Quest

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If God Made the Universe, What Made God?

The Bard by John Martin, 1817

Humanity can claim to have invented many things, but oxygen is not one of them. We depend upon oxygen for our existence, thus, none of us would be in a very good position at all to have invented it. Whatever brought oxygen into existence, would have had to exist independent of oxygen. This may seem rather trivial, even silly, but it is an important concept in answering the question of what caused God.

As I explained in another post, as well as in a short video, just as a woman cannot give birth to herself, so nature could not have brought itself into existence. The cause of nature, therefore, must be not-natural (i.e., supernatural). Let’s call the supernatural cause of nature, “God”. This raises the obvious question, “what made God?”.

One of the principle components of nature is time. Just as humans could not possibly have invented oxygen, since they depend upon it, nothing dependent upon time for its existence could have caused time to begin. It follows from this that if God is the origin of time, then God cannot be dependent upon time for His own existence. He existed in a timeless state.

For something that is timeless, it is logically impossible to have a temporal beginning. Without a beginning, no cause is possible. It follows from this that, since God has a timeless existence, it is logically impossible for God to have been caused by yet something else. To ask what caused God is to assume God had a temporal beginning, but that is impossible for a timeless God.

We must conclude that the Cause of nature is not only supernatural but eternal, beginningless, and uncaused. The beauty of this is that there is no infinite regression of causes into the past. The ultimate foundation of physical reality, including time itself, is supernatural, eternal, and uncaused.

This could be summarized in a simple syllogism as follows ….

1.  The cause of time is God.

2.  To cause time to exist, God is necessarily timeless.

3.  If God is timeless, then a temporal beginning is impossible.

4.  If something has no beginning, then it has no cause.

5.  Therefore, logic requires that God is timeless, beginningless, and uncaused.

I have made a short, two-minute video (below) where I explain this in a slightly different wa