Is "Who Made God?" a Problem for Theists?
Friday, December 27, 2019 at 9:45PM For the third day of Christmas, a new topic, again focused on confusions about some aspect of Christianity. (Though not specifically Christianity, in this case.) We live in a strangely bifurcated age, with pockets where rationality is celebrated and other pockets where it is ignored or derided. Unfortunately, religious belief is often found in the second set of pockets, and this arises among believers and unbelievers alike. Case in point: the idea raised by some atheists that the question, “Who made God?”, poses a problem for theism.
Now, if a Christian or some other theist (e.g. a Jew or a Muslim) argued as follows:
Everything that exists has a cause.
The universe exists.
Therefore, the universe has a cause – God.
the objection would make sense. Against this sort of argument, it would be appropriate to ask about God’s cause, as the first premise doesn’t just invite it; it demands it.
The problem is that no religious believer in history has ever made this argument.* What theists have argued is that anything that begins to exist has a cause, or anything that is contingent has a cause, or anything that appears to be designed and can’t be explained by necessity or chance has a (designing) cause, and so on. There is always some qualification: things of a certain sort are such that they are not self-explanatory, and ultimately depend for their existence on something which is not of the same sort and therefore not in need of the same sort of explanation. (A being that is reasonably construed as God.) The arguments may or may not succeed, but if they fail it’s not because the property in need of explanation is also possessed by God.
But leave this aside. Maybe that’s one reason why some non-theists have asked the question. But why can’t the question be asked anyway? Isn’t it reasonable to ask, who made God? Maybe what we call “God” is really God-1, who is made by God-2, who is made by …God-N. Could it be gods (rather than turtles) all the way down? And if not, isn’t that a reason to just rule out any gods at all?
This argument may be relevant to certain conceptions of God. If one is talking about Zeus or Odin, for example – finite gods whose existence isn’t in any way self-explanatory – then sure. But this is not the conception of God held by traditional Christians (or traditional Jews or Muslims). God is supposed to be a necessary being, independent in principle of all other beings, self-explanatory and the source of all existence. To ask about the maker of such a being is a bit like asking what’s north of the earth’s north pole. If we understand what it is for something to be the north pole, we understand that it makes no sense to ask what’s north of it. Likewise, to ask what accounts for the existence of the source of all existence is likewise a nonsensical question.
Note: this is not by itself an argument that God exists, just as the north pole argument doesn’t prove that there is a north pole. Had there been no earth, its north pole obviously wouldn’t have existed, either. Similarly, we’re not saying that there is an uncreated, self-explanatory God that is the source of all existence. Rather, the claim is that if God exists, it makes no sense to ask who or what caused God to exist. Some things can be caused to exist, but if there’s a God, he’s not one of them.
* Okay, that’s too strong a claim. There was probably a drunk philosopher, a depressed theologian, and a couple of couple of college sophomores on spring break who each came employed it. But the number of times theists have been accused of making this sort of argument, as opposed to the number of times they’ve actually made it, is probably two or three orders of magnitude in favor of the first option.
Reader Comments (4)
I think the source of all exlatence is the Spaghetti monster, in its infinite wisdom and perfection.
Don’t you dare ask why it’s the Spaghetti monster and not the Broccoli one. That’s like asking what’s north of the North pole.
[DM: I may do a post on the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" topic soon. But briefly, the question is whether the nature of the FSM is self-explanatory or not. If it's not, then like the gods of traditional mythology it can't be God. If it is, then it will be by virtue of having the sorts of properties possessed by God as classically conceived, in which case the pasta properties are irrelevant at best. FSM-based parody arguments may carry some weight against finite, anthropomorphic conceptions of god, but don't work against the classical concept of God. (Again, the point isn't that God exists, but that parody arguments from the FSM do nothing to undermine belief in God. You're welcome to wear your colander though - it's a free internet.)]
Where does the axiom of necessary being come from?
[DM: Could you spell this out a bit, if what follows doesn't address your concern?
I'm not claiming that there is a necessary being, only that this is (part of) what classical theists like Christians, Jews, and Muslims mean when they talk about God. (Of course, I believe such a being exists, but I'm not asserting it in the post and there's nothing in its argument that relies on it. An atheist could - and should - agree with everything written there. [And plenty do. This is a popular misunderstanding, not one that's common among philosophers of religion, regardless of their beliefs.]) One could ask the theist, "Why do you believe in a necessary, self-existent being?" That's a reasonable question. The question, "What created the necessary, self-existent being you believe in?" is, however, not reasonable, but nonsensical. (Likewise, one might ask "Why do you believe in the North Pole?"; asking "What [on earth] is north of the North Pole" only shows that one doesn't understand the concept of the North Pole.)]
I think your argument above isn't very fair Dennis. Point of the flying spaghetti monster is it's really to show that aside from some causal characteristic for the universe, there are many mutually exclusive substitutions for the classical God (whatever that happens to mean to the particular person making the argument). There's nothing that says that my conception of God has to be sentient or has to have a personal relationship with you or even has to have influence in the universe post creation.
