Atheist Talking Points: Who Created God

Atheist Talking Points: Who Created God?

Bertrand Russell recalled that his conversion to Atheism came as a boy when he discovered the question posed by John Stuart Mill: “Who Created God?” This seemed to be an intractable and irrevocable dismemberment of all Theology. He never found an answer, and the question still resounds as a staple in Atheist arguments. For example, Atheist apologist and philosopher Daniel C. Dennett used not only the argument [1] but also referred to another Atheist, Richard Dawkins, who uses the same argument:

“To explain the origin of the DNA / protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain exactly nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the designer.”

Richard Dawkins, 1986,141, otherwise unannotated.

Dennett goes to say that “Since, as Dawkins notes, the hypothesis that [organized, complex] mind plays such a role in the universe could not possibly be explanatory, we should ask: With what other hypotheses is the architecture of the universe consistent?”[2] (Parentheses original).

So For the Atheists Dennett and Dawkins, the “Who created God” question is now morphed into a premise of “non-explanatoriness” of a Deity’s possible role in creation. Aside from being non sequitur, the question actually plays no role in countering the possibility. However, let’s disabuse these “New Atheists” from their old ideas.

Let us assume that by “creation of the universe”, we mean the instant of the Big Bang.

Then let us assume that Hawking, Penrose and Ellis are correct in saying that all of space–time and mass–energy were created at the Big Bang. That of course means that all of our physics, all of our logic, all of our First Principles, all of our ability to obtain and store knowledge ceases, when we try to look back before the instant of the Big Bang.

Most importantly, there would exist no cause and effect before the Big Bang. This is because there would be no time before the BB. And a cause, as we know it, needs to exist before…in time: prior to….the effect. If effects exist before their cause, our logic and rational thought fail us completely.[3]

Now the issue, “Who created God”, clearly reflects a cause and effect relationship: what is the cause of the existence of God. The question is clearly nonsensical based on the non-existence of time and cause-and-effect before the Big Bang.

Not to have clearly seen this obviously salient aspect of the issue casts a darkness on the mental acuity and intellectual integrity of Dennett and Dawkins, who as Atheists spouting “science”, should have known better. Even Hawking has said that to speak of what existed before the Big Bang is “meaningless”, as in asking “what is north of the North Pole?” Hawking anticipated an answer of “nothing” is north of the North Pole; but obviously something is: the quantum grid, the fabric of space; the North Star; galaxies, etc. But by philosophical “meaningless”, the Hawking answer to the original (philosophical) question becomes: “meaningless” also. The manufactured issue of “Who Made God?” is meaningless.

Another clue is to be had from “string” theory, which might or might not be science: Mathematically at any rate, we coexist with 8 additional dimensions. These are said to be miniscule, located at all points on the fabric of the universe. They exist inside us and all around us. How do these relate to the Big Bang? Even if these do not inhabit both sides of the moment of creation, the fact that we cannot begin to comprehend another dimension, or how we wrap around it, or it around us, gives credence to a mandatory mathematical transcendence. And if these dimensions do in fact exist, then there is existential transcendence also.

Who made God? Incomprehensibly to humans locked in three dimensions plus time, the creator of the universe exists outside of time. So without time, the term “beginning” has no meaning, the term “end” has no meaning, the term “now” has no meaning, and the term “eternity” has no meaning.

So the First Cause, the Creator, the Deity….just is. In Biblical terms, he said, “I am.”