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Who made God?
Question:
"I have a friend at school who said that the Christian belief that God 'always was' is no different than another belief that matter always was. So he said that evolution and creation are on the same footing. This doesn't sound right--how do I respond to this?"Answer:
First, I'm impressed that you are doing this in the first place. It's gutsy!
This is an old problem. If you start with "something"--that something had to come from something, and that something had to come from something else, etc. This becomes an infinite chain that is unresolvable. This is referred to as the "problem of infinite regress." But it is the problem for the materialist (or evolutionist), not the theist.
The Christian position is this:
1. Everything that has a beginning also has a cause. This is self evident (or obvious), but can easily be demonstrated. Any motion certainly has a cause. Wind has a cause. Electricity and phone books have causes. We can identify causes to these things as having been ordered by some set of conditions.
2. The Universe clearly had a beginning. One thing we know about the universe is that it is expanding. Red Shift and Doppler technologies have pretty well established this. If it is all expanding over time, and we can reverse the expansion, it is obvious that it all came from one point in time (scientists call this the "singularity"). This is what we popularly call the "Big Bang" and is the point of creation.
3. God is the point of origin for everything...the one reality without a beginning...the author of the Big Bang. We say he is the "uncaused cause." He is the end of the infinite chain I mentioned--because He is infinite. This is consistent with the idea that everything with a beginning has a cause. At some point there has to be an uncause cause or nothing would ever be here.
So the Christian claim is NOT that everything must have a prior cause. This would be a claim for that infinite chain, which is an unworkable idea. Your friend's claim seems to support the infinite chain. But an "infinite" is only theoretical, we NEVER see one in reality. If the universe is infinite and involves and infinite set of events prior to the current time, then the current time would never come--because this current time would break the set of infinite events leading up to this time. The universe is not infinite.
Theists (those who believe that God created) claim that natural mechanisms (like natural selection) cannot account for the complexity of living beings. There are three popular arguments for this:
1. Because of complexity in general. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that order tends to disorder. Evolution is a direct contradiction of this universal law: claiming that simple organisms somehow organize, gather complex information, and complicate themselves. In organism, mutations tend to be destructive. How is it that evolution works in this kind of universe?
2. Because of "Specified complexity" - this phrase refers to the kind of complexity you see in language--which is also the kind of complexity in languages (human or computer). Natural causes never produce this kind of complexity. This is William Dembski's phrase (he wrote a book called "Intelligent Design").
3. Because of "Irreducible complexity" - this is Michael Behe's phrase showing that even the simplest organisms could not be explained by evolution (he uses the hair of a bacterium as his illustration--his book is "Darwin's Black Box").
These are complicated issues and difficult to talk about. You may want to do a little reading before tackling the question...but don't feel like you have to know everything about it to ask a few questions of your friend!
