If God Created Everything, Who Created God?

The Short Answer

No one created God, because God is not the kind of being that can be created. The argument for God’s existence does not say that everything needs a cause. It says that everything which depends on something else for its existence needs a cause. God depends on nothing. He does not receive existence from anywhere; He simply is. “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).

The objection is common and sounds decisive: if the world needs a maker, surely the maker needs one too, and so on for ever. It deserves a careful answer.

What the Church Does and Does Not Claim

The Church does not claim:

That everything has a cause. If she did, the objection would succeed. The claim is narrower: whatever is dependent needs a cause.
That God caused Himself. Nothing can cause itself, since it would have to exist before it existed. God is not self-caused but uncaused.
That God is a very large being inside the universe. God is not one more thing among things, however big. He is the source of everything that exists.
That the answer depends on the Big Bang. The argument concerns what holds things in existence now, whether or not the universe had a beginning.

The Church does claim that God is “the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end” (CCC 213), and that all other things receive their existence from Him.

Why Catholics Believe It

Two kinds of being

Everything in our experience is contingent. It exists, but need not have. You might never have been born; the earth might never have formed. A contingent thing does not explain its own existence. It depends on something else, both for coming to be and for continuing to be.

Now imagine a chain of things, each depending on the next for its existence at this moment. However long the chain, even endless, every link has only borrowed existence. A chain made only of borrowers cannot explain why there is anything to borrow. There must be something whose existence is not borrowed: a necessary being, which exists of itself and gives existence to all the rest.

That is what the argument concludes to. Asking “who created it?” misses the point, because the whole argument was about finding the one being that does not need a creator.

God’s name

When Moses asked God His name, God answered: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). The Church has long read this as revealing that God does not merely have existence, as we do. He is existence itself. St Thomas Aquinas put it in philosophical terms: in God, what He is and that He is are one and the same (Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4). A being like that cannot fail to exist, and cannot be made by another.

Common Objections

”That’s special pleading. You just made an exception for God.”

An exception would be special pleading if there were no reason for it. But the reason is the very thing the argument establishes. The argument shows that dependent things need a cause, and that therefore there must be something not dependent. That something is not an exception to the rule; it is what the rule leads to. Asking what is north of the North Pole is not a deep question about the North Pole; it misunderstands what “north” means.

”Who designed the designer?”

Richard Dawkins has argued that a God able to design the universe would have to be even more complex than it, and so even more in need of explanation. But this pictures God as a complex physical thing made of parts, like a very clever brain. Classical Christian thought says the opposite: God is simple, not in the sense of being unsophisticated, but in having no parts at all (Summa Theologiae I, q. 3; CCC 202). Something with no parts was never assembled, and does not need an assembler.

”Why not just say the universe is the necessary being?”

Because everything in the universe shows the marks of contingency. It changes, it is made of parts, and each part could have been otherwise. A collection of things that each need not exist does not become something that must exist simply by being added together. A heap of borrowed money is still borrowed.

”Maybe there is just no explanation. The universe is a brute fact.”

That is a possible position, but it is a strange one for anyone who values science, which assumes that things have explanations. To say that the most basic question of all, why there is something rather than nothing, simply has no answer is not a discovery. It is giving up on the question.

In Summary

“Who created God?” assumes the argument for God says that everything needs a cause. It does not. It says dependent things need a cause, and so there must be a being that depends on nothing and exists of itself. That being, by its nature, cannot be created. Christians call Him God, the One who revealed Himself as “I AM.” No one made Him; He is the reason anything else is made at all.

This article follows the method St Robert Bellarmine used in his Controversies*: state the question fairly, clear away misunderstandings, make the case, then answer each objection. See How We Answer Objections.*

Sources

Scripture: Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Press). Exodus 3:14; Psalm 90:2.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 202, 212–213.
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3 and q. 3. Tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. ccel.org
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), ch. 4.