What Scripture says
Scripture never pictures God as having a beginning:
- “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2, ESV).
- When Moses asks God’s name, God answers, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14): the one who simply is.
- God is “the King of the ages, immortal, invisible” (1 Timothy 1:17), who “alone has immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16).
- “I am the Alpha and the Omega… who is and who was and who is to come” (Revelation 1:8).
- Everything else is made: “All things were made through him” (John 1:3).
In Scripture, the line between God and everything else is the line between the Creator, who has no beginning, and creation, which does.
What the evidence says
Philosophy
“Who created God?” is one of the most common responses to arguments for God. Bertrand Russell asked it in 1927, and Richard Dawkins made it central in The God Delusion (2006). It sounds like a knockout. But it misreads the argument it is answering.
What the argument actually says
The cosmological argument doesn’t say “everything has a cause.” If it did, God would need a cause too. It says “everything that begins to exist has a cause” (the kalam version), or “everything that could have failed to exist needs an explanation outside itself” (the contingency version).
The universe began to exist (see 1.2) and could have been different. So it needs a cause or an explanation. God, as Christians, Jews, Muslims and classical philosophers understand him, never began and couldn’t fail to exist. So asking “Who caused God?” is like asking “Who is the bachelor’s wife?” or “What is north of the North Pole?” The question assumes something the definition rules out.
Every explanation has to stop somewhere
Whatever your view, the chain of explanation must end somewhere. There are only a few options:
| Option | What it says | The problem |
|---|---|---|
| Infinite regress | Causes go back forever | An infinite past faces serious problems (see 1.2), and an infinite chain never explains why the whole chain exists |
| An uncaused universe | The universe (or physics) just exists, with no explanation | The universe appears to have begun and to be contingent |
| An uncaused God | A necessary, eternal being is the ultimate explanation | Requires belief in God |
Atheists and theists both face this. Before the Big Bang theory, many atheists argued that the universe itself was eternal and uncaused. When cosmology made that harder to hold, the question moved to God.
Dawkins’s version: “Who designed the designer?”
Dawkins puts a sharper version: a God complex enough to design a universe would be even more improbable, and so would need even more explaining.
Philosophers, including some who aren’t theists, have pointed out problems:
- God isn’t complex in the relevant sense. Complexity, in Dawkins’s sense, means having many physical parts arranged in an improbable way. Classical theism holds God is immaterial and not made of parts. A mind can have complex thoughts without being assembled from components.
- Explanations don’t need explanations first. If archaeologists found tools on Mars, they could rightly conclude intelligent beings made them, even without knowing who made the intelligent beings. An explanation can be the best one without itself being explained.
- The question doesn’t apply to a necessary being. If God exists necessarily, it doesn’t make sense to ask how improbable his existence is.
Alvin Plantinga and others responded to Dawkins along these lines.
What “necessary being” means
The key idea is a necessary being: something that exists by its own nature and couldn’t fail to exist. Mathematical truths are often given as an example of things that are necessary: 2 + 2 = 4 couldn’t have been false. Classical theism holds that God exists in this way. Critics question whether the idea of a necessary being makes sense. That is a real debate, but it is a different question from “Who made God?”
Where they meet
Scripture describes exactly the kind of being philosophy says must exist if anything does: eternal, uncaused, not part of the universe, the source of everything else. The “who made God?” question doesn’t defeat that idea; it simply restates the fact that God isn’t a created thing.
What’s still open
- Philosophers still debate whether a necessary being makes sense, and whether the universe or its laws could fill that role instead.
- This answer shows the objection fails. It doesn’t by itself prove God exists; that’s the job of the arguments in 1.1.
Bottom line
“Who created God?” is a category error: only things that begin to exist need a cause, and God by definition is eternal and uncaused. Many philosophers, including some who reject theism, regard the objection as weak, so the answer is rated Settled.