If God Created Everything, Who Created God?

Mill and Russell: the classical formulation (1873–1927)

The modern "who created God?" objection has a fairly precise birth date. Bertrand Russell, in the lecture given at Battersea Town Hall on 6 March 1927 and published the same year under the title Why I Am Not a Christian, recounts that he owes its discovery to the posthumous Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1873)^[2]. Mill reported what his father James Mill had told him in childhood:

"My father taught me that the question, 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, 'Who made God?'" — John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873, as reported by Bertrand Russell^[3]

Russell draws from this sentence what would become the heart of the contemporary objection:

"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument." — Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, Watts & Co., London, 1927^[4]

It is this formulation — brief, striking, prima facie unanswerable — that has circulated for almost a century in every manual of popular atheism, in pamphlets, on internet forums and now in viral videos. It has become what Matthieu Lavagna calls "the weakest objection of all"^[5], because it is built entirely against a caricature of theistic arguments.

Before answering, one must take the measure of the philosophical seriousness with which Russell defended it. Russell was no atheist caricaturist; he was one of the great logicians of the twentieth century, co-author with Alfred North Whitehead of the Principia Mathematica (1910–1913). His criticism deserves a real answer, not a shrug. It is precisely because analytic philosophy took the objection seriously that it also produced the most rigorous refutation, in Frederick Copleston, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Alexander Pruss and Edward Feser.

The Russell–Copleston debate (BBC, 28 January 1948)

Twenty years after the Battersea lecture, Russell faced the Jesuit Frederick Copleston, author of a monumental nine-volume History of Philosophy, on the BBC's Third Programme on 28 January 1948^[6]. The debate has become a classic of the philosophy of religion. Copleston defends the Leibnizian version of the cosmological argument, which does not rely on the naïve principle "everything has a cause", but on the distinction between contingent being and necessary being.

"A contingent being is a being which has not in itself the complete reason for its existence. A necessary being is a being that must and cannot not exist." — Frederick Copleston, debate with Bertrand Russell, BBC Third Programme, 28 January 1948^[7]

Russell rejects the very concept of necessary being:

"The word 'necessary,' it seems to me, is a useless word, except as applied to analytic propositions, not to things. I don't admit the idea of a necessary being and I don't admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings 'contingent.'" — Bertrand Russell, debate with Frederick Copleston, BBC, 28 January 1948^[8]

Pressed on the origin of the world, Russell ends with the most radical position an atheist can defend: the universe is a brute fact, without ultimate explanation.

"I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all." — Bertrand Russell, debate with Frederick Copleston, BBC, 28 January 1948^[9]

This answer is honest. It is also very revealing: Russell does not say that the "who created God?" argument refuted Copleston. He says that to escape the theistic conclusion, one must accept that the entire universe is without reason. The 1948 debate thus shows, plainly, that the real alternative is not "cause except for God / cause for God too", but "acceptance of a necessary reality / refusal of any demand for explanation". The discussion shifts to the principle of sufficient reason, not to the grammar of causality.

Dawkins and the New Atheists (2006)

Almost sixty years later, Richard Dawkins takes up the objection in The God Delusion (2006), giving it an evolutionist dressing. In what he calls the central argument of his book, Dawkins maintains that any designer capable of conceiving the universe would be at least as complex as his creation, and that this complexity would itself require an explanation^[10]. Hence his formula, passed on to posterity:

"The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer." — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Bantam Press, London, 2006, p. 158^[11]

Dawkins's argument has been closely examined by philosophers — including atheists. Its main weakness, as William Lane Craig has shown, is that it commits exactly the error philosophers call shifting the burden of proof, and that it rests on a double confusion: Dawkins claims that every cause must itself be explained in order to explain its effect (false for ordinary scientific explanations), and that God would be "complex" in the sense in which the word applies to matter (false for a mind without parts)^[12].

In the end, whether one takes the 1927 Mill–Russell formulation, the 1948 Russell–Copleston formulation or the 2006 Dawkins formulation, the same question always returns: why treat God differently from the universe? And the same classical answer imposes itself, in three steps: dismantle the three great misunderstandings, then present the metaphysical heart, then treat the serious sceptical objections one by one.

The following table summarizes the chronology of the main modern formulations of the objection:

Why the objection seems unanswerable at first sight

The objection has genuine psychological force. Three main reasons explain why it seems so obvious:

1. It promises to close a complicated discussion with a single short question. Any long apologetic argument can be dismissed with a "but then who created God?" that seems to settle the matter in eight words.
2. It plays on the everyday analogy of the maker. In our experience, everything we see was made by someone or produced by something. Extending this intuition to God seems the most natural thing in the world.
3. It reverses the burden of proof. Instead of having to explain why the universe exists, the atheist throws the question back at the believer, who would look inconsistent if he did not answer.

The problem is that none of these three levers survives a precise reading of theistic arguments. That is what we shall now examine.

