Where did God come from?

The following article is excerpted from chapter 9 of Dr. Jim Denison’s latest book, How Does God See America?

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The biblical writers presupposed the existence of God, as did their readers (“In the beginning God . . .”). But this informal, unexamined belief will not do for those who question the reality of God. We cannot have a real relationship with people who do not exist except in our minds. We can have a dream, hallucination, or fantasy about them, but we’d be schizophrenic to spend much time worshiping or serving our imaginary friends.

This is precisely what atheists claim: God exists only as a dream, hallucination, or fantasy, a belief which cannot be proven or even rationally defended.

Creation without a creator?

One way to respond to people who reject the existence of God is to ask how there can be a creation without a Creator. (This argument from cosmos to Creator is known to scholars as the “cosmological argument for God’s existence.”) If the universe began as a Big Bang, where did the Big Bang come from? If you think life started as a cell floating in a pool of water, we can ask what or who made the water. Since we live in a world where every effect has a prior cause, it’s easy for us to reason that the world came from somewhere or Someone. This “First Cause” (to use Aristotle’s term) we can call God.

Unfortunately, for those of us who like this approach, it doesn’t prove as much as we might think it does.

For instance, scientists say that the universe is running down (the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Someday, perhaps 10¹⁵⁰ years in the future, all energy will be converted to matter and everything will collapse on itself. Scientists call this “heat death” and say that it will make the entire universe into one “black hole.” This is a rather pessimistic way of stating the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

Skeptics then ask, could this be how…