It is not rare that in an argument there is a point which one side feels is decisive and powerful, while the other side sees it as hardly worthy of consideration. Arguments on the existence of God are not an exception to this, and probably the most famous example is the question “If God created the Universe, then who created God?”

Many atheists feel that this is the knock-down, decisive blow to any talk on the existence of God; many Christians feel that the point is so weak that it hardly needs to be addressed. At the very least, such is the impression one gets when watching a debate between none other than two Oxford professors, biologist Richard Dawkins and mathematician John Lennox. To Dawkins, the question “who created God” is one of the central arguments of his work The God Delusion; to Lennox, this is the ‘schoolboys question’, which he is surprised to find in the work of someone like Dawkins.

It is not hard to trail Dawkins’ line of thought. As he writes, anything complex has to result from simpler forms; since our minds (the only ones we know of) are reducible to physio-chemical processes, so should be God’s. Hence, positing God to explain the universe simply begs the question as to what has to explain God. If we see that our minds are created, why should we make an exception for God’s, however powerful it is?

But the fundamental point of contention between atheism and Christianity is not the existence of just another great and powerful mind, but the question as to what is primary. If atheism is true, then any mind, however great and powerful, is at the end a result of mindless outworking of natural forces; there is, by definition, no such thing as the primary mind which is uncaused, according to atheism. On the other hand, if Christianity is true, then the fundamental reality is a rational spirit, and everything else is derived from it; mind is primary, and mass-energy is derivative. [1]

This particular misunderstanding is, at the end of the day, a definitional issue. When the atheist says “assuming that God exists..”, often what he does not mean is to assume that mind is primary, but rather to assume only that there is a powerful mind of some sort that created the universe. However, the Christian, given his definition of God, understands the atheist as accepting that mind is primary, and is perplexed by the seemingly contradictory follow-up that “we have to ask who created God”. When he replies that God is uncreated, the atheist feels as if a cheap trick has been pulled, and sees this as just an ad-hoc assertion used to avoid the uncomfortable, yet obvious (to the atheist) question of who created God.

It is therefore incumbent upon both the Christian and the atheist to understand what they mean when assuming that God exists. If the atheist really uses the same definition of “God” as the Christian does, then he would see that to concede, for the sake of argument, that God exists, means to forfeit a fundamental notion of the atheistic worldview – namely, that all minds have to be created. The atheist then should not be saying “assuming that God exists, we have to ask who created God”, but instead, “I cannot grant you that God exists, because I believe that any mind, however powerful, is a result of natural, mindless processes”. From there on, the real argument can begin – whether it is really the case that minds are derived from mindless processes. [2]

[1] This point is pressed all throughout the Bible, from the first chapter of Genesis to the gospel of John. For instance, when John 1:3 writes that all things that came into existence did so through the Word, he implicitly defines the categories of created and uncreated, placing God in the latter.

[2] I have written on this to some extent in my other post, Four Arguments for the Irreducibility of Mind