The Kalam does not say "everything has a cause"

The Kalam cosmological argument — defended in the Middle Ages by Al-Kindi, Al-Ghazali and Bonaventure, and masterfully reformulated by William Lane Craig in his doctoral thesis defended at Birmingham in 1977 and published in 1979^[13] — takes the form of a syllogism in three sentences:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

Premise 1 is precise. It does not say "everything has a cause". It says "whatever begins to exist". The distinction is crucial^[14]. An eternal, unbegun being does not fall under the premise. When one asks "who created God?", one treats God as a being that would have begun to exist — which the defenders of the Kalam explicitly deny. The objection therefore does not touch the argument; it surreptitiously changes the premises.

"Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence: this is the fundamental metaphysical principle on which the whole Kalam stands. It is this principle, and this alone, that must be defended. The naïve principle 'whatever exists has a cause' is untenable, and no one in the cosmological tradition defends it." — William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument, Macmillan, London, 1979, p. 141–142^[15]

Premise 1 has two classical justifications: (a) a metaphysical justification: ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing — a phrase David Hume himself claimed he had never intended to challenge^[16]; (b) an experimental justification: we have no observation of anything that began to exist without an antecedent cause. Premise 2, since the Borde–Vilenkin–Guth theorems (2003)^[17], receives additional cosmological confirmation: any universe with an average expansion greater than zero has a beginning. But the crucial point here is that premise 1 explicitly targets beings that begin — not God.

The argument from contingency does not say "everything has a cause"

The cosmological argument from contingency, in its accomplished form in Leibniz (Monadology, 1714), is built on the principle of sufficient reason, not on the naïve principle of universal causality. Leibniz's classical formulation is as follows:

"We must also acknowledge that no fact can be real or existing and no statement true unless there is a sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise." — G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, § 32, 1714^[18]

The movement of the argument from contingency then proceeds in three steps:

1. Every contingent being — that is, every being whose non-existence is not logically impossible — calls for a sufficient reason outside itself.
2. The sum of contingent beings is itself contingent, and therefore calls for a sufficient reason outside that sum.
3. But nothing outside the totality of contingent beings is itself contingent. The sufficient reason must therefore be a necessary being, containing within itself the reason for its own existence^[19].

Here again, premise 1 precisely targets the contingent. To ask "who created God?" within this argument is to ask "what is the cause of a being which is, by definition, not contingent?" The question is malformed — as "why does the triangle have a fourth side?" would be.

The Five Ways of Thomas: an ontological foundation, not a first instant

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) reformulates the argument in several Ways, in the Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, circa 1265–1268. The Second Way is the most directly concerned by our objection. It relies on efficient causality ordered per se — that is, a causality whose elements are simultaneous, like a hand moving a stick moving a stone. Here is the literal formulation:

"It is impossible to proceed to infinity among efficient causes. For among all efficient causes ordered among themselves, the first is the cause of the intermediaries, and the intermediaries are the causes of the last term, whether these intermediaries be many or only one. But remove the cause and you also remove the effect. Therefore, if there is no first in the order of efficient causes, there will be neither last nor intermediate. But if one had to proceed to infinity in the series of efficient causes, there would be no first cause; consequently, there would be neither ultimate effect nor intermediate efficient cause, which is evidently false. One must therefore necessarily affirm that there exists a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, Second Way, circa 1265–1268^[20]

Thomas does not argue for "a very distant event in the past". He argues for a present ontological foundation: every link in the per se ordered causal chain receives its causal power from an antecedent term, and if the entire chain had no independent first term, no link could cause anything here and now. The first cause is not an old clock in the attic of the cosmos; it is the present source of the being of everything that exists^[21]. Edward Feser has particularly insisted on this point:

"What Aquinas argues for is not that there must have been, at some point in the past, a first event. It is that there must be, here and now, an actual ground for the existence of the world. If the objection 'who made God?' were directed at Aquinas, it would amount to asking 'what is the actual ground of the actual ground?' And Aquinas's answer is: a ground which is itself its own act of being needs no external ground — this is precisely what is called 'God'." — Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, Oneworld, Oxford, 2009, p. 81–82^[22]

A universal rule: only dependence calls for a cause

The central point, found identically in Aristotle, Avicenna, Anselm, Thomas, Leibniz and Feser, is therefore this: theistic arguments do not posit the rule "everything has a cause". They posit the much finer and much more defensible rule:

Every reality that begins to exist, that depends on something else in order to exist, that might not exist, or that receives its act of being from another — in short, every contingent reality — requires a cause or a sufficient reason outside itself.

God, by definition, falls into none of these categories. He did not begin to exist, he depends on nothing other than himself, he could not fail to exist, and he did not receive his act of being: he is his own act of being. The question "who created God?" therefore projects onto him properties that define creatures and which he precisely refuses, and then concludes that he should receive a cause. It is circular reasoning.

