I was talking to a group of teenagers about the things of God and of Jesus when one of them blurted out, “What stupid stuff you Christians believe. I can’t see your God but you want me to believe in him. Every thing I know was made by something else. Wood comes from trees which come from seeds. Human beings happen when Mum and Dad get together. Who created your so-called God?”
This is a reasonable question. God’s view is that “anyone who comes to [God] must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him”(Heb. 11:6, NIV). Before we can approach God, we must believe that he exists. We Christians spend too little time helping people with something that God requires before we can even approach him. This is the existence of God.
What kinds of evidence would you accept?
I once lived in a house that had several mango trees in the yard. When the fruit was of reasonable size, each morning I could go to the tree and see that something had been destroying my fruit by eating bits and pieces out of the green and near-ripe fruit. I didn’t see the flying foxes, but I can infer their existence from the evidence.
It’s like that with God. There is evidence all around that shows his existence. It shouldn’t bother us that we cannot see him. I can’t see the wind. I can’t see your brain and you can’t see mine. Neither can I see the principle within me that gives me life. But I sure know the wind, my brain, and my life exist – from the evidence they produce.
We can see the effects of God around us if we care to notice. Let’s take a look at our universe. Examine the intricate design of a human eye. If this earth were orbiting closer to the sun, it would fry. If it were further away, it would freeze over.
Let’s look at some other evidence:
Consider the sun. It is monstrous when compared with the earth. It has a diameter of 864,400 miles and a volume that is over one million times that of earth. The surface of the sun has a temperature of 6,000 degrees C, but that rises to 14 million degrees C at its core. About 4 million tons of the mass of the sun is lost every second, but it is of such gigantic proportions that it has enough fuel for about another 5,000 million years.
But the sun is only an average-sized star in the Milky Way galaxy. This galaxy, shaped like a disc, is 621,000 million million miles in breadth. There are 100,000 million stars in this single galaxy. The nearest star in the Milky Way, Andromeda, is about 24 million million million miles away.
Doesn’t this boggle the mind? All of it is perfectly designed and holds together by something or someone.
Now consider the dimension of the universe in light years. Light travels at just over 186,282 miles per second, which means that light travels at about 5,878,000 million miles per year. At this phenomenal speed, how long would it take to reach the sun from earth? Eight minutes. The nearest group of stars in our galaxy, Magellanic Clouds, takes 170,000 light years of travel to reach them. It takes 2.2 million light years to reach the Andromeda Spiral.
We could go on and on about the time to reach Sirius, Polaris (North Star), and Ursa Major (Great Bear). But this is only in one galaxy. It is estimated that there are at least 100,000 million galaxies, and we haven’t discussed the size of stars.[1]
After considering these and other dimensions of our wondrous universe, British evangelist, John Blanchard, asked: “What exactly is it that we are seeing? How does it work? Has it always existed? If not, when and how did it come into being? Will it go on for ever? If not, when and how will it come to an end? Why is it there at all? Does it have any meaning or purpose?”[2]
If the known stars in the universe were divided among the present population of the world, one writer has suggested that each person would receive two trillion of them.[3] A trillion is 10 to the 9th power, or, one million millions.[4] There are so many stars in the universe that each person in the world could have two trillion of them. What an immense cosmos.
Examine the composition of just one cell of a human body.
“The DNA molecule inside each cell contains a three-billion letter software code capable of overseeing and regulating all the anatomy on display in Body Worlds [the human body]. Increasingly we are learning to read the code. But who wrote it? And why? Can anyone guide us in reading not only the microcode inside each cell but the macrocode governing the entire planet, the universe?”[5]
As I consider this information about the existence of the Creator God, a few passages of Scripture come to mind that confirm this kind of evidence. I’m thinking of . . .
Psalm 8:3-4:
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? (TNIV)[6]
Psalm 19:1-6:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
5 which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
6 It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth (TNIV)
A verse from the NT confirms these passages from the Psalms: Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (TNIV).
Philip Yancey said: “In my lifetime, astronomers have ‘discovered’ seventy billion more galaxies, admitted they may have overlooked 96 percent of the makeup of the universe (‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’), and adjusted the time of the Big Bang by four to five billion years.”[7]
Today I’ve given a couple pointers to the existence of God, but . . .
Who created God?
I’m convinced beyond reasonable doubt that God exists, but how can I come to know who created God?
So, who made God?[8] The simple answer is: Nobody made God. God has always existed. The only things that are created are things that had a beginning – like you, me and our universe. All of us and our universe need a maker, a creator. Since God did not need to be created, the question, “Who made God?” is meaningless because he is not a created being but is the eternal being who eternally existed before he created the universe.
