Ken Samples asks the poignant question:

Is it more reasonable to believe that the universe came into existence from nothing by nothing or that, as the Bible says, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’?

I would think the answer is obvious and the supposed reasons for rejecting this conclusion are:

  1. Who created God?
  2. Which God supposedly did it?

Before I address these questions I think we must make clear that the probability of a universe popping into existence from nothing and by nothing is exactly 0. Not, some-small-number which over eons of time made the improbable probable but zero and at heart we all know this, as do all scientists. Things have causes, even if we can’t find them.

This means, however improbable we think He might be (usually based on the misguided assumption that God evolved or was created by something even more complex) God is infinitely more probable than the fat zero probability we have for a causeless universe.

The question “Who made God” is perhaps an honest one coming from a child but anyone who has bothered to consider what is meant by “God” will quickly realise that the question is nonsense – on par with “who made Tuesday” or “how many cabbages make a sunset?”. These questions exhibit a fundamental ignorance of what the concept of God is supposed to represent. Among other things, God is eternal. This means having no beginning or end and thus no prior cause. This does not prove that God exists but it does mean that the question “Who made the eternal” is nonsensical.

The question “is anything eternal” is universally answered “Yes” by atheists and theist thinkers for the simple reason that from nothing comes nothing. While atheists have always maintained the natural universe is this eternal recent cosmological discoveries have rendered this untenable – our universe is finite in age and began with the Big Bang which science can describe but not explain because of the breakdown of physical laws at the singularity.

It therefore appears reasonable and natural to conclude that the “something” which is eternal cannot be natural since nature cannot cause itself if it does not yet exist to do it.

We simply cannot avoid a transcendent reality in order to explain our universe. However this argument alone does not necessarily point to one God or another except to indicate that God must be outside of time and space, transcendent and eternal. Any creator God not matching this description must be rejected.

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