Now, just who did make God?

In a video shown at church this morning, promoting children's camps, we saw one boy enthuse that he was able to ask interesting questions such as 'who made God'.

Firstly, it's good that he could ask that question in confidence of being taken seriously, perhaps not so good that maybe he didn't think he could ask it at his church.

When one is asked this question, the reflexive reply might be 'No one 'made' God, he has always existed.' or 'Only entities that had a beginning need a cause, God does not have a beginning'.

But a better way would be to ask questions. This demonstrates that you want to engage with the person, and gives you more information about their thinking behind their question.

On the surface the question seems to contain an assumption or two: that god is contingent, first off. That is, he depends upon something/one else for his being. This would imply that he is a denizen of the world, the cosmos, that we know. This is the mistake made by the Russian cosmonaut who reported that he didn't find God when in orbit around  Earth. The other possible assumption is that the very idea of 'god' is made-up, a human invention. This produces the typical unbeliever's view that we made God in our own image.

Now, the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly fell for that error; their gods are very human like. But the God who speaks is very much not so. Just check the demands in the beatitudes!

So our questions can explore the questioner's understanding of God.

Questions you might ask could be:

What would be able to make god?

When you say 'god' what do you mean?

How would you characterize 'god': i.e., what is 'god' like, in your estimation?

If someone made god, then who made that someone?

Why would you think that God needed to be 'made'?

The strategy is to find out if they think 'god' is an invention, a entirely contained by the  cosmos, that he is a type of creature...and is thus the result of an infinite regress, or an epiphenomenon of material.

For most people, consider that the questioner is, at least, an unconscious modern materialist, and probably evolutionist, or perhaps, again unconsciously, a 'paneverythingist' (as per Schaeffer in He is There and He is Not Silent). That is, with a vague belief that the universe is 'god', or 'god' is an undefined and probably impersonal spirit, such as would represent the 'karma' belief of Hindus.

Most people, and I think, even some Christians, hold that (material) reality is characterized by a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. However this fails to explain man, the universe and its form (and intelligibility). It fails as a basis for real knowledge of any kind.

Christian faith invites us to the world created by the creator: God who is love. Here we have the uniformity of natural causes in an open system in a limited time span.

The God who is there made the universe, with things together, in relationships. Indeed, the whole area of science turns upon the fact that He has made a world in which things are made to stand together, that there are relationships between things. So God made the external universe which makes true science possible, but he also made man and made him to live in that universe. He did not make man to live somewhere else. So we have three things coming together: God, the infinite-personal God, who made the  universe, and man, whom he made to live in that universe, and the Bible, which he has given us to tell us about that universe. There is a unity between them.

(Schaeffer, He is There and He is Not Silent, p, 329 in the Crossway compilation, vol. 1)