DEBATENATE

Topics / Faith and God

The challenge

“Who made God, then?”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

Nobody made God. That's what the word means. The argument was never that everything needs a cause. It's that whatever begins to exist needs a cause. The universe began, so it needs one. God never began. Psalm ninety calls him God from everlasting to everlasting. Walk with me for a second. Picture a line of falling dominoes. If every domino needs another one to knock it over, and nothing gives the first push, nothing ever falls. Something has to stand at the front that nothing knocked over. You'll say, fine, make the universe the eternal thing. The evidence we have points to a beginning, and an eternal thing can't have one. Now ask yourself what a God who was made would even be. He'd be a creature, and you'd go looking for his maker. The first cause can't be the second domino.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The claim is that whatever begins to exist has a cause, not that everything does. An eternal God never began, so he needs no maker.

    Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways argue for a first cause that is not itself caused by anything else.

  2. The universe is the thing that shows signs of a beginning. So the universe is the thing that needs a cause.

    Borde, Guth and Vilenkin showed that a universe which has on average been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past, though physicists still debate what lies at that boundary.

  3. The Bible never describes a God who came into being. It describes the eternal source of everything else.

    Psalm ninety describes God as existing from everlasting to everlasting, before the mountains or the world were formed.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Why not just say the universe is the uncaused thing and skip God?

Nate: The universe shows every sign of a beginning, and an uncaused thing can't have one. Whatever caused space, time and matter stands outside space, time and matter. That sounds a lot more like God than like the universe.

The lines

Sources

  1. The Bible, Psalm 90
  2. Borde, Guth and Vilenkin, Physical Review Letters, Inflationary spacetimes are incomplete in past directions (2003)
  3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 2, Article 3 (c. 1265-1274)

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