To ask, “Who created God?” is as illogical as asking, “Who is the bachelor’s wife?”[9]
However, there are questions that remain for those of us who do a little thinking. You might be asking questions like these: [10]
- If the universe needs a cause, then why doesn’t God need a cause?
- If God doesn’t need a cause, why should the universe need a cause?
Please note that: “The word ’cause’ has several different meanings in philosophy. But in this article, I am referring to the efficient cause, the chief agent causing something to be made.”[11]
A logical answer should go like this:
1. Everything which has a beginning has a cause.
2. The universe has a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.[12]
Its important to emphasise the words “which has a beginning.” Our universe requires a cause because it had a beginning. Everything that had a beginning is caused by something. God is not like the universe. He had no beginning and therefore doesn’t need a cause.
In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which has a lot of experimental support, is “the geometric theory of gravitation that was published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravity in modern physics. It unifies special relativity and Newton’s law of universal gravitation, and describes gravity as a property of the geometry of space and time.”[13]
From this well established theory of Einstein’s, we can deduce that God, unlike the universe, had no beginning, so He doesn’t need a cause. Einstein’s theory of general relativity shows that time is linked to matter and space. So time itself would have begun along with matter and space.[14]
Thus, time, space and matter all had a beginning. The universe cannot be eternal.
God, by definition, is the creator of the entire universe, including time, space and matter. He cannot be limited by time. He created it. So, he had no beginning. There is an interesting verse in Isaiah 57:15a that confirms this: “For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy. . .” (ESV).
Therefore, the eternal God does not have a cause.
It’s time to put on your thinking caps again. It’s a long while since I did science and I’m not a scientist. I did chemistry and physics in high school and a chemistry subject in my bachelor’s degree.
I want to introduce you to the term, “thermodynamics.” It is “a field of physical science that relates matter to energy. The principles of thermodynamics are regarded as inviolable and are applied constantly to engineering and the sciences, including origin science.”[15]
According to the first law of thermodynamics, “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.”[16] That really is a philosophical way of putting it. Since science is based on observation, the observational evidence for the first law of thermodynamics should read: “[As far as we have observed,] the amount of energy in the universe remains constant.”[17] i.e. scientists have not observed any new energy coming into existence or going out of existence.
This statement cannot affirm or deny that the universe was created. It simply states that, “as far as we can tell, the actual amount of energy that was created has remained constant since then.”[18]
That’s the first law of thermodynamics.
But there’s a second law of thermodynamics.
Are you ready to think a little more with me?
Remember the core of the first law of thermodynamics: “[As far as we have observed,] the amount of energy in the universe remains constant.”[19] i.e. scientists have not observed any new energy coming into existence or going out of existence
The second law of thermodynamics is another story. It can be stated this way:
“In a closed, isolated system, the amount of usable energy in the universe is decreasing.”[20] When I learned it back in my Grade 12 and university classes the term used was increase in entropy for decrease in useable energy.
Remember, the term is thermodynamics. By “dynamic” we mean that the amount of energy is being changed into unusable energy. This doesn’t conflict with the first law of thermodynamics, rather “it amplifies it.”[21]
Norman Geisler puts it this way: “If energy is constant, why do we keep needing more electricity? The answer is that entropy happens. The second law states that ‘overall things left to themselves tend to disorder.’ Overall, the amount of disorder is increasing. The entropy—that is, the disorder—of an isolated system can never decrease. When an isolated system achieves maximum entropy, it can no longer undergo change: It has reached equilibrium. We would say it has ‘run down.'”[22]
Put a cabbage in a closed system such as a glass house with no cracks and let it stay there for 6 months. What will happen to the cabbage? There will be an increase in entropy, or a decrease in energy. The cabbage will become putrid. Guaranteed. Think about this principle.
So, according to science, the second law of thermodynamics indicates that our universe is running down. If it is running down, it is running down from a higher position when it was created. It’s another way of showing that the universe cannot be eternal. It had a beginning; it had a cause and there is a decrease in useable energy.
But who is eternal and who caused the universe to come into existence. I put it to you that God Himself, the eternal one, created the universe. This is confirmed in the very first sentence of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1 NIV).
Here’s another searching question about God:
Since God is has always existed and was not created, what was he up to before the creation of the cosmos, the universe, the world?
One of the great Christian teachers of the fifth-century, St. Augustine of Hippo, had two answers to this question. One of them was humorous and the other was serious.
