When we claim that God has created everything in existence, the popular question is “Well, who created God?” While it’s meant to catch us in a bind, it actually points to how unique and incredible God is. And when people ask that question, they may be accidentally proving to themselves why God must exist.
Everything has a beginning
As humans, much of what we understand is based on past experience. When we’re trying to understand something new or unknown, we’ll often try to compare it to what we already understand about the world. Of course, this becomes difficult when we’re trying to understand something so unique and outside of our experience that nothing can compare.
This matters, because it’s why we struggle with this basic question about God. If everything is created by something, then who created God? And if something created Him, who created God’s creator? This question can stretch on to infinity because it makes one assumption: God must fit into our experience of everything being created by something else.
After all, everything we see was created by something. Even if you take God out of the discussion, everyone has an explanation for how the universe began. Cows don’t just pop into the world from nowhere. Mountains haven’t just always existed. Even science recognizes a law called the “Conservation of Mass,” which basically means that matter is never created or destroyed, but just changes its form.
Everything that is can trace itself back to some point of creation. This is part of “cause and effect.” Everything we see has a cause – it was started or created by something else. It’s like a line of dominoes – every falling domino is caused by another domino falling into it.
But at some point, this line of cause and effect has to actually start somewhere. We can’t have an infinite number of falling dominoes that keeps going back in time. At some point, whatever you believe about God or the origins of the universe, we must acknowledge that the line of dominoes started falling when a non-domino pushed the very first one. There had to be an “Uncaused Cause” that was started by nothing else.
The foundation for the Cosmological Argument
This is where the Cosmological Argument comes in. I’m going to dig a bit deeply into what this argument means, but don’t worry if it’s a lot to take in. There’s a shorter, more user-friendly version at the end. The goal right now isn’t to just give you some words to say, but help you understand why the argument is true.
In its simplest form, the Cosmological Argument answers the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” It looks something like this:
- Does something begin to exist on its own, or does something cause it to exist?
- Something causes it to exist.
- Does the universe exist?
- Obviously.
- Then something caused the universe to exist.
The question, of course, is what caused the universe to exist? Naturalistic explanations like the Big Bang may seem just as valid as God. So at first, it may seem like this only proves that anything could have created the universe, whether it was God or anything else.
However, ideas like the Big Bang have a major flaw. When we try to explain creation without God, we have to come down to the fact that, at some point, matter went from “not existing” to “existing.” We must claim that nothing created everything.
Everything must have a beginning, because the idea of “eternal existence” is impossible (to understand why, click here and scroll down to The Impossibility of Eternity). Thus, while the idea that matter came into existence on its own and exploded to create the universe is a way to maintain an atheistic worldview, it still can’t answer what caused that matter to start existing in the first place.
This leads us to another reason that God is the only explanation for existence. Nothing is required to exist, and in an atheistic worldview there is an equal chance of everything never existing at all. The question now becomes “why do things exist when nothing chooses for them to exist?”
A house could not be built, yet if we see a house it’s because someone chose to build it. A cloud could not exist, yet something happened to form it. Everything we see and experience is the effect of something that came before it – we can trace everything’s existence back to another cause.
So however someone chooses to explain the universe’s existence without God, they must answer one key question: Why did the beginning of the universe happen if nothing caused it to happen? Why did matter go from “not existing” to “existing” without something causing it? WIthout someone, or even something, that isn’t dependent on the cause-and-effect relationship of the universe, nothing could exist. We can’t say “Chance created everything” because “chance” doesn’t create – chance is a math term that explains the odds of something happening, and even that requires something to already exist.
That’s why God is called “The Uncaused Cause.” At a certain point, we are left with no choice but to say “Everything that exists was created by something that didn’t have to be created.” We also have to realize that this creator must be an intelligent being, because a rock doesn’t suddenly decide to create an entire universe. We also know this being is personal because He created things with order, purpose, beauty, and even created life when He could have left the universe as nothing more than nonliving material.
All of this is reflected by the God that we see in the Bible. God must exist because He’s the only one who exists outside of time, space, and matter, and thus didn’t need to be created by something else to exist. God, unlike everything else in the universe, isn’t dependent on something else for His creation and continued existence.
Simplifying the argument for everyday use
That’s a lot to understand, but that foundation won’t come up in most conversations. Let’s get down to the important things to remember.
- Everything around us is caused by something else
- That means that nothing just pops into existence
- We know that the universe exists
- Therefore, something had to cause the universe to exist.
From there, you can explain why there had to be an original creator that didn’t need something else to cause Him to exist.
If someone insists on the Big Bang, just ask them what caused it. However they answer, you can probably keep asking the same question: “Okay, but what caused that?” Doing that shows a massive weakness of explaining the universe without an intelligent, eternal creator.
Weaknesses of the argument
No argument can 100%, without question prove God’s existence. While God doesn’t call anyone to believe in Him on blind faith, there is a certain point where we have to look at the evidence and realize that we’re left with no choice but for God to be the answer to everything.
One of the biggest weaknesses of this argument is that it doesn’t prove God, but just proves… something. It certainly pokes holes in an atheistic worldview, but won’t have as much impact on someone who already believes in some sort of creator. Whether they’re agnostic, pagan, or Jehovah’s Witness, this argument won’t do much to dissuade them from their false beliefs.
Likewise, this isn’t a magic bullet against atheists. As I understand it, the current way to counter this argument is to point to a “singularity.” This basically means that there’s a certain point in the formation of the universe where things like time and logic break down. We can trace existence back to something like the Big Bang, but before that we just don’t have enough scientific understanding to know what was happening before that. The conclusion, they would say, isn’t that God must exist, but that we simply aren’t advanced enough to understand how everything could come from nothing.
Final thoughts
Understand that the goal of this argument isn’t to convert people on the spot. Much of arguing for God’s existence is planting seeds that make them test their own worldview, and praying for the Holy Spirit to bring them to the cross. If we have a relationship with these people, God will likely use us in future discussions to help them see the truth of the gospel. However, don’t be surprised if a conversation with a stranger ends with them seeming no more convinced of God’s existence than when you first met them.
However, our success isn’t defined by what we see. Remember that our goal is to be faithful servants of Jesus Christ, who love God with our minds and are always ready to point people to the truth. It’s important that we know the gospel, but we also need to understand why we believe what we believe in every area of life. Simply saying “God exists because the Bible says so” will convince no one. Why do we believe the Bible is trustworthy? Why do we believe God exists in the way we think? How do we know Mormons don’t have it right, and we’re in the wrong?
In life, we’re going to encounter people with much different beliefs than our own. When that happens, we have a few options:
- doubt the beliefs we can’t defend
- fear those who question our faith and only surround ourselves with people who won’t challenge us (sometimes to the extreme of being hostile to anyone not like us)
- glorify God by explaining why faith in Him isn’t just reasonable, but it’s the only thing that makes sense
Let’s choose to love God, and love others, by knowing how to explain (and defend) why we believe what we believe.
Pingback: Can Good Exist Without God? The Moral Argument (Simplifying Arguments for God’s Existence #3) – Onward in the Faith