THINK ABOUT THIS: Who Created God?
Whoa! That’s quite a big question up there in the headline to this post. But it captures a question that is often heard when an atheist or agnostic considers whether God exists. It’s also sometimes meant more rhetorically than as a serious inquiry.
But to answer the question, there can only be three possible kinds of beings — self-caused, caused by another and uncaused. Think for a moment: To be self-caused requires that you be in existence, but if you are already in existence, then how can you be self-caused? Clearly, you can’t. So God is not a self-caused being.
Paul the Apostle, by Rembrandt. Paul knew his way around philosophy. (Wikimedia Commons)
What about if God was created by some other being? Then God would be dependent upon that other being, which would then raise the same question about that being that we started with regarding God. That puts us into what is known as an Infinite Regress – every cause has a prior cause.
Unless, that is, there is actually the third kind of being mentioned at the outset. If God is neither self-caused nor caused by another , then God is uncaused, what philosopher Thomas Aquinas called a necessary, infinite being. God exists outside of time, space and matter.
And so we see that asking who caused or created God is like asking what time is purple. Time is not a measure of color, so the question is nonsensical. Like asking who created an infinite being known as God.
Speaking of purple, there is a fascinating little (6″X4″), 46 page book written by a smart fellow named Tom Hammond. The title is, coincidentally, “What Times Is Purple: And Other Intriguing Questions On The Road To Truth.”
Hammond does a great job of answering brain-twisting questions in plain English, at an easy pace and with good humor. If you would like a free copy of it, just drop me a note with your snail mail address at: mark.tapscott@hillfaith.org.
Since You’re Here:
Where Do Natural Laws Come From? Dr. Frank Turek.
Contrary to what the OED and purveyors of indo-european have been pushing, the word “G-d” is derived from the Hebrew “echad”, or one and monotheism. Deus, domini, divinity, and the rest are derived from polytheististc sources.
That is the part that really is beyond human comprehension. Whether you are talking about God or “the Big Bang” it requires that SOMETHING was always there and not created. Everything we see or imagine came from something.
God is outside of time. Without time, there is no “before” nor “after”; there is no “cause and effect”; there is no “infinite regress” – there is no Eternity.
As always, it depends on what you think you mean by ‘God’, eh?
But God, being infinitely outside of time, space and matter, is not subject to such closed loop logic.
Exactly right! But Epimenides presents an irresolvable paradox, not a “closed loop.” Divinity as a Transcendent Immanence is not amenable to rational, syllogistic “if-then” explication. Inspirational “truth greater than proof” is very liberating.
Epimenides is doing closed loop logic precisely because his paradox is closed to resolution by God.
As posted repeatedly, this epistemic “something-rather-than-nothing” is beyond Aristotle’s if-then syllogistic logic, a “truth beyond proof” entailing 2,500-year old Epimenides of Crete’s formally undecidable Paradox of Contradictory Self-Reference to effect that “all Cretans are liars”– if Epimenides speaks truth, he lies; but if he lies, then he speaks truth.
Just so, if a Transcendent Immanence creates all things, and only those things, that do not create themselves, does this Primum Mobile create itself? If it does, it doesn’t; but if it doesn’t, then it does. As Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein affirmed, this makes nonsense of semantic vs. semiotic premises (Symbol vs. Sign) without invalidating the cosmic reality that Creatures-of-Nature (“Nature’s God”?) manifestly do exist.
In context and perspective, mathematical logician Kurt Godel resolved Epimenides’ conundrum in 1932, proving that “a complete set of axioms is inconsistent, a consistent of axioms is incomplete.” In other words, for any system more complex than Euclidean Geometry, fundamental “axioms of choice” preclude verifying self-referential premises. Interestingly, this bears directly on cosmological questions such as Guth Expansion (Hoyle’s “Big Bang”), dark matter/energy, entropic “heat death,” relativistic time-dilation vs. quantum-probabilistic phase-space in an Eternal Present, and so forth.
Gentlemen, choose your weapons! But be aware that, whatever ball or blade you choose, there never, ever, can be “one best way.”