"Who Created God, Then?", The Atheist Asked.

To my surprise, I have read that "Who created God, then?" is considered by many modern atheists to be a sharp, insightful comeback to belief in God. It seems to be inspired by this line of thinking, expressed in Dr. Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion:

" Expounding creationist argument, viz., the absurdity of irreducibly complex biological system arising by natural means “without the intercession of a designer mind” and comparing the probability of assembling Boeing 747 from a tornado-ed junkyard to that of life assembling itself spontaneously, which is a popular illustration given by creationists, Orr explained that Dawkins responded to design argument with a “judo-like move” in which he turned creationist’s logic against itself. Quoting Dawkins, “[a] designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.” Orr wrote."

So Dawkins' comeback sounds like a syllogism:

1. All complex things require a prior creator.
2. God is complex.
3. Therefore, God must have had a prior creator.

Can you see Dawkins' trick? 

It a straw man argument.  Christians, or even monotheists in general, do not claim that all complex things require a prior creator. We claim that most things do. Dawkins is not responding to the Christian claim, but to a slyly twisted version of it.

Second, Dawkins is ignoring the monotheist's definition of "God." The idea of "Creator of all things" necessarily includes self-existence. And the quality of self-existence nullifies the syllogism. His syllogism might strike a blow against polytheist religions like Hinduism and Mormonism, but not against a monotheist religion like Christianity.

When Christians say that there is an eternal Creator God, we mean that He pre-existed the creation. Eternal means that God is radically independent of everything. Independent to His very core. God in His nature as God has no external dependencies, no external contingencies, no external conditions for existence or action. And God created all things. Not a lot of things, or most things, but all things. 


Both claims mean God is self-existent. So, if the question is posed, "What is the origin of God's complexity?", the Biblical answer is, "God's complexity does not have an origin, because God by definition is eternal and self-existent." Nothing else is eternal or self-existent, so the analogy between nature and God based on complexity doesn't hold. God has a quality -- self-existence -- that breaks the analogy.  

Dawkins' syllogism fails because it misrepresents what Christians are believe, and because it ignores one of God's essential attributes that make Him God.  Atheists should talk about what Christianity actually teaches, not pop philosophical balloon-animals.