The artisanal sense of the word in everyday life

In ordinary language, to create most often means to make: a craftsman creates a chair from wood, an engineer creates a machine from parts, a composer creates a symphony from notes, a painter creates a picture from pigments. In all these cases, the agent acts on pre-existing matter: he transforms, organizes, composes, shapes. The cause is external to the matter, but the matter pre-exists it.

When the objection asks "who created God?", it tacitly supposes that creating always means this: taking matter and making something of it. Within this framework, indeed, one may ask: what is the matter from which God was made, and who made him? But this framework is not at all the one in which Christianity speaks of God's creation — it is precisely the one it rejects.

Creatio ex nihilo: the act that gives being itself

The Catholic tradition speaks of creation as an act radically different from making. The key concept is creatio ex nihilo: creation out of nothing — not from a nothing that would be some kind of ghostly matter, but from the absence of all matter, of every prior condition, of every substrate^[23]. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) formulates it thus:

"God, creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal, who by his almighty power founded together, from the beginning of time, out of nothing, both creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly." — Fourth Lateran Council, constitution De fide catholica, ch. 1, 1215^[24]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church specifies what this means philosophically:

"We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine substance. God creates freely 'out of nothing': 'What would be surprising if God had drawn the world from pre-existent matter? A human artisan, when given matter, makes of it whatever he wills. Whereas God's power is shown precisely in that he starts from nothing to make whatever he wills' (St Theophilus of Antioch, Autol. 2, 4)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 296^[25]

Divine creation is therefore not cosmic tinkering on matter given to God. It is the act by which being itself is given to what had no being. This act is intelligible only if the cause itself possesses being in its own right, without receiving it from anyone. If God were manufactured, he would depend on the matter he was made of, on the agent who manufactured him, and on the conditions that made his manufacture possible. He would have, like a craftsman, tools, materials, a workshop, a history — in short, he would be one more creature, and the relevant question would then be: "who created this super-being?", ad infinitum.

Why a "manufactured" God would no longer be God

When the objection asks "who created God?", it thus proves two opposite things at once:

1. If the answer is "someone", then that "someone" is the true God — and the question must start over: who made him? Infinite regress.
2. If the answer is "no one", then the question acknowledges that a being existing without being created is possible — and the real discussion becomes: is God, or the universe, or a multiverse, or something else, that uncreated being?

In both cases, the objection does not refute God's existence: it necessarily leads back to the question of the necessary being. That is exactly what Russell noted in 1948 when he declared "the universe is just there": he transferred God's aseity to the universe, without abolishing it.

"If you say 'God needs no cause,' they will reply: 'Why then would the universe need one?' But if you say 'the universe needs no cause,' you concede exactly what the theist was claiming: that something exists that needs no cause. The whole question is whether that something is more like the being of thought and will that theists call God, or like a heap of matter in mindless motion." — Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2017, p. 153^[26]

First cause does not mean first instant

A third classical confusion consists in imagining God as a very ancient event, situated before the Big Bang or before the first cosmological instant, in a sort of distant past. Under this image, the first cause would simply be the first candle in a long row lit by an initial domino. And it would then be natural to ask: who lit that domino?

This image is mistaken. The first cause in the metaphysical sense is not the first temporal element of a series, but the present foundation of being. It is precisely the error that Edward Feser, in Five Proofs (2017), places at the heart of his analyses:

"The idea that a first cause would simply be the first in a long temporal causal series, like the first domino to fall or the first ancestor in a chain of descent, is a fundamental misunderstanding. The first cause in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is what actualizes the potential here and now, at every moment, in all things that exist. It is not located in the past. It is what holds everything in being." — Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 24–25^[27]

Per accidens versus per se: Thomas's decisive distinction

Thomas Aquinas draws an essential distinction between two types of causal series^[28]:

• An accidentally ordered causal series (per accidens) is a series in which each cause produces its effect, then ceases to act, the effect then being able in turn to produce another effect. The classical example is the chain of human generations: a grandfather may die without the father ceasing to exist; the father may die without the son ceasing to exist. The elements of the series need not be simultaneous. Such a series, according to Thomas, may philosophically be infinite in the past (which is indeed what he grants in De aeternitate mundi in 1270^[29]).

• An essentially ordered causal series (per se) is a series in which each cause causes its effect at the same time as it is itself caused by its own cause. The classical example is the hand moving the stick moving the stone: if the hand stops, the stick stops immediately, and so does the stone. Another example: a paintbrush painting, held by a painter, himself standing on scaffolding, itself resting on the ground. If one removes a single link, the whole series collapses instantly.

It is for per se series — and only for them — that Thomas affirms the necessity of a first cause. His demonstration is metaphysical, not chronological: if each link of the series has its causal power only by receiving it from a higher link, then an infinite regress leaves the totality of the series with no causal power at all. A first link is needed which has its causal power in itself.

