Who Created The Creator?

We live in a universe where everything that exists has a beginning and an end. It is universally held within the scientific community, as far as I am aware, that the universe itself had a beginning, which we affectionately know as ‘the Big Bang’. And if it had a beginning, it will no doubt have an end, at some point in the ultra-distant future.

You and I were born, having been conceived by the union of two tiny cells some nine months prior, and after we have lived on this earth for maybe eight or nine decades, the dust will return to the dust, and every trace of us will be gone, except for the memories.

So, if everything that exists has a beginning and an end, then the same must be true about God, if He exists at all. Yes?

Well, not necessarily.

Let’s park professor Dawkins’s question for a moment, take a step backwards, and ask a different question, the one that has bamboozled thinkers, sages, seers, philosophers, and scientists since the dawn of humanity. Here is the question:

Why is there SOMETHING rather than NOTHING?

Now, something that we can all agree on is this: ‘something’ exists.

I can’t imagine that anyone would disagree with that, except perhaps someone who doesn’t exist!

But, how do we account for the fact that ‘something’ exists? How can this be?

As I have tried to get my head around this conundrum, I have concluded that there are three options that we can consider as contenders for an answer to it.

Note that I have said ‘options’ rather than ‘possibilities’, for I am not convinced that all three are genuinely possible.

There may, of course, be others besides these three, but I would expect those to be variations on one or more of these.

So, here are my three options:

1. Originally there was nothing, but at some point ‘something’ came into being.

2. There was never nothing, but ‘something’ has always existed. It had no beginning, it will have no end. We could say that it exists absolutely.

3. There was never nothing. There has always been ‘something’, but over time the ‘something’ has changed. In an infinite process which had no beginning, ‘something’ comes into being, exists for a time, then ends, and is replaced or superseded by another ‘something’, perhaps like a phoenix rising from the ashes of its predecessor.

If you happen to be a scientist, none of these options will appeal to you, because science is the business of asking and answering the most nagging question of all – the question ‘why?’ In the sense of ‘how?’; and none of these is amenable to having that question answered.

Option 1 cannot be answered because the generation of ‘something’ was uncaused, which is both logically and scientifically impossible.

Option 2 cannot be answered because there was no beginning, the ‘something’ simply is, or was.

Option 3 holds out some hope, because you may be able to answer why or how the current ‘something’ came into being, but what about the previous ‘somethings’?

For all three options, it is impossible to explain how the ‘something’ could ever exist; but is any one of the three a logical possibility, or must all three be rejected?

Before considering each one in turn, let’s think for a moment about what is or is not logically possible.

Logically it is impossible for ‘doing’ to occur without ‘being’. If something is going to happen, then there needs, at the very least, to be an environment within which it is able to happen and also something to do the happening. This means that ‘being’ is a necessary pre-condition of ‘doing’.

If there is no ‘being’ then there is ‘nothing’, and only ‘nothing’ can happen where there is ‘nothing’.

If something is going to be done, there must be something to do it. If something is going to happen, there must be something for it to happen to. If an event is going to take place, there must be a place for it to take.

In short, any activity requires three elements: a CAUSE to initiate it, a SUBJECT to carry it out, and an ENVIRONMENT within which the activity can occur. Whether the three elements need to be distinct entities or may be attributes of a single entity is a separate question, which I will not be attempting to address in this article.

For option 1, there was ‘nothing’, and then there was ‘something’. The ‘something’ had a beginning, but the beginning had no cause, because there was nothing there to cause it.

Is it realistic to consider this as being a possibility? I would contend that this is a logical absurdity, because it proposes an event (the generation of ‘something’) which has no cause. If it did have a cause, then its precursor was not ‘nothing’ but another ‘something’.

Where there is nothing, nothing can happen, and ‘the generation of something’ is not nothing.

Someone might argue that ‘something’ might generate itself, but this would necessitate a ‘doing’ as the precursor to a ‘being’, which is a logical absurdity, as it would have to act before it existed.

‘Being’ is a necessary pre-condition of ‘doing’, and the generation of ‘something’ is a ‘doing’.

For this reason, option 1 must be ruled out as being impossible.

For option 2, this ‘something’ did not come into being, so there is no beginning to explain. Is this a logical possibility?

Yes it is. This is the well-known concept of the First Cause, argued for by both the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas.

The argument is simple: everything that exists does so ‘because’ – that is to say, it was caused by something else. But this chain of cause and effect must have a beginning, therefore there must be, or have been, a First Cause which set the process in motion. If there were not, the process would never have begun.

As I’ve already observed, ‘being’ is a necessary pre-condition of ‘doing’, but ‘being’ itself does not have a necessary pre-condition.

In fact, since ‘something’ is known to exist, it is a logical necessity that there was a First Cause which, by definition, had no beginning, since if it had, it would not be the First Cause but the Second Cause, and something else would be the First Cause.

The First Cause must also be infinite in regard to time, because it had no beginning, and therefore has always been. If this were not so, it would have had a beginning, and thereby be disqualified as being the First Cause, since it itself would have been caused by something else.

Option 2 is therefore a strong contender.

Option 3 postulates that there was no First Cause, but that the process of cause and effect is infinite, with neither beginning nor end. It did not start, so it will not finish. It continues from eternity to eternity.

A variation on this would be that it is a repetitive cycle of generation, advance, decline, demise, regeneration, and so on, endlessly.

However, option 3 proposes an infinite process which had no beginning. But, as ‘doing’ requires ‘being’ as a necessary pre-condition, this means that ‘something’ had to already be in existence in order for this apparently infinite process to occur.

And this means that even option 3 requires a pre-existent cause, and a pre-existent subject and environment. So ‘something’ had to be there ‘in the beginning’.

The upshot of this is that option 3 is only a variation on the theme of option 2.

This leaves us with option 2 as being the only logical possibility, which tells us that there was a definite beginning and there was a definite First Cause, in line with the conclusions of Aristotle and Aquinas.

So we now have a reasonable and satisfactory answer to Professor Dawkins’s question, “Who created the creator?”

Assuming that by ‘the creator’ we mean the First Cause, the answer is clearly, “No-one”. The creator did not need to be created, but it did need to exist, and to have had no beginning.

Before we go on to consider what the First Cause might have been, let’s turn Professor Dawkins’s question around and ask one that is easier to answer: “What did the creator create?”