"Who created God? If everything needs a cause, then God does too." This is a long-standing question brought up by atheists, including one of the most well-known leaders in the atheist movement, Richard Dawkins (and is a question mentioned in the book below). This question often stumps Christians (including myself at one point) and is an easy jab for an atheist to make. But when presenting this question, atheists often show their misunderstanding of the Law of Causality.
Serving as a foundational philosophical principle, the Law of Causality says, “everything that had a beginning had a cause.” As Drs. Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek point out in their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, “The Law of Causality does not say that everything needs a cause. It says that everything that comes to be needs a cause. God did not come to be. No one made God. He is unmade [Revelation 1:8]. As an eternal being, God did not have a beginning, so he didn't need a cause.”
In the movie God's Not Dead, Josh Wheaton, a student defending Christianity to a militantly atheist professor, is posed with the challenge: "...in his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says that if you tell me God created the universe then I have the right to ask you who created God." Josh then cleverly retorts, "Dawkins’ question only makes sense in terms of a god who has been created. It doesn’t make sense in terms of an uncreated god, which is the kind of God Christians believe in. And even leaving God out of the equation, I then have a right to turn Mr. Dawkins’ own question back around on him and ask, if the universe created you, then who created the universe?"
Atheists raise this question because it is difficult, impossible in fact, to understand something that has existed forever while we are bound to time. The misconception at the heart of this question is that time is eternal. It's not. It was created, it did not always exist. Before the creation, there was nothing. Since we generally define time in terms of the relationships between objects and events, there wouldn't have been time in the sense we know it before creation.
In a recent conversation, I was asked, "If an actual infinity can't be real, what does that mean for the Christian idea of eternal life?" In other words, if time isn't eternal, then how does a Christian have eternal life? I was shaken, and a bit disappointed in myself, because I didn't know how to respond. Then I realized the assumption behind the question was wrong. This question is talking about time in physical matters, not spiritual. The key here is distinguishing the nature of physical, 'human time.’ God is outside of time and He created time. Time did not preexist God. When we say an actual infinity cannot be real, we are discussing the physical, human conception of time. However, the Christian idea of eternal life is in spiritual terms, not physical. Just as God is eternal, existing outside the limits of time as we know it, the Christian concept of eternal life is outside physical time.
We can see that the only logical idea is to have a Supreme Being outside of the realm of time. In fact, if we didn’t, we would have no Law of Causality because this is a natural law and nature wouldn’t exist. Dr. Frank Turek again makes an excellent point in his book Stealing From God, “If nature had a beginning, then the cause can't be something natural because nature didn't exist. Nature was the effect, so it can't be the cause. The cause must be something beyond nature, or supernatural.”
We must have God to argue against Him. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” If there was no timeless being to create time, then there would be no time. But since we have time, we must have a timeless Being; and Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Bible, is that timeless Being. In Revelation 1:8, Jesus says He is the “Alpha and the Omega” and “who is and who was, and who is to come. The Almighty.”
