'Who Made God?' Answering the Question

Sooner or later almost every child asks it: "If God made everything, who made God?" Many adults never get a satisfying answer, and some conclude that there is none. The question has also become one of the best-known objections in modern atheism. Bertrand Russell said that one sentence about it, read at eighteen, showed him the fallacy in the First Cause argument, and Richard Dawkins built the central argument of The God Delusion on a version of it.

It is a good question, and the Church's answer to it is old, clear and reasonable. This article sets out where the objection comes from, what it assumes, how Christian thinkers from St John of Damascus to Thomas Aquinas answered it, and why the newest form of it, Dawkins's "Ultimate Boeing 747," does not succeed.

In brief

"Who made God?" assumes that God is the kind of thing that needs a maker. The classical arguments for God never claimed that everything has a cause. They argued that things which are created, changeable or contingent (able not to exist) need a cause, and that the chain of such causes must end in a being that is uncreated and exists of itself. St John of Damascus put it plainly in the eighth century: the maker of created things "cannot have been created," otherwise we go back "till we arrive at something uncreated." The serious form of the objection, from David Hume to Russell, asks why the chain should not stop at the universe instead of God. The answer is that the universe shows every mark of contingency, while God, as the Church confesses Him, is not one more thing in the universe but the One who simply is. Dawkins's claim that God would be more complex, and so more improbable, than the world assumes that God is a physical system with parts. Classical Christian teaching, Eastern and Western, denies exactly that.

Thesis: "Who made God?" does not refute belief in God; it shows instead that every explanation must end in something uncaused, and only an uncreated, necessary and simple God can bear that weight.

Where the question comes from

In his 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell recalled that he had accepted the First Cause argument until he read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, where Mill wrote: "My father taught me that the question, 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, 'Who made God?'" Russell drew the lesson: "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."¹

The deeper version is older. In David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published 1779), the skeptic Philo presses the point against a designer God: "why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum?" If the material world rests on a divine mind, he argues, "this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end."²

Richard Dawkins gave the question its best-known modern form in chapter 4 of The God Delusion (2006). The astronomer Fred Hoyle had compared the chance origin of life to a hurricane assembling a Boeing 747 in a junkyard. Dawkins turned the image around: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747."³ A God able to design a universe would, he argues, be "a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide."⁴

Russell says the theist cannot stop at God; Hume, that we may as well stop at the world; Dawkins, that stopping at God means stopping at the most improbable thing of all. Each deserves an answer.

What the question assumes

Russell's sentence begins with an "if": "If everything must have a cause." But the classical Christian arguments for God do not begin from that premise, because Christians do not believe it. The Fathers and the medieval theologians argued from a narrower starting point: things that come into being, change, or depend on something else for their existence need a cause.

St John of Damascus, whose Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith gathered the teaching of the Greek Fathers, makes the argument in book 1, chapter 3. All things, he says, "are either created or uncreated." Created things are changeable. "But things that are created must be the work of some maker, and the maker cannot have been created. For if he had been created, he also must surely have been created by some one, and so on till we arrive at something uncreated."⁵ The argument does not say that everything has a maker. It says that whatever is made has a maker, and that the series of makers must end in the unmade.

Thomas Aquinas's "third way" has the same shape. Things in nature are "possible to be and not to be." If everything were like that, there could once have been nothing, and then nothing would exist now. So "we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another."⁶ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the cosmological argument makes the same point in modern terms: "what needs explanation is the existence of what is contingent, not the existence of everything."⁷

{{very-strong: Classical Christian arguments for God, East and West, argue that created or contingent things need a cause; they do not claim that everything, including God, needs one.}} Russell's "if" attacks a premise the theist never held.

The category of uncaused being

So the real question is whether there can be something that exists without being caused. Every worldview says yes. The atheist who says the universe is a "brute fact" believes in something uncaused as much as the Christian does. The difference is in what each takes the uncaused reality to be.

