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August 2001, Page 8.
Index of articles.
Questions:
index,
Marriage prep,
Creed,
Real Devil,
Sick visiting,
Who made God,
Harry Potter.
In this issue:
(August 2001)
Vicar's Letter,
CW Books,
Money,
Question.
In our "Questions to the clergy" slot, John will try to answer any query you throw at him, without hesitation, deviation or repetition...
Who made God?
Q. If God made everything, who made God?
(Asked by a year-6 pupil (10-11 years old) at the School Service.)
A. The trouble with this question is that it’s easy for me to give a short answer, but it’s hard for you to understand it. Sorry about that!
The answer is: God is not the sort of thing who needs to be made. If he was, he wouldn’t be God. God exists in his own right without needing a creator.
The problem is really that we tend to imagine God as being like us only bigger. This is what the bible calls “idolatry” - we make an image of God in our minds, and then we fall into the trap of thinking that the real God is like our image. Everything in our experience needs creating and sustaining, and we are used to the idea that nothing lasts for ever. We find it impossible to imagine something which is sustained solely by its own power, outside time, always there, and independent of anything else in the universe. In short, we cannot imagine God, and our attempts to do so are failures.
Greek mythology was like this. They imagined all sorts of stories about the goings on between Zeus and Aphrodite and all the rest of them, a bit like a modern soap opera. As a result it was obvious that their gods needed gods of their own to create them: the Titans! Logically, the titans would also need creators. In no time at all you have an infinite sequence of gods, each held up by the next one’s bootlaces!
Unfortunately, a modern dictionary is no better. It will tell you that “god” is (i) a “divine being” (but divine just means “god-like”, so that’s not much use), and (ii) creator of the universe. It will also say the “universe” is (i) “everything that exists” (but in that case there couldn’t be anything outside the universe to create it, so God couldn’t exist), or (ii) the whole creation (but that defines God as the creator of everything that he has created, which is a bit circular). All this proves is the pointlessness of dictionaries for philosophy!
Behind all this is the following idea: the observable universe, space and time and everything in it, is either all that exists, in which case there is no purpose for it and no reason why it exists at all. Or else it isn’t everything: there is something outside it which caused it, and which itself doesn’t need a cause. The prime mover - the being who exists in his own right. In fact, the concept which Exodus is trying to get at when God says “I AM WHO I AM - ‘I AM’ is my name”.
John Hartley