The image of the painter on scaffolding

Let us take up the classical image as clarified by Lavagna:

"Take the example of a painter on scaffolding five metres above the ground. If the pavement ceased to exist, the scaffolding would collapse at once, and the painter with it. One understands that, in this case, the effect coexists with its cause." — Matthieu Lavagna, Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique !, MDN Productions / Salvator, Paris, 2023, p. 43^[30]

The analogy shows exactly what Thomas means. The question "who created God?" is analogous to asking: "what is the cause of what holds up the ground?" If one answers "the subsoil", one must ask: "and what holds up the subsoil?" At some point, one must arrive at something that does not need to be held up by something else. God, in classical metaphysics, is analogously that point: what needs no holding up because he is his own support.

The image of the wagons and infinite regress

Another often repeated image is that of the train of wagons. If you ask "why is this wagon moving?", you may be answered: "because it is pulled by the preceding wagon". If you ask "and why is that one moving?", you may be answered: "because it is pulled by the wagon before it". But however many wagons you add, you will never have explained why the train, as such, moves. A locomotive is needed — that is, a wagon that is not merely pulled, but possesses within itself the power to pull^[31].

"If each wagon moves thanks to its predecessor, and so on to infinity, one would then be in the absurd situation in which motion could be transmitted without ever having actually been received. Such a causal series could not exist. If each element of a causal series depends on another, then the series itself is dependent." — Matthieu Lavagna, Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique !, op. cit., p. 44^[32]

The American philosopher Alexander Pruss gave, in 1998, a particularly elegant formal demonstration of the impossibility of an infinite causal regress: if the set of even terms of such a series is caused by the set of odd terms, and conversely, then each of the two sets is the cause of its cause, hence self-caused. But "the notion of a self-cause implies existing before existing, which is absurd"^[33].

Why an eternal universe would still require a cause

A point often misunderstood: even if the universe were eternal in the past (without temporal beginning), the question of its metaphysical cause would remain entirely open. Why? Because the question is not only "what switched the universe on?" but "why does something exist rather than nothing?" An eternal yet contingent universe remains a universe that might not have existed, and that state of affairs requires a reason.

Thomas Aquinas recognized this very clearly: on the plane of pure philosophy, one cannot demonstrate that the world has a temporal beginning; it is by faith that we know it^[34]. But the metaphysical first cause is demonstrable independently of the question of temporal beginning. Even an eternal universe does not explain itself.

Contingency: existing without containing the reason for one's existence

To answer the objection truly, one must enter the metaphysics of being. The essential distinction is between beings that contain within themselves the reason for their existence (necessary beings, or a se — through self) and those that receive their existence from another (contingent beings, or ab alio — through another).

A tree depends on its seed, on the soil, on water, on light, on the physical laws that make photosynthesis possible. A planet depends on the condensation of a nebula, on a cosmological history, on physical constants. A man depends on his parents, on his body, on a biocompatible environment and — for the Catholic — on a soul created by God. None of these realities contains within itself the reason for its existence: one can conceive without contradiction that they do not exist.

Necessity: existing through oneself

A necessary being is the exact inverse: a being such that it is metaphysically impossible for it not to exist, because it contains within itself the complete reason for its existence. This idea has a long philosophical history. It appears in Aristotle as the Unmoved First Mover (Metaphysics, Book XII)^[35], in Avicenna as the Wâdjib al-wudjûd (the "necessary of existence")^[36], in Anselm as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" (Proslogion, ch. 2–4, circa 1077–1078), and in Thomas as the ipsum esse subsistens.

"Whatever can exist and not exist has its cause through which it exists. But this cannot proceed to infinity. One must therefore posit something which exists by necessity, and which has the cause of its necessity in no other, but which is the cause of necessity in others: and this, all call God." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, Third Way, circa 1265–1268^[37]

Ipsum esse subsistens: Thomist metaphysics

The most condensed formula of the Thomist answer to "who created God?" holds in three Latin words: ipsum esse subsistens — "the act of being subsisting through itself". Thomas develops this idea principally in Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4:

"In God, essence is not distinguished from existence. For every being whose essence does not include its existence receives its existence from another; and what receives its existence from another is caused by another. But God is caused by nothing else. Therefore in God, essence is identical with existence. God is not only a being that exists; he is the very act of being, subsisting through itself." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3, a. 4, circa 1265–1268^[38]

For every creature, essence — what it is — and existence — that it is — are really distinct. A horse might not exist without ceasing to be a horse as a concept. A star might not exist without ceasing to be a star in theory. But in God, essence and existence coincide: to be God and to exist are the same thing. God cannot therefore, by nature, receive existence from another. This is the most rigorous version of the answer to the objection.

