#STRask - Where Did the Essence God Is Composed of Come From?

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Questions about where the essence God is composed of came from, whether God has the same choices other beings have and could choose not to exist, and how to convince a non-believer God matters if he��s undetectable and a non-interventionist.   If things have to have a beginning, and God is something and not nothing, then where did the essence he is composed of come from? Can something create itself? Does God have the same choices other beings have, and could he could choose not to be, like other beings can, or is he somehow outside of being and non-being, thus not being a being at all? If God is undetectable and a non-interventionist, then how do I convince a non-believer he matters? Does he only matter because of the afterlife?

You're listening to Amy Hall and Greg Kokel on Stand to Reason's Hashtag STR Ask podcast. And this is a podcast where we take your questions off of X or from our website at str.org. off of X or from our website at str.org. And we'd love to hear from you because, like I said in the last episode, we keep all of your questions. I read every single question that comes in. It will never be lost. In fact, I even go back in time and sometimes look for older questions. So we'd love to hear from you. All right, Greg, we're going to start with a question from Bryson. Good evening. My question relates to the issue of a prime mover that things have to have a beginning. If God is something and not nothing, then where did the essence he is composed of come from? Can something create itself? Well, something can't create itself because that would be essentially a contradiction.

It would have to exist to do the act of creating before it could exist as a created being, right? So that doesn't make any sense. I'm not—the point of a prime mover is that there is a logical necessity to having a beginning. All right. Because there are arguments by Thomas Aquinas, one on motion and other types of that kind of go back to the same thing. If there is not a beginning for a number of different things, motion for one, then there would never be any motion to begin with, okay? There has to be something at the beginning, because you get stuck in a vicious regress. Okay, what move that? Okay, what move that? Okay, what move that? What move that? What move that? And off you go, ad infinitum.

what moved that? Okay, what moved that? What moved that? What moved that? And off you go, ad infinitum. And because you can always ask what moved that, you never get to a point where things start moving, just to use motion as an example. And Aquinas developed it in much more sophisticated ways than I'm offering right now. But any regress like that is going to be vicious because it won't allow you to get going. But the fact is we're here. And therefore, there must be some explanation for why we're here. to the problem is that there has to be something that is the beginning starter initiator mover that it or himself was never initiated by something else. Okay. Now, the only way that can do that, that could be the case, is if that thing is the ground of existence itself. the ground of existence itself. Now, in these arguments, you can't avoid those things because of the problem of the vicious regress that all of these kinds of questions, well, who created him?

Well, then who created them? Who created, and on and on and on. In order for there to be anything at all, there's got to be a beginning of things. And all of these things that are contingent require something that's not contingent. Now, this is a version of Leibniz's argument for the existence of God. It's a cosmological argument based on contingency, not on beginnings, like the Kalam cosmological argument is. He's just saying everything's got a reason for its existence, either in itself or in something else. And all of the things that we experience in life are all contingent on something else for their existence.

So there must be something that is non-contingent, that is itself the ground of being that accounts for the existence of everything else. So that's the general idea there. And to ask the kind of question that's being asked is like asking, who created the uncreated creator? That's what it amounts to, although that's not the way it's being stated. And I talk about this in the story of reality. I talk about this in

street smarts because it comes up so often. The most common version is, who created God? Because if the universe needed to be created, then God needed to be created. Well, this is faulty reasoning, and it reflects a misunderstanding of the argument we're offering. All we're saying in that case, Kalam cosmological argument, is that anything that comes into being needed a cause. Okay, the universe came into being, so what was the cause? And eventually, to avoid the regress, you have to have something that is the ground or the initiation of all causes that itself was not caused, and that can only be the case if it had a capability of self-existence.

And so all of this just seems to follow naturally. It's the most adequate—it's the best explanation for the way things are. And so, it's the proper answer to challenges like this. God is self-existent. He's not composed of something. So, the question here, where did the essence he's composed of come from? But he's not composed of anything. He wasn't put together. He wasn't created. He is self-existent, and that's it. No, he does have an essence that's a spiritual essence.