His humorous answer was: “God was spending his time preparing hell for people who ask questions like this!”
The serious answer was: “God didn’t have any time on his hands, since there was no time before time was created. Time began with creation. Before creation, time did not exist. So there was no time for God to have on his hands. The world did not begin by a creation in time but by a creation of time. But, you may think, if there was no time before time began, what was there? The answer is, eternity. God is eternal, and the only thing prior to time was eternity.”[23]
Our very question, what was God up to before the creation of the universe “implies that an infinitely perfect being like God could get bored. Boredom, however, is a sign of imperfection and dissatisfaction, and God is perfectly satisfied. Thus, there is no way God could be bored, even if he had long time periods on his hands. An infinitely creative mind can always find something interesting to do. Only finite minds [like yours and mine] that run out of interesting things to do get bored.”[24]
This is not the time or place to get into a discussion of the nature of the Christian God who has three persons, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, in perfect fellowship. There is no way that such a person could become bored or lonely. There would always be somebody with whom to communicate who would have “perfect understanding, love, and companionship. Boredom is impossible for such a being.”[25]
Conclusion
William MacDonald calculated this:
“If it cost a cent to travel 1,000 miles, a cruise to the moon would be $2.38. But if you wanted to go to the sun, the one-way ticket would cost $930. And a trip to the nearest star would be – hold onto your hat – $260 million. Yet a place in the heart of the One who made this vast universe is free, based on the priceless sacrifice of Christ. Have you reserved your place?
Wonder of wonders! Vast surprise!
Can bigger wonder be?
That He who built the starry skies
“God made you, darling.”
“Well, Daddy, who made the sky and the trees?”
“God made the sky and the trees. God made everything.”
“Daddy, who made God?”
What a good question? “What do you say? Who made God? is a natural question for a child. If we teach our children that everything in the world is made from something else, where do we stop this line of reasoning? If everything has a maker, then who makes the maker? We find clues to the answer in God’s curious name for Himself, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’
“The simple answer (try explaining this to a child!) is that God does not require a cause. He causes all creatures to be, but He Himself is caused by no one. He makes all things move, but He Himself is moved by nothing.
“God exists by His own power. He alone is self-existent.”[29]
This is a summary of what I have been trying to communicate:
1. I have tried to show that the universe is not eternal. It had a beginning.
2. It is unreasonable to believe that something that had a being could begin to exist without a cause.
3. Therefore, the universe requires a cause as Genesis 1:1 and Romans 1:20 confirm.
· God, as creator of time, matter and energy, is outside of time. God has no beginning in time. He has always existed, so he doesn’t need a cause.
· The end of the story is that God was never created. He is eternal.
Endnotes:
[1] This information is from John Blanchard, Does God Believe in Atheists? Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000, pp.244-245.
[4] A trillion is “a number represented as a 1 followed by twelve zeros (1,000,000,000,000) If you have a bucket that holds 100 thousand marbles, you would need 10,” available from: www.ncsu.edu/project/agronauts/workbooks/Mission_1_Glossary.doc [4 May 2009].
[5] Philip Yancey, Rumours of a Another World. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2003, p. 30.
[6] TNIV = Today’s New International Version, available from: http://www.tniv.info/bible/ [3 May 2009]. A hard copy of The TNIV Bible: Timeless Truth in Today’s Language (Today’s New International Version) 2005 is available from Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
[8] With help from Norman Geisler, “Tough Questions about God,” ch. 1, pp. 23-32, in Ravi Zacharias & Norman Geisler (gen. ed.) 2003, Who Made God? And Answers to over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
[10] The following is based on Christian Answers, available from: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c039.html [4 May 2009].
[12] “Who created God?” Christian Answers, loc. cit.
[13] “General relativity,” Wikipedia, available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity [4 May 2009].
[14] “Who created God?” Christian Answers, loc. cit.
[15] Norman L. Geisler 1999, “Thermodynamics, Laws of,” in Norman L. Geisler 1999, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, pp.723-724.
[16] Geisler, “Tough questions about God,” p. 24.
[20] Geisler, “Thermodynamics, Laws of,” p. 724.
[23] Geisler, “Tough questions about God,” p. 28.
[26] In “D.P’s Scrap Book,” New Life, 11th December 1997, p. 15.
[27] The following example is from R.C. Sproul 1987, One Holy Passion, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, p. 15.
[28] Sproul used “Mummy,” but I changed to “Daddy” because this message was originally presented at a men’s breakfast.
