more detail later.
The question is tricky because it sneaks in the false assumption that God came from somewhere and then asks where that might be.
I believe the word “tricky” means “sly” here and not “difficult,” implying that there is some subterfuge involved in just asking the question as if it is posed deliberately to catch out unwary believers. Perhaps in some cases that’s true, but it in no way devalues the provalidity of the question.
The answer is that the question does not even make sense.
Ah, and here we go. A term that is often used here is “category mistake.” In other words, you are wrong to even ask the question.
It is like asking, “What does blue smell like?” Blue is not in the category of things that have a smell, so the question itself is flawed.
Well actually, some people are actually able to “smell blue”—people who suffer from a neurological condition called synesthesia. (Not particularly relevant to this discussion, but fascinating nonetheless!)
In the same way, God is not in the category of things that are created or caused. God is uncaused and uncreated—He simply exists.
Er, okay. That is a rather bald assertion. Let’s see how they back it up.
How do we know this? We know that from nothing, nothing comes.
Whoa, there. Not so fast. That nothing comes from nothing may be true in the macroscopic world—the world we have first hand experience of every day—but in the quantum world that is certainly not the case. All kinds of weird and entirely counter-intuitive things are known—proven—to happen, including the measurable existence of virtual particles—particles that really do come from nothing and exist in our Universe for a short while before vanishing again. Thus God is not the only possible non-caused entity in existence.
So, if there were ever a time when there was absolutely nothing in existence, then nothing would have ever come into existence.
Well, since time is an inherent property of the Universe, there was no specific time when there was absolutely nothing, since time came into existence at exactly the same time the rest of the Universe was born—at the moment of the Big Bang. Thus it is just as much a category mistake to ask what happened before the Big Bang, since there was no “before” before the Big Bang. Mind bending I know, but it all boils down to the simple fact that, as of today, we haven’t a clue how or why the Universe sprang into existence—not scientists and certainly not theologians. We can speculate endlessly, but none of us knows for sure—not even close.
But things do exist. Therefore, since there could never have been absolutely nothing, something had to have always been in existence.
Maybe, but we have no way of knowing if it’s true, even though it sounds logical. And if time itself has only been around since the Big Bang, then any statement that references a time before the Universe is rendered meaningless anyway—and another category mistake.
That ever-existing thing is what we call God. God is the uncaused Being that caused everything else to come into existence. God is the uncreated Creator who created the universe and everything in it.
And so we finish with a giant leap of faith, and one more bald assertion—that God is the uncreated creator of the Universe.
But here’s another problem. Why does it have to be God? Of all the things that could be eternal—uncaused and beyond time—a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being would seem to be one of the most unlikely culprits, especially one that demands to be worshiped for creating the Universe. Christian fundamentalists scoff when scientists speculate about a multiverse, or an infinite number of universes, or some other naturalistic theory of cosmological origins, but at least the scientists will freely admit that it’s just speculation and that we don’t really have a clue about how or why the Universe sprang into existence.
Even the argument that a complex Universe requires an even more complex creator (which must be the God of the Bible), doesn’t hold water. Even if intelligence was involved in the origin of the Universe, there is no reason to believe the creator is a being worthy of our worship and devotion. What if our Universe was the result of a hyper-dimensional being’s fifth-grade science project? Or perhaps even a unwanted side-effect of said project? Perhaps the creator of our Universe isn’t an eternal being. Perhaps our Universe’s creator was also created ex nihilo by another, even more superintelligent creator, and so on ad infinitum.
So, to bring this post to a conclusion before my brain explodes, I think it’s pretty clear that the any assertion that God, if God exists, must be eternal and an uncaused being is based on nothing more than flimsy and flawed logic. Contrary to the above assertions, we don’t even know that the Universe needed a creator, but even if we accept that it did, there is no justifiable reason to claim that the creator is either eternal or an uncaused being. That is just one of any number of scenarios bounded only by our imagination since we have no clue as to what exists beyond our Universe, or even if there is anything at all.
Oddly enough, even though I cannot fully wrap my mind around God having no beginning, him having no beginning or ending makes everything else make more sense...because there was a 'hand' to set things in motion.