"The question 'who created God?' supposes that God would be a being possessing existence in the way a creature possesses it — as a received quality. But God, in the classical tradition, does not have existence: he is existence itself, in its full subsistence. The question is therefore grammatically intelligible but metaphysically empty." — Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, Oneworld, Oxford, 2009, p. 78^[39]

"I am who am": the revelation of the divine Name

The Bible expresses this idea of aseity through the revelation of the divine Name to Moses at the burning bush, around the fifteenth century BC (according to the traditional chronology deduced from 1 Kgs 6:1):

"God said to Moses: 'I AM WHO AM.' And he said: 'Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS hath sent me to you.'" — Exodus 3:14, Jerusalem Bible translation^[40]

The Vulgate renders this formula as Ego sum qui sum. Origen, Augustine, and the whole patristic and medieval tradition read in this sentence the revelation of the God of aseity — he whose proper being is to subsist through himself. The Catechism comments:

"In revealing his mysterious name, YHWH ('I AM HE WHO IS', 'I AM WHO AM' or 'I AM WHO I AM'), God says who he is and by what name he is to be called. This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery. It is at once a name revealed and like the refusal of a name, and this is precisely why it expresses best what God is, infinitely above everything that we can understand or say." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 206^[41]

The mystical reception of aseity: Catherine of Siena

What philosophers formulate in terms of ipsum esse subsistens and aseity, mystics receive as an experience of prayer: God alone is, and the creature, of itself, is not. The most famous expression of this intuition comes from Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), Doctor of the Church, who repeats it like a refrain in her Dialogue dictated to her confessors between 1377 and 1378:

"O eternal Trinity! You are He who is, and I am she who is not." — Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. CLXVII (final prayer, dictated at Rome), 1378^[42]

And further on, in another prayer of the same Dialogue:

"I am she who is not, and you alone are He who is." — Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, prayer at Rome, 1378^[43]

This formula, which may seem hyperbolic, is in fact the exact spiritual translation of the Thomist doctrine of ipsum esse subsistens. The creature does not possess being; it receives it at every instant. If God ceased, the next instant, to communicate being to it, it would immediately fall back into nothingness — not into a diminished state, but into pure absence. "I am she who is not" is not pious self-denial: it is the lucid recognition that without the present support of the Creator, I am nothing. The question "who created God?" projects precisely this creaturely condition onto God — and that is where it shatters against real metaphysics.

Summary table

The decisive row is the last. If God had been created, he would not be God. He would be a superior creature, dependent on a still more fundamental cause, and the true ultimate reality — the one deserving that word — would be that fundamental cause, in every case uncreated. The word God designates precisely that ultimate reality which does not need to receive being.

The basic objection having been dealt with, several philosophically stronger reformulations have been developed by sceptical thinkers. They must be taken one by one, in their strongest version.

Objection 1 — "This is special pleading"

The accusation of special pleading is as follows: believers would impose a universal rule on the universe ("everything must have a cause"), then make an arbitrary exception for God. This objection is defended by Russell, Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and many contemporary atheists.

Answer: this reasoning would be sound if the rule were "everything has a cause". But no serious defender of the cosmological argument has ever posited that rule. The real rule is: "whatever begins to exist, whatever is contingent, whatever receives its being from another requires a cause". God is not arbitrarily exempted from this rule; he does not fall under this rule because he has none of the characteristics targeted. The objection consists in surreptitiously substituting a naïve rule for the real rule, then reproaching the theist for the inconsistency fabricated by that substitution. In reality it is the objection itself that commits a petitio principii.

A parallel helps understanding. If one says: "every human being has a mother", it is not special pleading to note that a mathematical equation has no mother. The equation does not fall under the rule, because it is not a human being. Likewise, God does not fall under the rule "every contingent being has a cause", because he is not a contingent being.

Objection 2 — "Why not a necessary universe?"

A subtler objection, defended notably by David Hume and by some contemporary physicists: if one accepts a necessary being for God, why not simply say that the universe is necessary? That would save an entity and explain reality just as well.

Answer: because the universe, as observed, presents none of the characteristics of a necessary being. It is determined by contingent fundamental constants — the proton-to-electron mass ratio could be otherwise, Planck's constant could be different, the cosmological constant could vary. It has a history with a beginning (Big Bang, confirmed by the 2003 Borde–Vilenkin–Guth theorem^[44]). It is divisible, composite, structured. One can conceive without contradiction a different universe or no universe at all. But what can be otherwise is not necessary in the strict metaphysical sense — this is the meaning of the way through contingency recalled by the Catechism^[45]. The universe wears all the marks of contingency on its brow.

The multiverse does not help either. A multiverse would be a structure of structures, determined by generative laws, parameters, initial conditions. One may ask: why these generative laws rather than others? Why a multiverse rather than nothing? Adding contingent universes together does not produce a necessary multiverse — as Leibniz had noted:

"The sufficient reason of contingent truths cannot be found in the series of contingent things, even prolonged indefinitely; it must lie outside that series." — G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, § 37, 1714^[46]

Objection 3 — "An infinite regress is enough"

Some accept the idea that there would simply be an infinite chain of causes, with no first term, and that this would do as an explanation. This objection was taken up in the twentieth century by some analytic atheist philosophers.

