Apologetics · Answering the New Atheism
You lay out the case as carefully as you know how. The universe had a beginning. It is finely tuned to an absurd degree. The cell runs on coded information. Something is behind all of this.
And the man across the table waits for you to finish, leans back, and asks four words.
Then who made God?
It lands like a checkmate. Everyone at the table feels it land. And most Christians go quiet — not because there is no answer, but because they have never been shown one and are not sure whether they just lost.
You did not lose. But you should understand exactly what was asked, because the question deserves better than a shrug and better than a sneer.
Take It at Full Strength First
Children ask this. Philosophers ask this. Anyone who has ever thought seriously about causation has hit it. It is not a cheap shot, and treating it like one is the fastest way to lose a person you were trying to reach.
Richard Dawkins gave the objection its most rigorous form and treated it as the central argument of his case. The reasoning runs like this: design arguments say complex, organized things require an explanation. Fine. But any being capable of designing a universe would have to be at least as complex as the universe — more so. So invoking God does not explain the complexity. It relocates it, and now you owe an explanation for something even bigger. You have not closed the question; you have started an infinite regress and hidden it behind a name.
That is a real argument. It is also wrong in two specific places, and both of them are worth knowing well enough to say out loud without notes.
First Error: You Do Not Have to Explain the Explanation
The argument assumes a rule that no field of inquiry actually uses: that an explanation only counts if you can also explain the explainer.
Apply it anywhere else and it is instantly absurd. An archaeologist finds a chipped flint blade in a riverbed and concludes a person made it. Nobody responds, “and who made the person?” — as though the toolmaker’s parentage had to be established before the tool could be recognized as a tool. A detective identifies an arsonist from an accelerant pattern without producing the arsonist’s biography. Astronomers infer an unseen planet from a wobble long before they can say how the planet formed.
Inference to the best explanation does not require a complete account of the thing inferred. If it did, science would never have started, because every explanation in history came before the explanation of that explanation.
So even in the worst case — even if a Christian had to answer “I don’t know” about God’s own origin — the design inference would still stand or fall on the evidence for it. “Who made the designer?” is a further question. It is not a refutation.
But we do not have to say “I don’t know,” because of the second error.
Second Error: The Premise Was Never “Everything Has a Cause”
This is where the whole objection actually turns, and it turns on a single word.
The question who made God? assumes the Christian claim is “everything has a cause.” It never was. The claim is: everything that begins to exist has a cause.
That is not a convenient dodge invented to protect God. It is the only version of the principle anyone has ever had reason to believe. We do not observe that everything has a cause — we observe that things which come into being come into being from something. Nothing in your experience has ever popped into existence out of nothing, and if things could, the question “why doesn’t a horse appear in this room right now?” would have no answer.
Once the premise is stated correctly, the objection simply does not attach. Asking who made an eternal being is like asking what is north of the North Pole, or how many years the number seven has been running. The question is grammatically fine and conceptually empty. There is no beginning there to explain.
And the name God gives Himself is a statement about exactly this. Moses asks who to say sent him, and gets back a sentence with no history in it:
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM. (KJV)
Exodus 3:14
Not “I was made.” Not “I arose.” Existence, stated in the present tense, as the name itself. Moses is standing in front of the answer to a question he had not yet learned to ask.
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. (KJV)
Psalm 90:2
“Then Why Not Say the Universe Never Began?”
This is the honest follow-up, and it is the one you should actually want. If something can be eternal, why not the universe? Why add a step?
Two answers, and give the first one straight.
The first is evidential, and it is the reason this objection was much stronger a century ago. For most of modern history the default scientific position was an eternal, static universe — and that position was abandoned on the evidence, not on theology. Expansion, background radiation, the arrow of entropy: the physical universe looks overwhelmingly like something with a starting edge. That is not a Christian talking point. It is why the man who first proposed the expanding model spent years being accused of smuggling in Genesis.
The second is philosophical. The universe is the sort of thing that changes — it moves, cools, decays, runs down. Change is precisely the category of thing that requires explanation, because a changing thing is always becoming something it was not. Whatever is truly ultimate cannot be running down, or it would already have run out.
Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? (KJV)
Isaiah 40:28
The Complexity Move
There is one piece of Dawkins’ argument left, and it is the piece people forget to answer: the claim that God would have to be more complex than the universe, and therefore more in need of explanation.
Notice what “complex” is doing there. In the design argument, complexity means many parts arranged in a specific functional order — a bacterial flagellum, a protein fold, a machine. That kind of complexity cries out for explanation precisely because parts have to be put together, and putting-together is an event that happened.
But Christian theology has never described God as an assembled object. He is not a very large machine with a great many components. He has no parts to arrange, and therefore no assembly to account for. A mind is not complex in the way a mechanism is — your own idea of a circle is not made of smaller pieces of circle.
So the argument equivocates. It takes “complex” in the engineering sense, where it demands a cause, and applies it to a being who is not that kind of thing at all. Scripture says it in a sentence, to a room full of philosophers:
God that made the world and all things therein … dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things. (KJV)
Acts 17:24–25
He needs nothing. That is not a compliment paid to God. It is a category — the difference between a thing that has life and the One who has life in himself.
Now Hold Our Own Side to the Standard
Here is where a lot of apologetics gets dishonest, so let us not.
Answering “who made God?” does not prove Christianity. It does not get you to the cross, to an empty tomb, or to a name. All it does is clear a roadblock — it shows that the question everyone treats as a conversation-ender is not one. An uncaused, eternal, personal cause is a long way from the God who has a Son.
That distance is crossed by history and by revelation, not by philosophy. And a Christian who is good at this argument and never gets around to the news has done something worse than lose the argument. He has won a debate and withheld the point of it.
The confrontation runs the other direction too. If the question is genuinely a search, it should survive being answered — a man who asks “who made God?” and gets a real answer should have a next question, not a subject change. When the same four words come back a third time in the same conversation, they were never a question. They were a door being held shut from the inside.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (KJV)
Romans 1:20
The Name Was Never an Explanation
Notice what God did not do at the burning bush. Moses asked for a name, and he did not receive a definition, an argument, or a proof. He received a self-existent Person, standing in front of him, in fire that did not consume the bush it was burning in.
And centuries later, in a temple courtyard, a carpenter from Nazareth reached back and picked that same name up.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. (KJV)
John 8:58
The grammar is deliberately broken and everyone in earshot knew it. He did not say “before Abraham was, I was.” He used the name that has no beginning in it — and He used it about Himself, standing in a body, on a Tuesday, where people could touch Him.
So the next time the four words come across the table, you have something better than a stalemate. Nobody made God. That is the whole point of the word. Everything else in existence is downstream of Someone who is not — including the mind asking the question, which is the strangest evidence of all, since it went looking for a cause behind the universe using equipment it could never have gotten from an accident.
The regress stops. It stops in a Person. And that Person came looking for you long before you thought to ask about Him.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist