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Who Created God?



When someone poses the question “who created God” I often find that the one posing it thinks they have asked the ultimate “gotcha” question. This is strange because it’s a question that immediately assumes a proposition about God that no montheistic religion claims to believe. This is consistent with the common logical fallacy that we call the straw man argument. This is where a person sets up a proposition that doesn’t reflect the view of their opponents precisely because the false proposition is easier to defeat in an argument.

The three major montheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all claim to believe in a God who is uncreated. These beliefs are derived from what their sacred texts say about God’s nature. The Bible in Psalm 90 says God is “from everlasting to everlasting.” Understanding this fundamental montheistic belief reveals that the question “who created God” is flawed at it’s premise. In essence the person posing this question is thinking of the “wrong God.”

The God of the Bible is not limited by time, space, or matter. If He is limited by any of these factors then He would cease to meet the qualifications of an Eternal God and we would then be discussing a completely different God than the God of the Bible. Time, space, and matter must have come into existence at the exact same time. For example, if you have matter but no space, where would you put the matter? Also, if you have matter and space but no time, when would you have them? The Bible teaches that in the beginning (time), God created the heavens (space) and the earth (matter).

The question of who created God, or where did God come from is often getting ahead of a more important question: what kind of God do you believe in? If we are already misunderstanding what is meant by the term "God" as defined by the Biblical text then we are doomed to ask uninformed questions such as “where did God come from?” Coming to realize that Christians believe in an Eternal Creator of time, space, and matter as clearly taught in the Bible helps the inquirer to discover, as John Lennox pointed out, that created gods have been rejected as false idols for millenia. No Christians, Jews, or Muslims believe in created gods.

Another aspect of this common question that needs to be understood is the logical fallacy called “Infinite regression.” Simply put infinite regression is when an explanation is given that leads to an endless series of explanations without end. Here is an example using the fictitious characters “Burt and Ernie” having a conversation:

Bert asks, “how do eyes project an image to your brain?”

Ernie says “think of it as a little guy in your brain watching the movie projected by your eyes.”

Bert says “ok, but what is happening in the little guy in your head’s brain?”

Ernie answers “well, think of it as a little guy in his brain watching a movie…”

As you can see, Ernie's explanation leads to an endless series of “little guys” in a brain watching the movie projected by the preceding little guy’s eyes. This is not a valid explanation but rather an infinite regress fallacy. In the same way, if someone “created God” then it leads again to the same question, “who created that God?” And so on, and so on. Therefore the question “who created God” leads to an endless series of the same question and commits the infinite regression fallacy unless one postulates an Uncreated God. Therefore not only is an Uncreated God the correct version of God that Christians believe in, an Uncreated God is also logically necessary to avoid the potential infinite regression fallacy that is produced by the question in the first place.


So the answer to the question "who created God" is simply another question. What is your definition of God? Unless we are talking about the same kind of God then there's no way to answer the question properly. The widespread monotheistic belief that God is an uncreated being helps us to understand the flawed premise of this question and therefore reveals that it is not the barrier to Faith that many believe it appears to be.

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