Answer: as seen above, Thomas distinguished per accidens series (which may possibly be infinite in the past) from per se series (which cannot be). The theistic argument does not ask for a temporal first term; it asks for an ontological first term. An infinite regress of dependent causes leaves the totality of the series with no real causal power: each link transmits what it receives, but no link gives being. That is exactly Pruss's formal argument (1998) cited above^[47].

An analogy: imagine a chain of mirrors reflecting an image. Each mirror reflects the image of the preceding mirror. How many mirrors are needed for an original image to appear? An infinity will not suffice — a real object is needed which is not a mirror, but a source of the image. Likewise, an infinity of dependent causes does not produce an independent cause: a non-dependent source is needed.

Objection 4 — "The concept of necessary being is empty" (Russell)

This is the most sophisticated objection, defended by Russell against Copleston in 1948. Russell maintains that necessity can apply only to propositions, not to things. To say "2 + 2 = 4 is necessary" makes sense: it means that the negation of the proposition is a contradiction. But to say "God exists necessarily" would make no sense, because one can always conceive God's non-existence without formal logical contradiction.

Answer: this objection rests on reducing metaphysical necessity to logical necessity in the narrow (analytic) sense. But since Saul Kripke and possible-worlds semantics in the 1970s, analytic philosophy itself has recognized that there are metaphysical necessities not reducible to purely logical necessities in the sense of analytic propositions. "Water is H₂O" is metaphysically necessary (true in all possible worlds), although it is not an analytic proposition in the Kantian sense. Likewise, divine aseity is a metaphysical necessity: a being whose essence is to exist cannot, in any possible world, fail to exist.

Russell, in 1948, could not have known Kripkean semantics, which would appear only twenty years later. His criticism has therefore been largely answered by the very development of modal logic in the twentieth century, which makes his 1948 arguments dated on this precise point. Alvin Plantinga, in The Nature of Necessity (1974), showed how the necessity of divine being could be rigorously formulated in modern modal logic^[48].

Objection 5 — "The universe is just there, and that's all" (Russell, brute fact)

This is Russell's ultimate fallback position against Copleston: the universe exists without reason. It is a brute fact, without explanation. This position is what philosophers call the acceptance of a brute fact — a fact without sufficient reason.

Answer: the position is more coherent than the caricature "everything has a cause except God", for it assumes to the end the refusal of the principle of sufficient reason. But it has an enormous philosophical cost. If the whole of contingent reality can be a brute fact without reason, then the very intelligibility of reality becomes suspect. In ordinary science, no one answers a question with "that's just how it is, for no reason" while an explanation remains possible. One seeks causes, laws, structures. Refusing this principle only when it leads to God is not a scientific discovery: it is a voluntary halt to inquiry.

Worse still, if one accepts brute facts for realities as massive as the entire universe, one may just as well accept that a pink unicorn might appear without reason tomorrow in your living room — there would no longer be any principle of incoherence. The cost of admitting brute facts at this level is the collapse of scientific rationality itself^[49].

Objection 6 — "Science will eventually explain everything"

This objection, popular in scientistic culture, maintains that science is advancing by leaps and bounds and will eventually explain what today seems to require God. The question "who created God?" would then be resolved by default: there would no longer be any need for God, hence no need to ask who created him.

Answer: science does indeed explain a great deal. But it always works within an already given framework: existence of laws, regularity of reality, mathematical intelligibility of the universe, existence of a physical substrate to study. No equation can, by its own power, decree that it exists. No physical law posits itself in being.

"Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time: 'What is it that breathes fire into the equations?' This question sums up very well the limit of the scientific method. Equations describe how things behave, given that they exist. They do not say why something exists rather than nothing. Science presupposes what it cannot itself explain." — John Lennox, God's Undertaker — Has Science Buried God?, Lion Hudson, Oxford, 2009, p. 24^[50]

Even a "theory of everything" in physics would remain silent on the question: why does this physical system exist? The metaphysical first cause is not a missing variable in an equation — it is the foundation of the very existence of what the equations describe.

Objection 7 — Dawkins: "Who designed the designer?"

In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins develops a particular version of the objection: any designer capable of conceiving the universe would necessarily be complex, and all complexity would itself require an explanation. Invoking a designer therefore solves nothing; it merely moves the problem one step further.

Answer: William Lane Craig and Edward Feser identified three serious flaws in Dawkins's argument^[51][52].

First, to recognize an explanation as the best, one need not explain the explanation. If an archaeologist finds a chipped arrowhead, he concludes that a human made it — without needing to explain where the human comes from. Otherwise, no science would ever advance: one would have to explain the explainer of the explainer of the explainer, ad infinitum. The scientific method itself rests on rejecting Dawkins's demand.

