Apologist Frank Turek recently addressed a question that often comes from critics of God who ponder where the Lord originated.
These atheists and secularists often raise curiosity in reaction to believers who point to the fact that nothing originates out of thin air — that every item and element of creation has an originator.
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“The evidence shows that space, time, and matter had a beginning out of nothing,” Turek told The Bible Bros Podcast earlier this year. “And even atheists agree with this, and Stephen Hawking … who was an atheist … said, almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.”
Turek noted that Hawking didn’t believe God was responsible for creation itself and even tried to propose other alternatives. Yet Turek believes the data are clear, pointing to an amazing God-ordained creation that brought everything from a “state of nothingness” to existence.
Turek believes this was an intentional choice by the Lord. Watch him explain:
“Space, time, and matter had a beginning,” he said. “If space, time, and matter had a beginning, what could have created space, time, and matter? Only something outside of space, time, and matter. In other words, something spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing.”
Turek also spoke more directly to the notion of God having a beginning, noting that, if the Lord is timeless, he has no origination point.
“If you’re timeless, you don’t have a beginning, which means you don’t have a cause,” he said. “So the question, ‘Who made God?’ is a stupid question because God is not ’cause,’ because the definition of God is the ‘uncaused first cause,’ what Aristotle might call the unmoved mover.”
Ultimately, this means there had to have been an origination point — a time when things kicked off and began. The “uncaused first cause” philosophical theory essentially argued that everything has a cause, so there must be one beginning point that didn’t — and that thing started everything.
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“You can’t go on an infinite regress of causes,” Turek said. “So if you’re talking about a created God, you’re not talking about the God of the universe. You may be talking about a God … like some sort of finite God, like some, you know, Osiris or Zeus or… or Thor or somebody, a finite God inside the universe.”
He continued, “But you know when you’re talking about the infinite God outside the universe, that God has no beginning — that God has will have no end. That God just ‘bees.’ In other words, as the Bible puts it, ‘The Great I Am.’”
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