I’ve sometimes heard atheists argue that to posit God as the Creator only kicks the can down the road. The flow of discussion typically goes like this: The theist argues that the existence of creation points to the existence of a Creator, to which the atheist responds, “Well, then who created God?”
For instance, John Locke (a Christian, incidentally) responds to a distorted version of a Hindu myth, where it’s claimed that the earth is on the back of an elephant on the back of a tortoise: “But [the believer] being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied — something, he knew not what.”
Well, do we just keep stacking creatures on top of each other all the way down forever? Does “who created God?” mean that to infer a Creator from creation is only to beg the question?
The answer, thankfully, is no – and to suggest otherwise is just to make a category error.
Here’s why. It’s obvious, by the nature of a tortoise, an elephant, or the earth, that they are not their own sources of being. It’s equally as obvious that God, by the definition of the term, is the source of his own being. Creation is categorically different from Creator in exactly this way. To put it in theological terms, God is not a being, but being himself. So to ask who created God is to misunderstand what is meant by God in the first place.
It’s a bit like asking, on learning that a river has carved the Grand Canyon: “Well, then what carved the river?” The river, of course, was not carved and did not need to be, seeing as it is something different from a canyon. Or, on being told that the moon is lit by the sun: “So what lights the sun?”
The questions seem clever – and even intuitive – but you can only ask them if you don’t understand what sorts of things you’re talking about. Set the category error aside and it’s clear that to posit a Creator isn’t to beg the question of causality; it’s to answer it.
