Who made God?

A little deeper

This is one of the most common questions people ask, and it's a genuinely fair one. It usually assumes something specific, though: that God is a being like the universe itself, something that came into existence and therefore needs an explanation for how it got here.

That's not what classical Christianity has ever claimed. Christians describe God as eternal, meaning He doesn't exist within time the way we do, and uncreated, meaning He isn't one more item in the universe that popped into being and needs a cause. Everything else that exists depends on something prior to explain it. Christianity's claim is that God is the one exception: the necessary reality everything else depends on, rather than one more thing requiring its own explanation.

Think of it this way. Every other explanation for why something exists points to something further back. If that chain went back forever without any foundation, nothing would actually be explained at all. Christians believe there has to be something that doesn't itself need a further explanation, something that simply is. That's what Christians mean by God.

It's worth being honest about what this argument does and doesn't do. It defines what Christians mean when they talk about God: an eternal, self-existent reality rather than a very powerful creature. It doesn't, by itself, prove that such a being exists. It answers a logical objection rather than providing independent proof.

Some people find this idea strange because we're used to everything having a beginning. But mathematicians, for instance, are comfortable with concepts like infinity that don't behave like the objects we handle daily. God's eternity is a similarly different kind of category, not simply a very old version of ordinary existence.

So the honest answer to 'who made God' is: nobody, because Christianity has never claimed He was made. Whether that claim is true is a separate question, one this page doesn't try to settle on its own.

Words used here

God