Christian teaching says that the uncaused reality is not a very large creature but a different kind of reality altogether. Aquinas argued that in God "His essence is His existence": God does not receive being from anything, because He is not a thing that has being added to it.⁸ St John of Damascus says that "the most proper of all the names given to God is He that is," from God's words to Moses at the burning bush, which the Greek Old Testament renders: "I am THE BEING" (Exodus 3:14).⁹ He goes further still. God "does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence, but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself."¹⁰

Scripture speaks the same way. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God" (Psalm 90:2). God is "the First" and "the Last" (Isaiah 44:6), the One "who is and who was and who is to come" (Revelation 1:8). He "made the world and everything in it" and is not served by human hands "as though He needed anything" (Acts 17:24-25).¹¹

To ask "who made God?" of this God is to ask what made the unmade. It is not a question the theist cannot answer; it is a question with a false assumption inside it. {{strong: Asking for the maker of an uncreated, necessary being is a category mistake, not a refutation.}}

Why not stop at the universe?

Hume's form of the objection is stronger than Russell's, and it should be faced squarely. If every explanation stops somewhere, why not stop at the physical universe and save a step? In Part IX of the Dialogues the character Cleanthes asks: "why may not the material universe be the necessarily existent Being?" Perhaps matter has qualities that, if we knew them, "would make its non-existence appear as great a contradiction as that twice two is five."¹²

The Christian answer is that the universe does not look like a necessary being, and God, as the Church confesses Him, does. Everything we observe in the physical world is limited, changeable and made of parts: stars form and burn out, and the physical constants have values that, as far as anyone can tell, could have been otherwise. St John of Damascus pointed to exactly this: what is mutable shows that it was made, and what is made needs a maker.¹³ A being that exists of itself cannot be limited by anything outside it, cannot be built from parts that might have been arranged differently, and cannot change, because change means receiving what one did not have. That description fits the God of Christian teaching. It does not fit anything in the physical world.

A philosopher can still say "the universe is just there," but that is a refusal to explain, not an explanation. The Stanford entry gives the reason Christians do not ask what explains God: it "makes no sense to ask for the explanation of the necessary."¹⁴ It does make sense to ask why a limited, changing, contingent universe exists rather than nothing. {{debated: Whether the universe could itself be a necessary being or an unexplained brute fact remains contested among philosophers, though the universe shows every observable mark of contingency.}}

The Kalam version

A second family of arguments starts from time rather than contingency. The kalam cosmological argument, developed by medieval Islamic theologians under the influence of the Christian philosopher John Philoponus and revived by William Lane Craig, runs: "Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence."¹⁵ (See the site's infographic The Kalam Cosmological Argument.)

Here too the first premise is carefully limited. It concerns what begins to exist. God, who is eternal, never began, so the premise does not apply to Him. The evidence for the second premise is serious but should not be overstated: the Big Bang model describes the universe expanding from a hot, dense early state, and physicists still debate what, if anything, lay before it (see If the Universe Began, What Explains It?).

The Christian case does not hang on this one argument. Aquinas held that the world's beginning in time could not be proved by philosophy at all: "By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist."¹⁶ His arguments from contingency were meant to work even for an eternal world, because a world without beginning would still be a dependent world (see If the Universe Is Contingent, What Grounds Its Existence?).

Dawkins's "Ultimate Boeing 747"

Dawkins's version adds a new premise: God, if He existed, would be complex, and complex things are improbable. As he puts it, "God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable."¹⁷ His reply to critics is that a being who knows and governs everything could not possibly be simple.

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga answered in his review "The Dawkins Confusion" (2007). First, classical theology teaches that God is simple, without parts. Second, by Dawkins's own definition, complexity means having parts "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone," and "God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts." Third, the idea that a mind with great knowledge must be improbable makes sense only if we already assume materialism, which would beg the question. Finally, if God is a necessary being, "the probability that he exists, of course, is 1."¹⁸

The criticism did not come only from believers. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, reviewing the book in 2006, wrote: "But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God."¹⁹

The heart of the matter is divine simplicity. Aquinas states that in God there is no composition "of quantitative parts," none "of matter and form," and no difference between His essence and His existence, so that "God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple."²⁰ St John of Damascus says the same in his own words: God is "simple, uncompound, incorporeal."²¹ God's knowledge is not stored information spread over parts, like a hard drive. He knows all things as their Creator, not by gathering and storing data. The Ultimate Boeing 747 is a fair objection to a god who is a very large, very clever creature. That is not the God of the Creed.

