Who created God?

Arguments that reason from the existence of the world to a first cause are called cosmological arguments. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy surveys the main forms, and none of the serious ones starts from “everything has a cause.” Their premises are deliberately narrower.

• The argument from contingency. A thing is contingent if it exists but could have failed to exist. You, the earth, and the Milky Way are all contingent. The argument says contingent things need an explanation outside themselves for why they exist rather than not.
• The kalam argument. First developed by medieval Muslim philosophers and defended today by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, it says that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Each premise covers only things that could have failed to exist, or things that began. The conclusion each argument draws is that there must be something that is neither: something that exists without depending on anything else, and that never began. Classical theism, the view of God held by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers for centuries, describes God in exactly those terms. So the premise does not reach God, and that was the argument’s point from the start, not a loophole added afterward.

Take any explanation and keep asking “and what explains that?” You end up with one of three things.

• An endless chain. Each dependent thing is explained by an earlier dependent thing, forever.
• A brute fact. At some point the answer is “it is there, and that is all.” Russell took roughly this view of the universe in a well-known 1948 radio debate.
• Something that exists by its own nature. Philosophers call this a necessary being: one that depends on nothing else and could not have failed to exist.

An endless chain of dependent things still leaves the whole chain unexplained. A train of carriages, each pulled by the one in front, never tells you why the train is moving, however many carriages you add. So the choice is usually between the second and third options. Your question assumes the theist is breaking a rule by stopping at God. Both of you stop. The question is which stopping point explains better.

Everything we observe in the universe is contingent. Stars form and burn out. Particles decay. The physical constants have particular values that physicists can describe but, so far, cannot derive from anything deeper. Every part of the universe looks like something that could have been different, or could have been absent.

Russell had a sharp reply to this: every human has a mother, but the human race does not have a mother, so you cannot infer a property of the whole from its parts. That is a fair warning, and it sometimes applies. Sometimes it does not: a wall built entirely of red bricks is red. A universe made entirely of things that could have failed to exist looks more like the wall than like the human race. Nothing about it suggests it had to exist.

Cosmology adds a further consideration, to be held more loosely. The standard Big Bang model traces the observable universe back to an extremely hot, dense state about 13.8 billion years ago. Some physicists think that was an absolute beginning; others propose models in which something came before it. This page does not depend on settling that. Even an endlessly old universe would still be a collection of contingent things.

Special pleading means treating two cases differently with no relevant difference between them. Here there is a relevant difference. The universe is the kind of thing the premise is about: dependent, changing, and possibly begun. A necessary being, by definition, is not. Treating different kinds of things differently is not special pleading when the difference is the very one at issue.

It helps to see what Christians mean by God. “Who created God?” pictures him as a very large object at the front of the line, the first domino, and that is not the claim. The Bible opens with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), but Christians hold that God is more than the one who started things. He is the reason there are any dominoes at all, and he keeps everything in existence at every moment. A New Testament letter says of Christ that “in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). Paul, in a speech recorded in the book of Acts, told an audience in Athens that God “gives everyone life and breath and everything else,” and that “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25, 28).

The medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas could argue for a first cause while granting that philosophy alone could not prove the universe had a beginning. His question was what everything depends on now, not what happened first.

If the argument works, it shows that something exists necessarily and that everything else depends on it. It does not show, by itself, that this something is personal, good, or the God of the Bible.

Some atheist philosophers accept that something necessary exists and argue that it is the universe’s earliest state, or the laws of physics, rather than God. That is a serious position, and the debate between it and theism is still live. If you hold it, you have already given up the idea that “Who created God?” ends the conversation; you are arguing about which necessary thing is more plausible.

Christians believe more than this argument can deliver, and they believe it on other grounds: that the moral law we feel binding on us points to a good source, which is the moral argument, and above all that God made himself known in Jesus of Nazareth. Those are separate arguments, with their own evidence.