Who Made God? Pt.1

In an otherwise standard letter about Intelligent Design printed in one of our national newspapers, a philosophy professor (in his support for the teaching of evolution in public schools) ended his letter with:

“Lastly, the appeal to some ‘unmoved mover’ or ‘first cause’ is inherently unsatisfactory since it raises the question of the origin of such an entity. Here we leave the realm of science and philosophy and enter the domain of faith.”

I’ve got no argument with evolutionary biology. I’ll let the scientific community deal with the reliability of the scientific evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution.

But the writer’s claim that the question of God’s origin “leaves the realm of science and philosophy to enter the domain of faith” is, I think, somewhat incorrect. Both science and philosophy can tell us something about God. I’m not trying to suggest that science and philosophy can prove with absolute certainty that God exists and is uncaused, only that they can make it more reasonable to believe this than believing its denial. And, it seems that he considers faith as “blind”, that is, believing in what your common sense tells you may be false, or believing in something based not on evidence but on some vague inner feeling. I don’t know how other religions view faith, but the Christian conception of faith is trusting in what one has good reason to believe is true. The reasons for believing can be evidential, though they don’t have to be. They can also be experiential. And the experience can be as clear and convincing as any logical argument or piece of empirical evidence.

In addition, the question “Who made God?” is often intended to be a conversation stopper, as if the questioner has asked the unanswerable. And since there is no answer, there’s no reason to believe in God. I think there are three responses that can be given to the question of who made God. (As usual, my lack of philosophical training makes me prone to making mistakes in logic, so take this for what it’s worth).

First, God, by definition, is a necessary being (ie. is not dependent on anything else for His existence), the uncreated Creator of everything that was created. To ask the question is to make a category mistake. It would be like asking what the note G# tasted like. Notes do not have taste. And an uncreated being cannot be created.

Although I think this first response true, I can see how someone might not be satisfied with it. There is the appearance of rhetorical hand-waving. One could define anything they want and then just refer to the definition. But, there are things in this world that are definitionally described. For example, a bachelor is, by definition, an unmarried man. And the biblical God, if He exists at all, is what theists have always defined as an uncaused necessary being.

Second,...