{{strong: Dawkins's argument assumes that God would be a complex physical or quasi-physical system; classical Christian teaching explicitly denies that God has parts, so the argument misses its target.}}

What the Orthodox Church confesses

The Creed of Nicaea and Constantinople (381) begins: "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible." It confesses the Son "begotten of his Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made," and the Holy Spirit "who proceeds from the Father."²²

This adds something that the philosophers alone could not. Within God there is an eternal order of origin that is not making. The Father is the one source, unoriginate; the Son is eternally begotten of Him, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from Him. Neither the Son nor the Spirit is a creature, and neither had a beginning in time. St John of Damascus explains: "The Father is one Father, and without beginning, that is, without cause: for He is not derived from anything. The Son is one Son, but not without beginning, that is, not without cause: for He is derived from the Father. But if you eliminate the idea of a beginning from time, He is also without beginning: for the creator of times cannot be subject to time."²³ So the Christian answer to the child's question is exact: no one made God. The Father is without cause; the Son and the Spirit are from the Father eternally, not made; and all creation was made by the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit ("All things were made through Him," John 1:3).

The Church also teaches that God can be known from His works. St Paul writes that God's "invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead" (Romans 1:20).²⁴ St Gregory the Theologian said: "Now our very eyes and the Law of Nature teach us that God exists and that He is the Efficient and Maintaining Cause of all things."²⁵ Yet the same Fathers insist that what God is in His essence remains beyond us. St John of Damascus: "It is plain, then, that there is a God. But what He is in His essence and nature is absolutely incomprehensible and unknowable."²⁶ Reason can show that the question "who made God?" rests on a mistake. It cannot replace the knowledge of God given in Christ, in prayer and in the life of the Church.

For a wider survey of the arguments, see Does God Exist? The Strongest Arguments for Theism Explained.

Objections and replies

"This is special pleading. You make a rule and then exempt God from it."

The rule was never "everything has a cause." It was "what is created, changing or contingent has a cause." God is exempt because He is not created, changing or contingent, which is the very conclusion the argument reaches about the first cause. Special pleading would be exempting something that falls under the rule. An atheist who says the universe needs no cause is exempting a changing, limited thing from a rule that applies to every changing, limited thing we know.

"If something can be uncaused, why not the universe?"

Because the candidates are not equal. An uncaused reality must exist of itself, and what exists of itself cannot be limited, composite or changeable. The physical universe is all three. Saying "the universe just is" declines the question rather than answering it.

"Necessary existence is a meaningless idea."

Hume's Cleanthes argued that "whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent," so nothing exists necessarily.²⁷ But being able to imagine something's absence is a fact about our minds, not about the thing. And Hume's own character then suggests the universe might be the necessary being, which shows that the idea is not meaningless after all; the argument is only about where necessity lies.

What we can say confidently

• The classical arguments for God (St John of Damascus, Aquinas, the cosmological tradition) argue that created or contingent things need a cause, not that everything does.
• Christian teaching holds that God is uncreated, eternal, unchangeable and simple; to ask who made such a being is a category mistake.
• Dawkins's "Ultimate Boeing 747" assumes that God would be complex in the way physical systems are; theist and atheist philosophers alike (Plantinga, Nagel) have pointed out that this misdescribes the God of classical theism.
• The Orthodox faith confesses that no one made God: the Father is without cause, the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds from the Father eternally, and all creation is made by God.

What remains disputed

• Whether the principle of sufficient reason holds in a strong form, which the contingency argument relies on; philosophers continue to debate it.
• Whether the universe had an absolute beginning; the Big Bang model is well supported, but what preceded the earliest observable state is still debated in physics.
• How best to state divine simplicity in philosophical terms; Orthodox theology affirms it while also distinguishing God's essence from His energies, and Western and Eastern accounts are not identical.

