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.