One argument for the existence of God involves the impossibility of an actual infinite past. We cannot trace a pattern of cause and effect back into an eternal past. One difficulty is that we could never have arrived at the present point of time. What created the universe? The big bang. What caused the big bang? A quantum fluctuation in the multiverse (one possible scenario). What caused that multiverse to exist? Some previous multiverse. What caused that previous or broader multiverse to exist? And so on forever.

There are many problems with this naturalistic picture of an infinitely old cosmos. The Christian solution (as well as that of other theists such as Jews and Muslims) is to say that the universe is not eternal; that it was created by something other than the universe, and that is God. But then someone will ask, “Who created God?” This is actually a rather silly question, though some of those who ask the question have taken to calling themselves “Brights.” As Christian apologist William Lane Craig once replied to the “Who created God?” question: “That’s really a meaningless question. It’s like wracking your brain wondering, ‘What is the cause of the First Uncaused Cause?'”

John Lennox, professor of Mathematics at Oxford, gives his answer to this question in his excellent book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Lennox writes:

There is another objection to the existence of God that is related to the preceding one [about God needing to be more complex than the universe]. Much attention has been drawn to it by the fact that Richard Dawkins has made it a central issue in his best-selling book The God Delusion. It is the age-old schoolboy teaser: If we say that God created the universe we shall have to ask who created God and so on, so that, according to Dawkins, the only way out of an impossible infinite regress is to deny that God exists.

Is this really the best that the Brights can do? I can hear an Irish friend saying: ‘Well, it proves one thing — if they had a better argument they would use it.’ If that is thought to be a rather strong reaction, just think of the question: Who made God? The very asking of it shows that the questioner has a created God in mind. It is then scarcely surprising that one calls one’s book The God Delusion. For that is precisely what a created god is, a delusion, virtually by definition — as Xenophanes pointed out centuries before Dawkins. A more informative title might have been: The Created-God Delusion. The book could then have been reduced to a pamphlet — but sales might just have suffered.

Now Dawkins candidly tells us that he does not like people telling him that they also do not believe in the God in which he does not believe. But we cannot afford to base our arguments on his dislikes. For, whether he likes it or not, he openly invites the charge. After all, it is he who is arguing that God is a delusion. In order to weigh his argument we need first of all to know what he means by God. And his main argument is focussed on a created God. Well, several billion of us would share his disbelief in such a god. He needn’t have bothered. Most of us have long since been convinced of what he is trying to tell us. Certainly, no Christian would ever dream of suggesting that God was created. Nor, indeed, would Jews or Muslims. His argument, by his own admission, has nothing to say about an eternal God. It is entirely beside the point. Dawkins should shelve it on the shelf marked ‘Celestial Teapots’ where it belongs.

For the God who created and upholds the universe was not created — he is eternal. He was not ‘made’ and therefore subject to the laws that science discovered; it was he who made the universe with its laws. Indeed, that fact constitutes the fundamental distinction between God and the universe. The universe came to be, God did not.

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Notes:

The William Lane Craig quote is from Reasonable Faith, 3rd edition, p. 193.

The long quote from Lennox is from the 2009 edition of God’s Undertaker, pp. 182-183.