Conclusion

"Who made God?" is a fair question to ask, and it has a clear answer: no one. Every chain of explanation must end in something that exists without being made. A universe that changes, decays and could have been otherwise is a poor candidate. The God whom the Church confesses, who is, who was and who is to come, without beginning and without parts, is the only candidate that fits.

The atheist answer, that the world simply exists for no reason, is not the more modest position; it is the less reasonable one. And the Christian answer is not only a conclusion of logic. The uncreated God did not stay at the end of an argument. The eternal Son, begotten not made, became man, so that we who were made from nothing might share by grace in the life of the One who was never made at all.

Notes

1. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (lecture at Battersea Town Hall, 6 March 1927), Bertrand Russell Society text, https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/whynot.html. Russell quotes John Stuart Mill's Autobiography.
2. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part IV (Philo speaking), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm.
3. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), chapter 4, as quoted in Alvin Plantinga, "The Dawkins Confusion," Books & Culture (March/April 2007), https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2007/marapr/1.21.html. Elizabeth Burns gives the page of the Bantam edition as 114 (see note 4).
4. Dawkins, The God Delusion, 147, as quoted in Elizabeth Burns, "The God Delusion: Dawkins on Religion" (Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life, Heythrop College, University of London, 2007), SAS-Space, https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/6606/.
5. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 1.3, trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, NPNF2 9, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/33041.htm.
6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2nd ed., 1920), https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm.
7. Bruce Reichenbach, "Cosmological Argument," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2004; revised 2026), section 5, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/.
8. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1003.htm.
9. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 1.9 (see note 5); Exodus 3:14, trans. L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha (1851), https://ebible.org/eng-Brenton/EXO03.htm.
10. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 1.4 (see note 5).
11. Psalm 90:2; Isaiah 44:6; Revelation 1:8; Acts 17:24-25 (NKJV).
12. Hume, Dialogues, Part IX (Cleanthes speaking) (see note 2).
13. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 1.3 (see note 5).
14. Reichenbach, "Cosmological Argument," section 5 (see note 7).
15. Reichenbach, "Cosmological Argument," sections 1 and 8 (see note 7).
16. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1046.htm.
17. Dawkins, as quoted in Plantinga, "The Dawkins Confusion" (see note 3).
18. Plantinga, "The Dawkins Confusion" (see note 3).
19. Thomas Nagel, "The Fear of Religion," The New Republic, 23 October 2006, 25-29 (publication details as given by Burns, see note 4; author, title and date also shown on the magazine's own page, https://newrepublic.com/article/65012/the-fear-religion, whose text is not openly available). Wording checked against a reprint of the full review on the blog Triablogue, https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/11/fear-of-religion.html.
20. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 7 (see note 8).
21. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 1.2 (see note 5).
22. The Creed of the First Council of Constantinople (381), trans. Henry Percival, NPNF2 14, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3808.htm.
23. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 1.8 (see note 5); John 1:3 (NKJV).
24. Romans 1:20 (NKJV).
25. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28 (Second Theological Oration) 6, trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, NPNF2 7, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310228.htm.
26. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition 1.4 (see note 5).
27. Hume, Dialogues, Part IX (see note 2).

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: English. London: Samuel Bagster, 1851.
• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 2nd ed., 1920.
• Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 1779.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9. 1899.
• Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 28. Trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7. 1894.
• The Creed of the Council of Constantinople (381). Trans. Henry Percival. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14. 1900.

Other scholarship

• Plantinga, Alvin. "The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum." Books & Culture, March/April 2007.
• Burns, Elizabeth. "The God Delusion: Dawkins on Religion." Heythrop College, University of London, 2007. SAS-Space.
• Reichenbach, Bruce. "Cosmological Argument." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004, rev. 2026.

Sources from the skeptical tradition

• Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
• Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian. 1927.
• Nagel, Thomas. "The Fear of Religion." The New Republic, 23 October 2006.