WHO MADE GOD?

C DeSalvo

A common tactic of atheistic debaters and writers is to challenge believers with the difficult-to-answer question: “Who made God.” Let’s think about the word: “made.” It and similar words such as “produced,” and “created” are sensible only within an environment, like our universe, that contains time. Without time, nothing can be “made.” There is no time in which to make it.

Since time is inherent throughout our existence, it’s natural for humans to think that time is everywhere. But we can’t assume that time exists outside the universe. To imply that God was made, as does the question, “Who made God?,” is not valid. Without time, nothing can be made, something simply exists or it doesn’t.

Religious thinkers in the distant past have explained that there is no time in the place where God exists. God is timeless. And the Jewish philosopher Nahmanides (1194 – 1270) taught there was no time even in the earliest universe.

Humans cannot understand how anything can exist without time, but according to the modern, scientific Big Bang theory, Nahmanides was correct. Somehow the universe began as only space and free energy (photons of light) and without time. Modern science argues that time is a property of matter, and since there was no matter at the very beginning of the Big Bang, there was no time.

From the beginning of science until a mere 75 years ago, science preached that the universe was independent of time -- that the universe was eternal. But today, many scientists complain that nothing, not even God, is independent of time. Why this change in science’s perception of time?

God's existence is a mystery that humans cannot explain. But many atheists demand answers to a host of questions before they will believe. And atheists will not even consider the possibility that God is more intelligent than they are. That there are mysteries they couldn’t understand even if God explained them! If God listens, perhaps He sometimes feels like a flabbergasted parent whose three-year old child demands an explanation for the origin of electricity and gravity.

So who made God? No one and no thing made God. God simply is. Is that hard for humans to understand. Yes it is. God was before the universe, matter and time, and God will be after the universe, matter and time are gone. How can God exist without time? No one knows. Many refuse to believe it is a possibility. Too many minds are constrained by their limited knowledge, and they cannot accept that anything might exist outside their environment or their personal experience.

Are you still confused? Think more carefully. Where God is, there is no time. Without time there is no motion of any kind, no matter (no atoms), not even thought (electric flow through neurons), and therefore nothing can be made. That’s why it is meaningless to ask: Who made God.” Humans cannot understand God. By analogy, can a cricket understand a human? God is so far beyond humans that we cannot even understand how God exists.

So how can any human decide whether there is a God or not? How should he relate to God? In the same manner that all truly rational humans make any decision – evaluate with great fairness absolutely all the evidence and arguments, pro and con.