Who Created God?

Question of the week: If God created us and the universe, who created God?

My answer: It is not just nontheistic physicists who ask this question. Almost everyone has asked or thought about this question. I often hear the question posed by young children. Children will ask, “If God created us, who created God?” A sophisticated adult might phrase the question this way, “If God created the universe and everything in it, including all matter, energy, and the 10 space-time dimensions, who created him?”

The question itself yields an elegant proof for creation. The universe and everything in it is confined to a single, finite dimension of time. Time proceeds only and always forward. The flow of time can never be reversed. Nor can it be stopped. Because it has a beginning and can move in only one direction, cosmic time is really just half a dimension. The proof of creation lies in the mathematical observation that any entity confined to such a half-dimension of time must have some ultimate starting point or point of origination. That is, that entity must be created. This necessity for creation applies to the whole universe and ultimately to everything in it and constrained by it.

The necessity for God to be created, however, would apply only if God, too, were constrained to half a dimension of time. He is not.

Again, by our definition, time is that realm or dimension in which cause-and-effect phenomena take place. According to the space-time theorems of general relativity, such effects as matter, energy, length, width, height, six other tiny space dimensions, and the single cosmic time dimension were caused independent of the time dimension of the universe. According to the New Testament (2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 1:2), such effects as grace and hope were caused independent of the time dimension of the universe (meaning before, outside of, or apart from our time dimension). So, both the Bible and general relativity speak of at least the equivalent of one additional time dimension for God, since effects existed before time in this universe began.

In the equivalent of two or more dimensions of time, an entity is free from the necessity of being created. If time were two-dimensional, for example, both a time length and a time width would be possible. Time would expand from a line into a plane (see the figure). In a plane of time, an infinite number of lines running in an infinite number of directions would be possible. If God were to so choose, he could move and operate along an infinite time line that never touches or crosses the time line of our universe. As John 1:3, Colossians 1:16–17, Hebrews 7:3, and Revelation 1:8 say, he would have no beginning and no end. He would not be created. Without him nothing was made that has been made.