Second, Dawkins supposes that God would be complex in the material sense, that is, composed of material parts arranged in certain configurations. But the classical idea of God, from Plotinus, Augustine and Thomas onwards, is precisely that God is absolutely simple — without parts, without composition, without internal configuration. Divine simplicity is a Catholic dogma defined by the First Vatican Council (constitution Dei Filius, ch. 1, 1870)^[53]. Dawkins therefore attacks a God whom no classical theology has ever defended.

Third, the informational complexity of a mind is not comparable to the complexity of a machine or an organism. An intelligence can conceive a complex object without itself being "more complex" than that object in the biological sense. A mind that understands arithmetic is not more "complicated" than a long equation.

"The objection 'who designed the designer?' supposes precisely what must be proved: that God is the kind of entity that requires an explanation. But the cosmological argument concludes, precisely, to a being that requires no explanation, because it exists through itself. Dawkins supposes what must be denied, and denies what must be proved. Philosophically, it is a complete failure." — William Lane Craig, Dawkins' Delusion, in God Is Great, God Is Good, IVP Academic, Downers Grove, 2009, p. 9–13^[54]

Objection 8 — "This is outdated medieval reasoning"

A final objection, more rhetorical than philosophical, consists in saying that all this is dusty scholastic metaphysics, unrelated to modern science, and that no serious thinker defends such arguments today.

Answer: this is factually false. Discussion of divine aseity, of the first cause and of the argument from contingency is one of the most active fields of analytic philosophy of religion since the 1960s. The principal contemporary defenders, all professional philosophers publishing in peer-reviewed journals, include:

• Richard Swinburne, former Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford (The Existence of God, 1979, 2nd ed. 2004);
• Alvin Plantinga, former John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame (The Nature of Necessity, 1974; Warranted Christian Belief, 2000);
• William Lane Craig, Research Professor at Talbot School of Theology (The Kalam Cosmological Argument, 1979; The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, 2009);
• Alexander Pruss, Professor of Philosophy at Baylor (The Principle of Sufficient Reason, Cambridge UP, 2006);
• Robert Koons, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin;
• Edward Feser, Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College (Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, 2009; Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 2017);
• Joshua Rasmussen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Azusa Pacific (How Reason Can Lead to God, 2019).

"The number of publications on Craig's defence of the Kalam exceeds that of the publications devoted to any other formulation of an argument for God's existence — including Anselm's ontological argument." — Quentin Smith (atheist philosopher), cited by William Lane Craig in Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed., Crossway, 2008^[55]

The verdict is without appeal: far from being outdated medieval reasoning, the cosmological argument is today more rigorously defended — and more rigorously attacked — than ever. The caricature "who created God?" bears no resemblance to current academic discussions.

The following summary table recapitulates the eight sceptical objections and their condensed answer:

The cosmological argument, on its own, does not immediately lead to the Creed. It establishes that there exists an uncaused cause, the source of everything that does not contain within itself the reason for its existence. To pass from this "something" to the "God" of Christianity, a complementary conceptual analysis is needed which deduces, from the nature of the first cause, the attributes of that being.

Six attributes deduced by conceptual analysis

Lavagna, following William Lane Craig in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology^[56], enumerates six necessary attributes of the first cause:

1. Immaterial — for if it were material, it would be part of the physical universe of which it is the cause.
2. Eternal or timeless — for if it were temporal, it would be part of time, which does not exist independently of the universe (according to general relativity, spacetime itself came into being at the Big Bang).
3. Non-spatial — for if it were spatial, it would be part of the space it brought into existence.
4. Endowed with extraordinary power — for it creates everything without pre-existing matter, ex nihilo.
5. Spiritual — for what is immaterial is either an abstraction (numbers, logical propositions) or a mind. But abstractions have no causal power — the number 4 cannot cause anything. So the uncaused cause must be a mind.
6. Personal and free — a subtler argument: if the uncaused cause were impersonal (without will), its effect would have to coexist eternally with it. Like the cause of frozen water (cold below 0 °C) eternally produces ice as long as it persists. But the universe begins. The only explanation of a temporal effect from an eternal cause is the free decision of an agent. The first cause must therefore be personal and free.

"The first cause of the universe cannot be an impersonal force acting necessarily, for then its effect — the universe — would coexist eternally with it. But the universe begins. The only way for an eternal cause to produce a temporal effect without itself changing is for it to act freely, like a personal agent who chooses to act at a given moment. The first cause is therefore personal." — William Lane Craig & James Sinclair, The Kalam Cosmological Argument, in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 193–194^[57]

The following table recapitulates the deduction of the six divine attributes from the nature of the first cause:

From the God of philosophers to the God of Abraham

The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, in the famous Memorial of 23 November 1654 — sewn into the lining of his coat and discovered at his death — distinguished "the God of philosophers and scholars" from the "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob". This distinction is valid but not an opposition: the cosmological argument leads to the threshold of the living God, without yet revealing his personal face and his love. It is Revelation that completes what natural reason begins.

