Where did God come from? How can you explain to someone that does not believe the Bible that God always is, always was, and always will be?

Short answer: “In the beginning God…” Gen. 1:1

But for the person that does not believe the Bible, perhaps a more rhetorical response is appropriate: What’s the alternative?

Slightly longer answer:

Personally this was the most difficult question that I needed to answer in my spiritual journey, and yet in retrospect it those first four words of Genesis was the best and most obvious answer. No one seems to question “in the beginning” . It seems logical that there was a beginning and physicists and many related scientific specialties aim at understanding these three words, yet the scientific journals remain shockingly silent on the fourth; “God”, and that silence leaves many unwittingly arguing that science has “disproved” God. It hasn’t, nor has it offered any alternative.

As one of the many engineers at Hillcrest (I think our church still has more engineers than adopted children, but its close), the basic laws of physics were something we learned and applied again and again from grade school through various levels of college training.

• Matter (and energy) cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form…
• An object in motion will remain in motion…
• For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction…
• Everything tends toward disorganization (yes, its not just what happens in the house, it’s a physical law of nature, also known as the 3rd law of thermodynamics)

And the list continues. We all recognize parts of these laws and we routinely see their affects. These basic laws have not changed since there discovery or throughout recorded history before they were defined (largely by early scientists that believed in God and merely wanted to better understand His creation.) As our understanding of these physical laws has grown, nothing within them contradicts “in the beginning God”, but instead just furthers our understandings along those lines.

Very few people that dare to argue “where did God come from” have any more understanding of the origin of the universe than “the big bang theory”, although even this concept has been altered dramatically over our lifetime by additional scientific discovery. But even a big bang is not a “beginning” story since it pre-supposes stuff was there to go bang and something caused the bang. So, quite simply unless you are an astrophysicist, the question really comes down to one of two faith decisions;

• Stuff always was and from infinity past it just happened to always be moving according to today’s physical laws, in such a manner that it eventually went boom, and after that, despite the 3rd law of thermodynamics, things randomly become incredibly organized and here we all are (with messy houses and missing socks).
• God always was and set the universe on nothing (Gen. 1:1, Job 26:7)

Both are faith decisions, one is no more explainable than the other. Understandably, some 80% of those scientists that do understand the origins of the universe best acknowledge there must be some creator to explain what they see.

To take the science step just one step farther, just a generation ago now, Einstein and his counterparts discovered that matter and energy were themselves interchangeable –that is via nuclear reactions. Consider the incredible power of nuclear bombs that release the energy contained in minute quantities of matter, and multiply that by the amount of matter in the universe and your brain is immediately overwhelmed. Then face a hard fact—a law upon which science rests—matter (or its energy counterpart) cannot be created, hence all that is must have been “in the beginning”—but how can that much matter or energy simply “be”. Turns out that accepting “in the beginning” without “God” is just as big of a leap of faith because doing otherwise is to accept an “in the beginning” argument upon which either matter or energy already existed in extreme abundance.

And add to that another disappointing discovery; while matter and energy cannot be created (but by God), we now know the universe is slowly “leaking” energy. That is to say, the universe is not fully conserving energy like anticipated, but is actually loosing it slowly. So if that is true and has always been true, “in the beginning” must back up even farther—really infinitely backward to where matter or energy were not just mind blowingly large, but infinitely large.

Where does this lead—in infinity past was an infinite power, which, at least from some point in times past (the beginning), has been very orderly in following prescribed physical laws, such as the laws of nature we all recognize. Does that not sound like God.

There are a multitude of further resources on this topic for the scientist that really wants to study the issue, so we end the science side here. But let’s also look at this from a second angle before closing. If you were God and wanted your created people to worship you by faith, rather than as robots, what step is critical to this? Faith. So logically, you would supply enough information to your creation such that they could know of your existence, such as is contained in the Bible. If your creation contains a variety of personalities and interests, the evidences that you would reveal might also contain an assortment to catch the eyes of those differing personalities (yes, engineers also have personalities). But if faith is what you want, as God, what do you not do? You do not reveal so much that true worship could be by means other than a step of faith. Again, from an engineer’s perspective, nothing happens without a proof to back it up. If I could prove God, I would be prevented from having faith in God, I’d simply believe because I have to, just like I believe 2+2=4. For me, seeing the logic of this was a key step in accepting “in the beginning God”.

I believe it is impossible to convince someone of those opening four words of the Bible until they see other parts of the Bible come to life through the work of the Holy Spirit in their life and the lives of the Christians they meet. You cannot prove God always was, but you can show God still is.

Submitted by: Paul Morrison