[DM: Fair enough, at a first pass. In fact, classical theism does address that, but I didn't fill in the details. My point, which could have been made clearer to avoid this sort of worry, was not that only God as fully spelled out in some particular understanding of Christianity could be the creator (I said nothing about the doctrine of the Trinity, or whether God is everlasting or eternal, passible or impassible, simple, etc.). And to be fair to me, I more than once added parentheticals including Judaism and Islam, both of which reject the doctrine of the Trinity. So there was indirect evidence that I wasn't offering a complete concept of God with all the necessary and sufficient conditions spelled out.
All I really want to argue for in this post is that Zeus & other obviously finite (and in many cases, physical) gods are fundamentally different from what any classical theist means by God that the objection that says "Hey Christians, you're atheists about all these other gods, you should be more consistent and join us in rejecting just one more god." My point is - and here, only is - that this objection badly misunderstands what Christians - and Jews, and Muslims - believe. As I said, even if we thought that the God of classical theism did not exist but that Zeus & his pals on Mt. Olympus did, we would not thereby be theists.]
So I don't think you get to say that all non-contingent universe creating things meet your definition of God.
[DM: Same points.]
Honestly it gets a lot worse from here though because our language is constructed around time and motion which are things that are only known to exist inside the universe. The upshot of this is there is literally no good vocabulary to talk about what it means to exist or to act outside of space time. This is true for scientific discussion as well. There is mathematics in physics that applies to different concepts of nothing but most of it still exists inside the framework of space-time.
[DM: First of all, this seems completely irrelevant to the argument I'm making. This still wouldn't show that what classical theists mean by "God" would be susceptible to the objection I'm addressing in the post. Second, let's suppose I grant for the moment that the basis for our language about God comes from the empirical world. Okay, so what? Aquinas was an empiricist in this sense, and many other Christians and other classical theists in history and today have been as well. It doesn't seem to follow that we couldn't make inferences about what's outside of space-time. Third, I don't see any reason to accept your claim. At a minimum, it's entirely question-begging. The hard problem of consciousness, for instance, is a hard problem (though not the only hard problem) precisely because consciousness is nothing like what we discuss and investigate in the physical world. Even if it turned out that it's completely caused by the physical, its nature is still of a sort that we ultimately know through introspection, not by third-person empirical observation. Ethical and aesthetic properties are also grasped by non-empirical means. Even if you reject these properties as robustly understood, the robust misunderstanding is still not the product of scientific or proto- or quasi-scientific investigation. But these are rabbit trails in any case - let's stick to the argument I'm making rather than dragging in other major issues.]
The first problem with "anything that begins to exist has a cause" is to demosntrate that this is correct. Put this way it contradicts quantum mechanics - take for instance electron-positron pair production for instance. A solution is to broaden the definition of "cause" so much that it's recognible and should be replaced by something like "explanation". Then another problem, a crucial one rises: quantum fields may very well be a natural example of a First Explanation that did not begin to exist. There is no reason that the First Cause (Explanation) that caused (explained) the first natural phenomenon that began to exist has to be supernatural. It very well can be natural.
So not even the best version of the argument is justified.
[DM: As you refer to William Lane Craig's work below, you know that the matter isn't so simple, for several reasons. First, there are interpretations of QM that make an appeal to hidden variables (appealed to by those who like their physics deterministic (e.g. Einstein), and it does seem to be at least probabilistic in any case. Nor is something coming from nothing - the quantum "void" is not a true void - the region of spacetime from which quantum particles come is not a literal, propertyless nothing. So even if the causation of quantum particles or of quantum decay is genuinely random, there doesn't seem to be any clear reason to think that those events are uncaused or examples of something coming into existence "from" a literal nothing.]
On internet I've met qutie a few christians who indeed claimed that "this is by itself an argument that God exists" and even become specific. They point at the Big Bang, despite one of two who formulated the hypothesis (the other and first one was atheist commie Alexander Friedman), catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, explicitly warning not to do so. The most famous one probably is WL Craig. Another one is Dutch mathematician and apologist Emanuel Rutten, who explicitly rejects quantum mechanic probabilism. So it speaks for you that you don't.
[DM: As much as I appreciate this kumbaya moment, I'm afraid you might be misunderstanding my argument. (Which is a pity - I like these rare moments of agreement! :)) What I meant was that refuting the "Who made God?" misunderstanding isn't itself an argument for God's existence. The conclusion of my argument against "Who made God?" is that IF God exists, God isn't the sort of being that could have a cause of its existence. It doesn't say that God does in fact exist. I do think there are good arguments for God's existence, but the foregoing doesn't even purport to be one of them.
But turning to the issue of the Big Bang, I would agree with you that *just* the fact of the Big Bang, by itself, without any supplementary premises, doesn't show that God exists - particularly the God of classical theism or the biblical God. One would need to argue that the universe needs a cause of its existence (the issue raised by your first paragraph) and that this cause needs to be a personal one, and even that offers a relatively bare understanding of God. That's not to say that a naturalist will be happy at this point, but only to say that a traditional Christian (for example) hasn't supported everything he or she might want to.
Of course, there are other sorts of cosmological arguments (and other, non-cosmological arguments) for the existence of God. None of Aquinas's cosmological arguments, for instance, say anything about a beginning of the universe - he's concerned with the ultimate dependence of contingent beings on a necessary being. Leibniz's cosmological argument is likewise unconcerned with temporal chains of succession.]