In the main religious traditions that believe in God, the answer is that nobody created God. God is understood as eternal and uncaused, the one being that has always existed and depends on nothing else. Sceptics reply that this is exactly the point in dispute: if everything needs a cause, God should need one too, and if something can exist without a cause, it might just as well be the universe. This guide explains why the question is asked, how believers answer it, the main objections, and what it shows about arguments for God.
Who Created God? At a Glance
| Position | Answer to “Who created God?” |
|---|---|
| Classical theism (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) | No one. God is eternal, uncaused and necessary |
| Kalam cosmological argument | Only things that begin to exist need a cause, and God did not begin to exist |
| Bertrand Russell and many sceptics | If everything needs a cause, so does God; if not, the universe may need none either |
| Agnostic view | We do not know what, if anything, lies behind the universe |
Why People Ask Who Created God
The question usually arises as a reply to the first-cause, or cosmological, argument for God. In its simplest form the argument says that everything has a cause, that the chain of causes cannot go back for ever, and so there must be a first cause, which is God. Children often ask “Who made God?” as soon as they hear this, and philosophers have taken the question seriously for centuries.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell gave the best-known version in his 1927 lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian”. He said he had accepted the first-cause argument as a young man until he read a sentence in John Stuart Mill’s autobiography in which Mill recalled his father teaching him that the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question “Who made God?” Russell concluded that if everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause, and if there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God. More recently the biologist Richard Dawkins pressed a related point in The God Delusion (2006): a designer complex enough to create the universe would itself need explaining.
How Believers Answer: God Is Uncaused
Most philosophers who defend the cosmological argument say that Russell’s version is not the argument they make. They do not claim that everything has a cause. They claim that things which exist only because something else brings them about need a cause, and that this chain must end in something which does not depend on anything else. Such a being would not be the kind of thing that could be created. Asking who created it would be like asking who drew the corners of a circle: the question misunderstands what is being described.
Thomas Aquinas set out arguments of this kind in his Five Ways in the Summa Theologiae, and Gottfried Leibniz built a version on what he called the principle of sufficient reason: that no fact can be real and no statement true without a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise. On this view the universe needs an explanation outside itself, while God, as a necessary being, carries the explanation of his existence within his own nature. Defenders argue that this means a demand to explain God’s existence is out of place.
The Kalam Version: Whatever Begins to Exist
A second answer comes from the kalam cosmological argument, which goes back to medieval Islamic philosophy and especially to al-Ghazali, who argued that everything that begins to exist requires a cause of its beginning. The philosopher William Lane Craig has made it widely known today. Its first premise is that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. Its second is that the universe began to exist. It concludes that the universe has a cause. Because God is held never to have begun to exist, the first premise does not apply to God, and so the question of who created God does not arise.
It is worth being clear about what believers are saying here. They do not claim that the universe came from nothing for no reason; as explained in what theists actually believe about origins, they claim that it came from God.
The Main Objections
Special pleading
Critics say that exempting God from the need for a cause is special pleading unless there is an independent reason to think God, and only God, could exist without one. If an uncaused, eternal reality is possible, they ask, why could it not be the universe itself, or some deeper physical reality from which the universe arose?
The beginning of the universe
The kalam argument depends on the universe having begun. Modern cosmology describes the expansion of the universe from a hot, dense state, but physicists do not agree on whether that was an absolute beginning or whether something came before it. Our ordinary ideas of cause and effect may not apply at that point at all.
Explaining the whole
David Hume argued that once each part of a series has been explained, there is nothing left over to explain: grouping the parts into a whole is, as he put it, an arbitrary act of the mind. Immanuel Kant argued that the cosmological argument quietly relies on the ontological argument, which tries to show that God exists from the concept of God alone and which Kant thought fails. That argument is explained in what is the ontological argument?
From a first cause to God
Even if there were a first cause, critics note that further argument is needed to show that it is a personal being, still exists, cares about humans or matches the God of any particular religion. A first cause on its own could be impersonal.
Gaps in knowledge
Some sceptics also worry that the first-cause argument places God wherever current science runs out, a style of reasoning known as god of the gaps reasoning. Defenders reply that their argument rests on general principles about causes and explanation, not on gaps in today’s physics.
The Complexity Question
Dawkins’s version of the question targets design arguments as well as first-cause arguments. Arguments from design, like the watchmaker analogy, say that complex things need a designer. Dawkins argued that a being able to design a universe would be at least as complex as what it designed, so the explanation would be more in need of explaining than the thing explained. Many theistic philosophers reply that God, as traditionally understood, is not made of parts and so is simple rather than complex, and that an explanation does not have to be explained itself before it can be accepted. Critics answer that a mind with unlimited knowledge and power is hard to call simple.
What the Question Shows
“Who created God?” does not by itself disprove God, and it does not refute the most careful versions of the cosmological argument, which never claimed that everything has a cause. What it does is bring the real issue into focus. Every account of reality, religious or not, ends with something that is not explained by anything further. Believers say that ultimate fact is God; many sceptics say it may be the universe or the laws of physics; others say we do not yet know. The disagreement is over which stopping point is more reasonable, and for many people the difference between agnostic and atheist turns on how they answer it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do Christians say about who created God?
Christian theology, like Jewish and Islamic theology, teaches that God was not created. God is eternal and the source of everything else, so there was never a time when God did not exist.
If everything has a cause, what caused God?
Defenders of the cosmological argument say they do not claim that everything has a cause, only that things which depend on something else, or which begin to exist, do. Critics reply that this exemption needs a reason, and that the universe might be exempt instead.
Did Bertrand Russell disprove the first-cause argument?
Russell showed that the simplest version, which says everything has a cause, contradicts itself if God is then left uncaused. Most philosophers agree with that point, but more careful versions of the argument avoid it, and they are still debated.
Could the universe have always existed?
Physicists do not yet know whether the expansion of the universe marks an absolute beginning. Some models describe a beginning and others allow something before it, so the question remains open.
Summary
Believers answer “Who created God?” by saying that God was not created: God is eternal, uncaused and necessary, while the universe depends on something beyond itself. The question still has force against simple first-cause arguments, as Bertrand Russell showed, and critics argue that exempting God from the need for a cause is special pleading unless there is good reason to think the universe could not be the uncaused thing instead. The question ultimately comes down to where explanation should stop, and that is still debated. For the wider case on both sides, see is God real?
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Cosmological Argument”. plato.stanford.edu.
- Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian”, lecture given in 1927.
- John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873).
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006).
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part I, question 2, article 3.
- David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), part IX.