Then Who Created God?

Have you ever witnessed an elaborate display of dominos falling? I’m talking about a masterpiece with thousands of dominos. Each domino is positioned perfectly to push over the next, and the next, and so on. Almost every domino falls because of the one before it. But it doesn’t take a domino expert to tell us that something else must have pushed the first domino.

We encounter a similar question when we think about the universe. Everything in the universe began to exist because of something else. I’m alive because of my parents, and my parents because of their parents, and so on. But where did it all begin? Surely it can’t go on forever.

Christians offer God as the start and origin of it all, that first domino. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). But to some that answer may only seem to delay the inevitable next question: Then who created God?

I think this is a good question to ask. It is the sign of a thinking brain and an inquisitive mind. And fortunately, it is a question with an answer.

This question is only difficult to answer when we don’t have a correct understanding of what we mean by the word “God”.

God is Being

The same God who created everything “in the beginning” later reveals a little more about his mystery. When Moses asked for God’s name, God answered with the mysterious, “I am who am” (Ex 3:14, Douay-Rheims). Put another way, he is the one who “is”.

In these cryptic words, God revealed much about himself. The Catechism explains that the revelation of this name “contains then the truth that God alone IS” (CCC 213).

This means that God isn’t just the greatest being, the biggest domino. He isn’t even a being. He is the source of all being, or as St. Thomas Aquinas put it, he is “Him who is subsisting being itself”.[1]

"He isn’t even a being. He is the source of all being"
 

Let’s break this down a bit with the example of a rock. Take a hard object that is a rock. Not only is it a rock, but it also exists. There are two facts on the table: What the rock is and that it is. It’s essence and existence are distinct. Sure, a thing must exist before it can be a rock. But there is still a distinction.

Created things don’t have to exist - existence isn’t neces sary for us. Think about it. We haven’t always existed. If our existence were necessary we would always need to have it - we would be immortal. But that isn’t the case, so we need an explanation for why we exist. According to Kreeft and Tacelli, created things “have a need for being that they cannot themselves supply.”[2] We need existence, but it isn’t ours by nature.

Now consider God, the source of being, the one “who is”. God’s existence is necessary. He has always had existence, and he can’t one day not have it. He is immortal. In this way, being is part of his nature, his essence. “That he exists is not a happy accident, not due to some other being as his cause,” explain Kreeft and Tacelli. In this way, “being must be inseparable from what he is; it must belong to him by nature.”[3]

Thus we call God the “source” of being.

So when we speak of God, we aren’t talking about one who inherits His existence as we do. We’re talking about one who is being itself.

God is Eternal

God’s eternal nature also plays into our question. It’s tempting to think of eternity as an infinite amount of time, time without end. But that’s not accurate. To exist in eternity is to exist outside of time, to not be limited by time.

"To exist in eternity is to exist outside of time, to not be limited by time"

You see, for God to create the universe, he must be outside of it. That means he is outside of our three spatial dimensions, as well as our fourth dimension, time.

This can be tricky for us humans to conceive, much like a fish trying to imagine life outside of water. But we can gain at least some insight. Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a cornfield covered in crop circles. You look around and see corn stalks all around, some standing, some knocked over. But you can’t really see a pattern. Now hop on a helicopter and fly above the field where you would be able to see the patterns from “outside” the field. That is similar to how God sees time - all at once from outside.

It is this view of eternity that allowed St. Peter to say that to God “one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).

Outside of time, words like “before” don’t exactly make sense, since they refer to the relationship of incidents in time. Or as Frank Sheed put it “‘before’ is a word of time - and God is not in time.”[4] So asking what came before God makes about as much sense as asking how many gallons are in a mile.

Unlike God, the universe isn’t eternal. It had a beginning. The Bible refers to the creation of the universe as “the beginning”, marking the start of time (Gen 1:1). From that moment on, the dominos began to fall.

So when we speak about God, we are not talking about someone who has been around for a long time in a galaxy far, far away. We’re talking about a God who exists entirely outside of our realm of space and time. There is no “before” God created. Commenting on this, Matt Fradd put it this way: “if something exists outside of time—like God—then it does not need an explanation for its beginning, because it does not have one.”[5]

Back to the Question

While the question “Who created God?” can be a head-scratcher, it’s not without an answer when we have a proper understanding of who God is. The question betrays an assumption that God must receive his existence from somewhere else, and similarly that something could exist before him. But as we’ve discussed, the existence of an eternal source of being does not require further explanation outside of himself.

With this understanding the Catholic Church holds that “God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end” (C CC 213).

The dominos started with God.

Discussion

Have you ever encountered this dilemma before? How did you respond? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below!

Sources
1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q4, Art 2, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1004.htm
2. Peter J. Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Catholic Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 98.
3. Ibid
4. Frank J. Sheed, Theology for Beginners (Cincinnati: Servant Books, 1981), 19.
5. Matt Fradd, "Who Created God?" Catholic Answers, February 20, 2013, https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/who-created-god