where did god come from?
Why is there anything, instead of nothing? One of the
philosophical reasons to believe in God is the Cosmological
Argument, which explains that everything must have a
cause...and the initial cause for everything is a being which we call
"God". Anything other than this explanation requires an
infinite regress (essentially that everything has always existed) for
which there is no evidence. Assuming one accepts the notion
of a first cause, it begs the question, "what caused God?"
But the answer within the Cosmological Argument gives us the answer to
this question also! By definition, God is the first event,
sometimes known as the 'Prime Mover'. Therefore by
this definition, God is uncaused. So the question
'Where did God come from?' is improper. It is like asking for
a square circle, or a flat ball. Is it hard to
accept? Yes. But does it make sense to
us? Yes, in the sense that we intuitively know that there
cannot be an infinite regress of events. SOMETHING had to be
the first. There is nothing in nature that we see coming from
nothing (despite the fifty dollar words some Naturalists throw around,
like quantum fluctuations, etc.) It is just not
practical. So what started it all
off? Something outside of nature - something
supernatural.
What's the alternative? If you don't want to believe in a
Creator, you must either believe that something (indeed, everything!)
came from nothing, OR you must believe that everything has always
existed. NEITHER are reasonable, since they contradict
everything observed. There is no evidence for it, in fact the
evidence points toward a beginning (second law of thermodynamics), and
evidence points to nothing coming from nothing (if someone has seen
something come from nothing, I'd love to see it!) Therefore,
it is REASONABLE to believe that there is a Creator!
While this philosophizing does not prove the God of Christianity, it
does establish that the belief in a 'Prime Mover' is
reasonable, based upon sound thinking formed from sound experience (the
observations of cause and effect and the unreasonableness of infinite
regress). Understanding this, the question now becomes: "What
is the nature of this Prime Mover?"