God is spirit, Jesus said. But I think the composed is an important distinction here because something that is composed, if a piece of music is composed, that means somebody put it together. And it has parts also that are assembled. And certainly God has no parts and he's not assembled because as a spiritual being, he is self-existent and therefore eternal. Never had origin and never will end. And I just want to point out here, we're not just saying something ad hoc, like, oh, we're just claiming God is self-existent. You've actually went through the reasoning of why we know there is some sort of being that is self-existent. We're not just claiming that out of the blue. It actually is a logical necessity for anything to exist. There has to be something

that existed before it that did not come into existence. Right, right. There's no other choice, it seems, unless you want to just, you know, punt to the universal or should say the eternality of matter, which was a, I mean, some philosophers in the past believed that and even scientists, but we just know better now. But empirically, we know better. And there are a number of different arguments. There are philosophical and scientific empirical arguments that make this case. So you're really swimming upstream against a very strong current if you want to assert that matter and the universe and all things are just eternal and never had any beginning. And there are other things we can—we've talked about this before in the show, so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail, but we know other

things about God being the self-existent first cause of the universe. We know that he's moral because this moral standard exists. So we know something about what he loves and who he is. We know that he's personal because he chose to create instead of the creation always existing. So there are things you can know about God. We know he's powerful. There are all sorts of things we can know about God just from that, in addition to being self-existent. Plus, you know, not to overlook the fact that he's revealed himself. I love the title of a book that had a great influence on me when I was a fairly new Christian, and that is He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Francis Schaeffer.

So I remember when J. Warner Wallace wrote his second book, God's Crime Scene, and he talked about all these evidences, all these elements that in the world, as a crime scene, so to speak, that can only be explained from outside of the world. It's very clever and very compelling. And all these arguments for God's existence, it was great. But I quipped to him once, since we're following the kind of criminal motif here, or the detective motif, I said, plus we have a signed confession. Yeah, right. Which we would expect, right? Because we are relational creatures, so we would expect God to be relational, which he is. He's Trinitarian. He's always been in relationship from

eternity. He created relational beings. And we would expect someone who is relational to reveal himself. And so there are all sorts of things that, you know, we can reason about from this one idea of God creating the universe. Let's go to a question from Robin D. Can God ever choose not to be like other beings can? Does God have the same choices as other beings do? Or is God somehow outside of being and non-being, thus not being a being at all? That's clever. Well, first of all, I'm not sure that we can choose not to be. We certainly can kill our physical bodies. But if we are by nature, the way we were created, immortal, that is, we have, I mean, ultimately, we have no end. Even if you want to call it conditional immortality, people mean different things by that.

But that God made us as the kind of creatures who have no end, then we can't put ourselves out of existence even. God can. I guess an animal—I have no reason to believe that an animal's soul survives the death of its body. And so if an animal were to kill itself, I guess then it could take itself out of being. But I don't count that as a virtue, as like an ability, that if that's an ability, that God ought to have that too. The answer is no. If God is the ground of being, that is his nature, the basic rule is that God can't do anything against his nature. And that's true, by the way, of everything that has a nature. That's what it means to have a nature. This is the way you are. Having a nature isn't a, it's an inductive description of an individual. It's based on what we know about the individual. It isn't like an external definition that's imposed

on it. Okay. This is the way God is. He is the ground of being. If he is the ground of being, he can't cease to be the ground of being because he would not be the ground to being anymore in the first place. All right? So, no, God can't will himself out of existence. And I don't think human beings can either because they have a never-ending existence based on the kind of creatures that God made them to be. He's ultimate being. You can't say he's not a being at all just because he will never go out of being. Yeah. And if God exists, he is a being. He bees, so to speak. So I don't know. Okay, I think we covered that. Let's go to a question from Sarah.

If God is undetectable and a non-interventionist, then how do I convince a non-believer he matters, the afterlife? Well, why would anybody think he's non-detectable and non-interventionist? I mean, that's not the Christian worldview. I suspect this wasn't sent in by a Christian, so maybe you could could take it in, you know, kind of a... Okay, so how do I know there's a mailman if I never see the truck? Every day or on certain days, I open the mailbox, there's mail in there, okay? Now, people don't like that illustration. Oh, well, we know about mailman, blah, blah, blah. I'm just, all I'm saying is that there are ways to infer causes from effects,

and the inference has to be justified based on the nature of the effect. Okay? So when cosmological arguments are offered, arguments are being given for the existence of God based on the existence of the universe. And there's two basic types of them, but in both cases, we are saying God is detectable by his effects. Okay. And there are, I mean, there are all kinds of examples in day-to-day life where we are not aware of the agent that is doing whatever, but we are recipients of the effect that clearly

implies an agent is involved, okay? We get an email. Oh, spam. We don't know who it is, but it's a who. Even if it's a who that is indirectly sending us an email through a program, a computer program, like a lot of spam is, it's still a who, okay? And so we know there's a who out there doing this. It's not just happening on its own. Okay. Even artificial intelligence is artificial. That means it's real intelligence had to create it and to equip it and program it, that kind of thing.

