Okay, let’s touch on a topic that many atheists would like to have a satisfactory answer on – the question of who created God.
In almost any debate pitting atheists against those who adhere to the existence of the Almighty Creator God, the atheist draws out his final Ace card on the question of God’s origin bringing the theist to a brick wall and dead end to his arguments. The point of digging into this actually makes sense. If theists argue that “designed” creations can only be the outcome of an intelligent creator, then wouldn’t it be reasonable to extend the question to the next level? Who then created the creator, who is even more complex than the creations?
Biblical apologist Ravi Zacharias however counters the inquisitive argument: if one were to reason that the creator of living things was created by a higher creator, then he can go on postulating that that higher creator was created by yet an even higher being, and the list would go on and on. Somehow the list has to end – and that ultimate end will be the supreme creator of all things. But rather than imagining a long line of creators ending with the greatest being, why can’t it just be one ultimate being to begin with?
There are many questions there just aren’t any answers for. For example:
- Does outer space have an end? What is beyond its outer edge?
- How long is eternity?
- What happened before time began?
- Where is the start and end of a circle?
- Can a machine become conscious / self-aware of its own existence?
When God answered Moses on who he was, he said “I am who I am”. The sentence in itself is cyclic in that the question “I am who?” is answered as “I am” – effectively, alluding to the nature of God as an infinite being with no beginning or end.
As humans, we cannot grasp the concept of infinity. In fact our equations blow up to result in undefined singularities when anything gets divided by zero. So the definition of God as the “uncreated Creator of all things” is indeed hard to fathom.
The reasoning that goes: “anything complex must have been designed” is the argument of the Creationist. But somehow (as if hypocritically), he will not apply it to God – who is the most complex entity in the universe. God is an exception to the rule, and that it just has to be taken on faith. Many atheists cannot settle for that – which is why they will rather go for an argument that can be even more ludicrous: that there was no creator to begin with, and that intelligence and information just came about with no designer.
But we need to look into the nature of God more deeply. God revealed to man in his book that he is Spirit. So the laws we would naturally assume in the physical world do not necessarily apply to things and beings that are spiritual (of the mind/heart). For example, in Physics we learn that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only transformed from one form to another. However, in the spirit realm, we can create things in the mind. Imagine an apple – red, shiny, sitting on a white table. We created something in our mind just now. So in the spirit realm of the mind things can be easily created or destroyed.
Imagine God to be a huge mind that is non-physical. The next question is – do minds need a creator? If an apple in our mind could so easily exist and disappear at the command of our thoughts, cannot minds also come to existence with no “starting material”?
We know for sure that God is conscious. But what are the building blocks of consciousness? It is not physical since in our case, cells or a collection of them are not conscious, but something that transcends the material physical aspect of us is somehow aware we exist.
From some point after the stage of being a baby and a toddler, we slowly came to realize our existence – at some point we became fully conscious.
In like manner, a non-physical entity (representing all that exists in the universe) that is self-aware may be our closest theory as to how God operates. But unlike humans who can remember a time they first began to be self-aware, God has always been aware of his existence.
The laws of creation in the spirit realm (demonstrated earlier by the sudden appearing of an apple in our mind) operate very differently from our physical laws. Information can be created in our minds, but physical laws have no capacity to generate information. We just cannot impose our arguments of “physical creation” onto God or the spirit realm, since the latter reside in a totally different paradigm. The plane of the mind can influence things in the physical. More often than not, it is the spiritual plane bringing about its manifestations and creations on the physical.
Somehow, we just have to give up on the argument of who created the ultimate infinite Being. It is like explaining to an ant the theory of quantum electrodynamics. We are just light-years lower in mental capacity than God and his mind. He himself told us that as much as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his thoughts and ways higher than ours.
To demonstrate the disparity, the following are 2 exercises you can try:
- Imagine squashing a fly to such a degree that every cell completely separates from the other. Then with the aid of a microscope, try to reassemble the fly to its original state – in a way that it can still reproduce and perpetuate life. Do you think you will succeed? How long do you think it will take for you to succeed? If you can understand how to do it, then you are an inch closer to understanding why and how God exists without having a creator.
- Get one cell in your body, and try to find which part of the DNA strand is responsible for forming the portion of brain matter that is located near your left ear. Then explain it to a toddler and ask if he understands why that specific DNA sequence is indeed the code for that portion of the body. If you succeed in making the youngster fully understand, then you are another inch closer to understanding God’s mind.
This big question on God’s existence/origin is beyond human reasoning and understanding. It is as if God did it on purpose to show how far greater he is and that there is just no comparison with him. The fact is that there is DNA in our cells, and the God of the Bible is the only viable explanation for the information getting there.
And he is just too smart beyond all that we can imagine – such that the only proper response is not questioning or demanding an explanation but awe and wonder. God meant it that we humans won’t fully grasp him – otherwise, he wouldn’t be God Almighty.
Finally, the question of God’s origin itself is illegal. If we define a circle to be a curve that has no beginning or end; then, if we ask – what is the beginning point of a circle? We are actually violating the very definition of a circle by asking for a property that it does not hold in the first place.
So if God is defined to be the Being who has no creator, but is the origin of all things, how can we ask – who created God? It is like asking, who created the Being who was not created? It is like asking a question: can the omnipotent God create a being more powerful than himself? It makes no sense.
So the next time an atheist comes with this question of God’s origin, tell him the answer is too complex he won’t understand it. And if he insists, point him to the 2 exercises given above to warm him up first. When he’s done and has succeeded, he can then come back to you for the answer.
Andy Philips | 2015-0711