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars. Certitude, certitude, sentiment, joy, peace." — Blaise Pascal, Memorial, 23 November 1654^[58]

The philosophical conclusion "there exists a necessary, immaterial, eternal, powerful, intelligent, free being" does not exhaust God, but it lays the foundation. It shows that reality is not suspended over nothingness, nor over an infinite chain of empty explanations, nor over an arbitrary "that's just how it is". It opens the mind to hear the biblical revelation, in which this God named by Moses at the burning bush lets himself be known progressively, culminating in the Incarnation.

The Creed: God the creator

All Christian creeds begin with the same affirmation: "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible". Creation is therefore, in Christianity, the first proposition of faith, prior even to the affirmation of the Incarnation. The Catechism devotes paragraphs 279 to 324 to it.

Vatican I: God knowable by natural reason

The First Vatican Council, in the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius of 24 April 1870, defined as a dogma of faith that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from created things:

"The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason; 'for his invisible perfections since the creation of the world are rendered visible to the intelligence through his works' (Rom 1:20)." — First Vatican Council, dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, ch. 2, 24 April 1870^[59]

The corresponding canon anathematizes those who would deny this possibility. Rational knowledge of God, and hence the use of the cosmological argument, is not a pious opinion but a truth of Catholic faith. The council specifies, however, that this natural knowledge is imperfect, and that Revelation is necessary to attain the supernatural mysteries (Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption).

The Catechism: creating freely, out of love, while conserving being

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992, typical Latin edition 1997) synthesizes the doctrine of creation in five central points^[60]:

1. God creates freely (§§ 295–296), not by metaphysical necessity nor by constraint. He could have not created; creation is a gratuitous gift.
2. God creates wisely (§ 295), giving each creature its nature and its proper end.
3. God creates ex nihilo (§§ 296–298), without pre-existing matter.
4. God creates for his glory and the good of creatures (§§ 293–294), not to fill a lack in himself — of which he has none.
5. God conserves creation in existence at every instant (§ 301), by a continuous act of ontological support: if God ceased to sustain a creature, it would immediately fall back into nothingness.

"With creation, God does not abandon his creatures to themselves. He not only gives them being and existence, but also, and at every moment, upholds and sustains them in being, enables them to act and brings them to their final end. Recognizing this utter dependence with respect to the Creator is a source of wisdom and freedom, of joy and confidence." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 301^[61]

This last point — continued creation — is essential to understanding why the objection "who created God?" misses its target so widely. God is not a clockmaker who wound up the pendulum at the beginning of time and then went off to rest. He is, here and now, the source of the being of each thing. To ask "who created God?" is as ill-posed as asking "what is the source of the source of the sun's light?" — if one calls "source" precisely what needs no source.

The objection "If God created everything, who created God?" has circulated from Bertrand Russell in 1927 to Richard Dawkins in 2006, but it does not touch the real theistic arguments. Here are the points to remember, in order.

1. *Theistic arguments do not say "everything has a cause". They say: "whatever begins to exist, whatever is contingent, whatever receives its being from another requires a cause". God falls into none of these categories.

2. *The word "create" in Catholic doctrine does not mean "make out of matter". It means giving being out of nothing. A manufactured God would, by definition, be a creature — hence not God.

3. The first cause is not a first temporal event far back in the past, but the present foundation of the being of everything that exists at every instant.

4. The key distinction is between contingent being and necessary being. The contingent receives existence; the necessary possesses it in its own right. God is the ipsum esse subsistens — the act of being subsisting through itself.

5. The objection turns back on itself. Either God needs no cause (and the objection fails), or the universe needs no cause (and then the atheist acknowledges exactly what the theist affirmed: there exists something that needs no cause), or one accepts an infinite regress (and then nothing is ever explained).

6. All the sophisticated variants of the objection — Russell on necessity as an empty concept, Dawkins on the complexity of the designer, the multiverse as an alternative to God, the universe as brute fact — have received detailed answers in contemporary analytic literature.

In short, the question "who created God?" is, as Lavagna wrote, "the weakest objection of all" against God's existence. Which does not mean that the proofs of God's existence are trivial — they require a genuine metaphysical effort. But it means that this particular objection, brandished as an eight-word conversation-stopper, does not touch a rigorous formulation of the arguments. It refutes only a caricature.

"Nothing and no one created God. What is created requires a cause. God is not created. He is the necessary being, without beginning, the source of everything that exists. Whatever receives being ultimately depends on Him who is being through himself."

• Does God exist? — overview of the rational proofs of God's existence.
• The Kalam cosmological argument — detailed demonstration that whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• The argument from contingency — why the contingent presupposes a necessary being.
• The ontological argument — God as necessary being in Anselm and Plantinga.
• The argument from consciousness — why the human mind resists materialism.
• The fine-tuning of the universe — the contemporary teleological argument.