Given that God created everything, who created
God?
Prophet Muhammad
predicted that this question would one day be raised as he correctly
predicted a great many future events of importance. On one occasion
he said:
A day
will certainly come when some people will sit with their legs
crossed and ask: ‘Given that God created everything, who created
God?’ (Bukhari, ‘I‘tisam,’ 3).
Those who put such questions are
generally atheists or inclined to atheism and seek to lead others
astray also. The purpose of their question is possibly to avoid the
responsibilities owed by us to the Creator; belief and worship. At
best, the question is derived from the observation of (what are
taken to be) ‘cause and effect’ relationships. Every circumstance
can be thought of as an ‘effect’ and attributed to an antecedent
circumstance or ‘cause’ which, in turn, is attributed to some
circumstance antecedent to it, and so on. In the first place, it is
obvious to anyone who reasons objectively that the notion of
‘cause’ is only an hypothesis, it has no objective existence:
all that objectively exists is a particular, often (but not always)
repeated sequence of circumstances. Secondly, if this hypothesis is
applied to existence as a whole, we cannot find a creator of it
because each creator must have a creator before that creator, in a
never-ending chain. (In fact, the futile notion of a never-ending
chain of creators was one of the arguments used by Muslim
theologians to explain the necessity of believing in God.)
The Creator must be Self-Subsistent and One, without
like or equal.
It is self-evident that the Creator must be
Self-Subsistent and One, without like or equal. If any created being
can be said to ‘cause’ anything, that capacity to ‘cause’ was itself
created within that being. Thus, no being in the universe can be
said to be self-existent; rather, it owes its existence to the
Creator who alone is Self-Existent as well as Self-Subsistent. It
follows from the fact that the Creator alone truly creates that for
each and every being He has determined all possible ‘causes’ and
‘effects’, all things whatever that come before or after it.
Therefore, we speak of God as the Sustainer, who holds and gives
life to His Creation from first to last. All ‘causes’ have their
beginning in Him, and all ‘effects’ find their ending in Him. In
truth, created things are no more than so many ciphers or zeros
which, no matter how many we put in a series, add up to nothing,
unless a positive ‘one’ is placed before the series to give it
value. In just this way, the creation could have no real existence,
nor any value, except by God.
What we call
‘causes’ have no direct or independent influence in existence, no
direct or independent ‘effects’. It may be that we need to speak of
‘causes and effects’ in order to understand how, in a short space
and over a little period of time, some part of the Creation is
made (by the Mercy of God) intelligible to us and available to us
for our use. But even this but confirms our dependence upon God and
our answerability before Him. It is not God who needs ‘causes and
effects’ to create; rather it is we who need ‘causes and effects’ to
understand what He has created. He alone is the First and the Last,
the Eternal, the Initiator and the Determiner—and all our busy
little efforts after cause and effect are but veils between
ourselves and His Majesty.
Let us then affirm
once more: He, God, is One; God, the Self-Subsistent,
Eternally-Besought-of-All; He neither begets nor was begotten; and
nothing whatever is like unto
Him. |
