Where Did the Essence God Is Composed of Come From?

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Where Did the Essence God Is Composed of Come From?

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?

Transcript

You're listening to Amy Hall and Greg Coco on Stand to Reason's hashtag-STRask podcast. And this is the podcast where we take your questions 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 works for people. We'll 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. Alright, 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.

Because there are arguments by Thomas Aquinas, one on motion and other types of that kind of go back to this 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. There has to be something at the beginning because you get stuck in a vicious regress.

Okay, what moved that? Okay, what moved that? Okay, what moved that? What moved that? What moved that? And off we go on in fun item. And because you can always ask what move 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. Okay. And so the argument then, the solution 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. 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 were who created him, or then who created them, who created an on and on and on. And all of these things that are contingent require something that's not contingent.

Now, this is a version of Leidenitz's argument for the existence of God is the cosmologic argument based on contingency, not on beginnings, like the column 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, that's the general idea there. And to ask the kind of question that's being asked is like, like, it's 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, column cosmological argument is that anything that comes into being needed to 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 the, of all causes that itself was not cost. And that can only be the cases if it had a capability of self existence. And so all of this just seems to follow naturally.

It's, it's, it's the most adequate and 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, 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 lesson. God is, Jesus said, but I think the compose isn't an important distinction here because that in 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, 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, we're just claiming God is self-existent.

You've actually went through the reasoning of why that we know there is some sort of being that is self-existent. It's not just, 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 that did not come into existence. 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 believe that, and even scientists, but we just know better now.

But empirically, we know better. And there are a number of different arguments that are philosophical and scientific empirical arguments that make this case. So you're really swimming upstream of against a very strong current if you want to assert that matter in 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, 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, he chose to create instead of the creation always existing. So there are things you can know about that. 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 a great influence on me when I was a fairly new Christian and that is he is there and he is not silent.

Francis Shafer. 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, it can only be explained from outside of the world. It's very clever and very compelling.

It's all these arguments for God's existence. It was great. But I quipped to him once, since we're following the, the kind of criminal motif here, or the detective motif, I said, plus we have assigned confession.

Yeah. At which we would expect, right? Because we are relational creatures, so we would expect God to be relational, which he is a 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 they're 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 not 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 have, if we are by nature, the way we were created immortal, that is we have, I mean, ultimately we have no end that even if you want to call it conditional immortality, people meet different things by that. But I say that God made us as the kind of creatures who have to win, then we can't put ourselves out of existence. God can.

I guess an animal, I have no reason to believe that an animal 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 of 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 never ending existence based on the kind of creatures that God made them to be.

He's ultimate being. I wouldn't, 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. That's what he, he bees, so to speak. So I don't know, I don't know, you know, okay, I think I 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, why would anybody think he's non detectable and non interventionist? I mean, that's not the question. I suspect this isn't sent in by Christian, but so maybe you could take it in, you know, kind of.

Okay, so how do I know there's a mailman? If I never see the truck every day or on certain days, 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, 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, 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, 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 that 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, had to create it and to, to, to equip it and program it, that kind of thing.

So there's 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.

You're claiming that there's a flying spaghetti monster in the world of the wicked apparel with the claim of a God for which there's not a shred of evidence, but you still believe in him. You know, so, or they would say my claim about the, the flying spaghetti monster for which there's no existence and doesn't communicate and doesn't have any effect, blah, blah, blah, blah, thinking that's a parallel with God. It's just as solid as your claim about God.

And both mind 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 and hear history in measurable ways.

So you've got, 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 new test, the resurrection of Christ, we have access to that because we have documents that talk about it and those can be tested. Okay.

So, so we can, we, we, 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 isn't 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, the way he's detectable is that he intervenes.

And the, the, 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, 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 have some kind of straw man, some kind of other thing that you have, have, have mischaracterized as Christianity, because you just made this up in your own mind. And this happens all the time, all the time.

No, but we don't think that God is undetectable. That's not our view. Now, whether the things that we are, 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 is doesn't intervene.

He doesn't 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. And how the way the question is worded is meant to by itself disqualify the legitimacy of the Christian worldview, but as a trick. And of course, our website is about how God is detectable and he matters.

You know, not, he didn't just create the world. He, he came to earth to, to save us from our guilt. And we are guilty.

He is our judge. He, you know, we've, we've talked so much about this lately, but he, he adopts. He saves.

He, he cleanses us from our all of our guilt. Every, we all know we have guilt. All of these things are, are reasons that he matters.

He's, he's the ground of all being, of course, he matters. It reminds me of what C. L. 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 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, the last part of it is, well, does he only matter because of the afterlife. So I just want to add one idea that atheists often have of Christians is that we are following God because we are scared of going to hell and that we're using him in some way to achieve our real aim, which is to have a nice afterlife. And I honestly think that is their understanding of Christians because I think that's how they see God.

I think they see him not as, as, 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, our, our desires to sin that we still struggle with. And we'll have nothing in between us and it will 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 God himself is the end, not those other things. Right. So there are a lot of, I think, misunderstandings about what Christianity is about.

And some of this, I, some of this, I think, is just spiritual blindness. I've had times when I have told atheist 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, and I'll 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, that there is a, there's good justice out there.

But it's a different thing when it's your, 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 go. 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 Coco for Stand to Reason.