The Bible
says God is eternal and that He inhabits eternity.
(Isaiah 57:15) So, for most Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it makes no sense to
ask who created God as He has always existed. But, has He always existed as God?
The Egyptians believed that the god
of creation, Atum, pulled himself into existence from
the dark waters of Chaos. Never mind how those dark waters came to be. Then Atum created other gods. It's not clear why more gods didn't come into existence on their own. Perhaps the Egyptians felt slightly
uncomfortable with the self-creation trick and refrained from overusing it.
The Greeks also kept the number
of spontaneously generated gods down to just the first one, Chaos, a personification
of the primeval unordered state. Then Chaos transitioned from a personification of Chaos to a real god and created Gaea, the Mother Earth
goddess. Then Gaea created numerous other quirky but powerful gods with human faults,
feelings, and features. From there, the gods reproduced at will, much like
humans.
Apsu and Tiamat kick off the
Babylonian myth as personifications of the primordial watery abyss and chaos,
respectively. They somehow became real gods and begat numerous children
together. Tiamat begat a grandson named Marduk by her own grandson Ea. Marduk
stole the throne from his mother’s appointee, Kingu, killed Tiamat and created all
the stars from pieces of her butchered body. Marduk then killed Kingu and
created humans from the drops of his blood. (Enuma Elish) Yuck!
The Navajo creation story has a
series of five worlds, each one arising from the prior one. I'm guessing that there was originally only the one world and that some
precocious child interrupted the telling of the story with, “Where did this world come from?” So, the additional previous worlds were added to answer the question. Apparently
five worlds made the story long enough that the child would fall asleep.
The reader has likely seen the sketch, Drawing Hands, by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, depicting a pair of hands drawing each other into existence. It’s only famous because it’s paradoxical. Nonexistent beings or things cannot create themselves from scratch. A future god cannot go back in time before the Big Bang and create himself and everything else any more than a smart ape could go back in time and become the ancestor of all smart apes including itself as depicted in Planet of the Apes.
The reader has likely seen the sketch, Drawing Hands, by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, depicting a pair of hands drawing each other into existence. It’s only famous because it’s paradoxical. Nonexistent beings or things cannot create themselves from scratch. A future god cannot go back in time before the Big Bang and create himself and everything else any more than a smart ape could go back in time and become the ancestor of all smart apes including itself as depicted in Planet of the Apes.
If a universe could create itself
from nothing, as physicists like Hawking and Krause claimed, why couldn’t a god create itself from nothing? Prominent atheist
activist Richard Dawkins has a problem with a God that “jumped into existence
spontaneously.” (imdb.com/title/tt1091617/quotes, DL 9 Jan 2018) Why he doesn’t have the same problem with a complex universe that popped out of
nothing? The truth is the both ideas are false. Creating oneself from nothing
is as ridiculous as completely eating oneself leaving no scraps.
There’s a rule of symmetry to
existence. “If it had a beginning, it will have an end.” (Joseph Smith, King Follett Sermon, 7 Apr 1844) God
will always exist in future so He must have always existed as some kind of
intelligence in the past. And, since His glory increases now and forever, it
must have increased forever in the past as well.
Just as paleobiologists believe
in a one-time event that produced the first common ancestor of all living
organisms from less ordered structures, there must exist one common ancestor
god who achieved deity from less ordered states. Joseph Smith said that even
God “could not create himself.” (WJS, Wilford
Woodruff Diary: 7 Apr 1844, pp.343–347) So, God must have had help
achieving His current status! Stay tuned for more on that!