So there is no reason to think that God is undetectable. This is a claim that atheists make about theists. That's where the flying spaghetti monster illustration comes in. not a shred of evidence, but you still believe in him, you know. Or they would say, my claim about the flying spaghetti monster for which there's no existence and doesn't communicate, doesn't have any effect, blah, blah, blah, blah, thinking that's a parallel with God, is just as solid as your claim about God. And mine is ridiculous, therefore yours is ridiculous. But of course, this is a straw man. This isn't our view. It's not the biblical view. The biblical view is that God intervened in history in measurable ways. So you've got famously in the Old Testament, you've got the Exodus. Famously in the New Testament, you have the resurrection of Jesus. Now, the Old Testament, that stuff is pretty far

back, but the resurrection of Christ, we have access to that because we have documents that talk about it, and those can be tested, okay? So we can assess the evidence, in this case historical evidence, for the intervention of God into history. And if God intervened in history, then there is a God. It isn't that he's undetectable. Or nor is he a non-interventionist. No, nor is he a non-interventionist. So that deals with both of them. The way he's detectable is that he intervenes. And the New Testament or the biblical worldview entails prayer and answers to prayer and God acting, you know, and all this other stuff. So, if a person is going to offer a critique—this is a very important point, by the way—offer a

critique of Christianity, they have to critique Christianity. You can't critique something else. Some kind of make-me-up, some kind of straw man, some kind of other thing that you have some kind of straw man, some kind of other thing that you have mischaracterized as Christianity because you just made this up in your own mind. And this happens all the time, all the time. We don't think that God is indetectable. That's not our view. Now, whether the things that we are identifying as evidences of God are sound or not, that's another matter. Okay?

And that has to be assessed. We don't say that God doesn't intervene. He does intervene. That's why we pray to him. So for all those reasons that God is real, that he is detectable, and he intervenes in really important ways to our existential existence, that's why people ought to care about this. ways to our existential existence. That's why people ought to care about this. But notice how people don't need to care because, according to you, he doesn't intervene and he's not detectable. Okay, you see how the way the question is worded is meant to, by itself, disqualify

the legitimacy of the Christian worldview. But it's a trick. disqualify the legitimacy of the Christian worldview, but it's a trick. And of course, our entire website is about how God is detectable and He matters. You know, He didn't just create the world. He came to earth to save us from our guilt. And we are guilty. He is our judge. We've talked so much about this lately, but he adopts, he saves, he cleanses us from all of our guilt. We all know we have guilt. All of these things are reasons that he matters. He's the ground of all being. Of course he matters. It reminds me of what C.S. Lewis said. He said, if Christianity isn't true, it is of no importance. But if it is true, and for a lot of the reasons that you mentioned,

then it is of the most significant importance. It's the greatest importance. There's nothing more important than this. And just to add one last thing to this question, you know, the last part of to achieve our real aim, which is to have a nice afterlife. Yeah, carrots and sticks. Yes. And I honestly think that is their understanding of Christians because I think that's how they see God. not as a person desirable in himself, who we would want to be in relationship with and follow, but they see him as the angry judge, and they assume that's how we see him, and that that's our motivation, is fear. And that's actually not the case with Christians. We have met the creator of the universe. We have met the son of the father who came to die for us and suffer on the cross

to save us and be in relationship with us. It's not just the afterlife that we're after. We are after being with God forever as he pours out the riches of his mercy and his grace on us in Jesus Christ, as it says in Ephesians. That's what we're after. That starts now. And, of course, it will be much better in the afterlife because we will no longer be weighed down by our sin and our desires to sin that we still struggle with. And we'll have nothing in between us, and we'll be walking with God as Adam and Eve were. But that has already started now, and we're not using God as a means to get that afterlife. And so this is something I think—

God himself is the end, not these other things. Right. So there are a lot of, I think, misunderstandings about what Christianity is about. And some of this, I think, is just spiritual blindness. I've had times when I have told atheists the gospel, and they literally cannot hear what I'm saying. They'll just go right back to talking about me being a fear. And I'll say, no, no, you don't understand. I don't have fear. I don't have fear. say, no, no, you don't understand. I don't have fear. I don't have fear. And by the way, we should all have fear of the law, that there's good justice out there. But it's a different thing when it's your parent, your father. It's just a different situation. And anyway, so I think there are just a lot of misunderstandings that I wish I was better at communicating, but I don't know how far we can get. I think you've done a pretty good job. Okay. Well, thank you, Bryson and Robin and Sarah. We appreciate hearing from you.

Send us your question on X with the hashtag STRASK or on our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.