Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer responds to the “who created God” argument. Drawing on philosophical insights, he challenges atheists to move beyond this flawed argument and explore more substantial discussions about the existence and nature of God.
Transcription:
One of the most common arguments I hear against Christianity, and against religion more broadly is this idea that we don’t need a creator. If you say, hey, creation needs a creator, the response is also, well, who made God or who created God. In fact, this is such a common problem it has its own Wikipedia entry called The Problem of the Creator of God. You’ll find versions of this from some of the better known atheists, but I encountered it recently on Twitter or ex Twitter and I liked the way the problem was presented because it was clear the person the atheist responded.
If you say everything must have a creator, their response is well if everything must have a creator, then your God needs a creator and his creator needs a creator and so on ad infinitum. But if you say everything except God needs a creator, then allegedly you’re making special exceptions just to keep your false beliefs intact. Your fallacy is called special pleading. Look it up. Well, I’ve actually studied logic, and that’s not what special bleeding is.
Now I can show at a glance why this objection doesn’t work, or we can take kind of a deeper dive. Let’s start with kind of the at a glance. It can’t have an end, because that’s a sign of contingency. If it, if it’s born, if it dies, if there’s ever a time it didn’t exist, if there’s ever any conditions under which it didn’t exist, we know there must be something else. Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it like this. If at one time nothing was in existence, like if at one time there was just nothing, you’re never going to get the conditions to get anything.
So if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist. If you say everything in the universe exists under certain conditions, and at one point there was nothing, you have no conditions and so nothing can come into being. You can’t say originally there was nothing, and then when the conditions were just right, the universe popped into being. No, if you’ve got nothing, you have no conditions and therefore the universe doesn’t pop into being. That’s as simple as it is.
So if at one time there’s nothing, then it would be impossible for anything to ever exist. And even now we have nothing, which is absurd because we realize this is not nothing. Existence exists. Therefore we don’t just have conditional things. We don’t have things that just are merely possible. But there must be something which has necessary existence. There must be something that always has existed, always will exist. So that gets us to a necessary being.
Now, I want to be clear about the limitations of the argument At this point. We don’t know everything about the unmoved mover. We don’t know everything about the God who created all of existence. We know a few things. So we know, for one that the God of the universe isn’t in the universe because everything in the universe is contingent. We know a second thing. The God of the universe must be eternal, cannot have a beginning, cannot have an end. That’s logically required by this.
We know a third thing. The God of the universe is an unmoved mover. No one created God. So that still leaves us a lot of work in figuring out is the God of Christianity. The God described by logic is the God that we encounter in the Bible, the one in the same God that we’ve reasoned our way to knowing the existence of. But we at least know this. The question who created God is an absurd argument. It does not understand. It’s like saying What Car pulls the engine car, or saying under what conditions will an unconditional thing happen.
It just misunderstands the whole terms of the debate. So if you’re an atheist, I would invite you A not to use that argument, B get better arguments, or better yet, C have a humble intellectual curiosity but finding out if maybe you’re wrong about atheism and maybe if God does logically exist and has in fact revealed himself.
For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.