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Who made God? at Tenterden

May 2011 | by Martin Waite

Who made God? at Tenterden

Despite the early spring chill, over 80 people including about 30 unbelievers gathered at Trinity Baptist Church in the Kent Weald on Saturday 5 March.
    They came for a sit-down meal and to hear Prof. Edgar Andrews expound the subject of his recent book Who made God? (EP Books; 2009). The author is Emeritus Professor of Materials at Queen Mary, University of London, and acting pastor of the Campus Church, Welwyn Garden City. Besides contributing to EP’s Welwyn Commentary series, he has served on the boards of both Evangelical Press and Evangelical Times.

Introduced by Pastor Montaz Ali, Prof. Andrews began by pointing out the great difficulty Christian writers and scientists have in getting a hearing in the mainstream media. The stridency of the new atheism of Richard Dawkins and others is going largely unchallenged — giving the public the impression that Christianity has already lost the argument.
    He had written this book to show that this was far from the case. Asking the leading question ‘Who wants to know who made God?’ the professor then gave four possible answers to ‘Who made God?’ — a question he dubbed the atheists’ ‘weapon of ontological mass destruction’.

‘I don’t know who made God’

This is the agnostic position. The true agnostic would like to know about God, but most professed agnostics are in reality closet atheists. They simply do not want to know about God lest the implications of his existence should interfere with their lifestyle choices. For those who genuinely seek, Jesus said, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you’ (Matthew 7:7).

‘God made God’

Stephen Hawking, the respected cosmologist and motor neurone sufferer, effectively states this view in his recent book The grand design.
    To Hawking the laws of nature are ‘God’ and it is they that created the universe — ‘the universe can and will create itself from nothing’, he declares. But this implies that the universe created the laws of nature.
    This is circular reasoning, not an explanation. Elsewhere in the book, Hawking further contradicts himself, both upholding and denying a beginning to the universe.

‘We made God’

Novelist Ian Banks describes himself as an ‘evangelical atheist’. He believes that religion is a cultural artefact introduced by humankind. God is a product of the human mind invented to fill the gaps in our knowledge — and this ‘God of the gaps’ is getting smaller as each generation passes. God is pre-science, a hangover into our present scientific age, a cultural appendix, a residual superstition now defunct.
    Prof. Andrews refuted this. How could such an elegant explanation of man’s place in the universe (namely, God as an invisible transcendent creator) emerge in the minds of the primitive beings described by evolutionists as ‘early man’?
    In the last century, the atheist Bertrand Russell wrote in his essay A free man’s worship: ‘Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving’. In other words, we are merely a cosmic accident, a collection of atomic and biological reactions.
    If this is true, concepts such as beauty, justice and love would disappear in this reductionist ‘black hole’, leaving only despair, as Russell admitted.
    In any case, if we made God, who made us? Atheists say evolution made us. But who made evolution? They reply that evolution is the way everything is! But who made everything? So the atheists have their own ontological mass destruction problem!

‘Nobody made God’

Everything that exists materially has a cause. The universe had a beginning and therefore a cause. But God is not part of the physical universe for he inhabits eternity (Isaiah 57:15)!
    Until about 100 years ago scientists believed the universe itself was eternal — the unchanging background to the drama of existence. But Albert Einstein changed this. His theory of relativity proved space and time were changeable and malleable and themselves actors in the drama!
    By contrast, God is outside space-time and not changeable or malleable. He exists in eternity, without beginning or end; nothing created him or caused him to exist.
    The apostle Paul preached to the Athenians about their ‘unknown’ God (Acts 17). He is the God who made everything, who ‘gives to all life and breath and all things’, and before whom repentance is required. His judgement is coming, but there is a great future for those who trust in Christ.
Martin Waite