Let’s begin by asking what it is that theists (people who believe in God) want– with the understanding that we are talking about monotheists only. I think there are three key beliefs at the heart of monotheism:

• There is one and only one God in the universe
• God is responsible for the creation of all that exists
• God also exists

If God created all that exists, and God also exists, then God must have created God. Does that make any kind of sense?

Well, it’s an idea that certainly has precedent. The Egyptian gods Ra and Ptah were both self-created gods, according to some of the Egyptian creation myths. But regardless of whether the idea has been advanced previously, is it reasonable? Is it even possible?

To answer that question we first need to identify the attributes that a being must have to be able to self-create. We’re not talking about a god that just suddenly pops into existence with no antecedent. To self-create the being must have consciously decided to bring himself into existence.

At the absolute minimum such a being must have self-awareness– that is, sentience. But this being must also realize that he doesn’t exist. That is, the being must have consciousness, but must not exist– and must be aware that he does not exist.

Secondly, this being would need to have the will to bring himself into existence. And that implies that he must perceive some advantage in existence.

And thirdly, he must have the power to bring himself into existence.

As I see it this line of inquiry poses far more questions than it answers. I don’t understand how it is possible for a being to have conscious awareness without existence. I would want to have that explained to me– and as far as I am aware, no one has ever offered any such explanation.

As to the requirement that he perceive some value in existence, I suspect that the only way such a being could appreciate the advantages of existence is if he had already experienced existence. That is, he must have existed before he could appreciate the advantages of existence.

And finally, how this being could have the power to bring himself into existence is the attribute I find most confusing. It’s so baffling to me that I don’t know that I can properly frame my questions about it. The best I’ve been able to do is to imagine this self-conscious but non-existent being immersed in an ocean of non-existence. Somehow this being must be able to bring himself into the realm of existence, but I don’t know how he can do that without having some kind of a purchase on the realm of existence. It just doesn’t make sense to me– so I would want an explanation of how it would work. And thus far I have never heard any such explanation.

So what have we learned? We’ve delved into the notion of a self-created deity, we’ve raised a number of questions about it, but our discussion provided no answers to any of those questions. What we have learned is that there are some questions about the nature of god that we would very much like to answer, but which we are never going to be able to answer.

So we are back to our original dilemma. How do we resolve the two thoughts that (a) God is responsible for the creation of all that exists and that (b) God also exists?

To address that question I would ask that you cast your thoughts back 5,000 years to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to see how religion was observed in that very ancient time. That’s a reasonable thing to do because those were the only two regions of the world at that time where the people of those regions had fully expressive writing systems.

And when we think back to that very ancient time we find that the forms of religion at that time were broadly similar. Each town had its own god or goddess. That deity lived in a temple in the form of a carved or cast statue. Every morning the temple priests would bathe the god, dress the god, feed the god, and pray to the god. Every once in a while they would appeal to the god for answers to the issues of the day: “When should we plant crops.?” “Our neighbors to the east are acting aggressively; should we be planning for war?”

Then once a year the priests would remove the god– that is, the carved statue– from the temple, put it in a sedan chair, and parade it down the main avenue of the town. That would be the one time when the average citizen would be able to see and interact with his god. And yes, it really does seem that the people of that very remote time did associate the carved statue with the living essence of the god.

That is how religion was practiced for at least 2,000 years throughout that broad region. But then, sometime after the Bronze Age Collapse, a people who called themselves Israelites appeared on the scene. They said, per the Second Commandment, that it isn’t possible to represent their God as a carved statue. God, they said, is beyond human understanding. Moses went to Mt. Sinai and saw a bush burning– but it was never consumed. And then he heard God’s voice speaking from the bush– but he never saw God’s face. Moses went to the top of Mt. Sinai and watched as God carved the ten commandments in stone. But he only saw the hand of God– never God’s face. In the book of Job, it was only when Job finally acknowledged that God’s purposes and designs are beyond human understanding that God finally restored to him everything that had been taken from him. God is not something that you can liken to a mere human, or represent in physical form. God is beyond our understanding. God transcends reality.

Consider a chair– a real chair, perhaps the one you are currently sitting on. No one would argue with the statement that your chair exists. But what exactly does that mean? In a modern context it means that we understand the chair to be comprised of a very large number of elementary particles– quarks, leptons, and bosons– and that those particles abide by a rather large set of rules. Rules that govern the strong force, the weak force, electricity and magnetism, special relativity, general relativity, conservation laws, the laws of thermodynamics, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and so forth. Without those rules your chair wouldn’t have any of the properties we associate with chairs. It wouldn’t have shape, or size, or texture, or color, or weight. It would just be an undifferentiated blob– a plasma.

When someone tells me that God created the universe from nothing, I interpret that to mean that God created the material substances of the universe– the quarks, leptons, and bosons– and the rules that govern their interactions. If God created those rules, then God must not be subject to those rules. And that would mean that God cannot have any of the properties that we associate with material things, such as shape, or size, or texture, or color, or weight. The Israelites said that God cannot be represented as a physical statue. But more than that, God cannot be represented as having any of the properties we associate with physical objects in our reality. God must in a very real sense transcend the rules that govern reality. If God truly transcends reality, then God is not bound by any of the constraints of reality. And therefore God cannot be real.

I am reminded of a song by George Harrison:

I really want to see you, really want to be with you

My Sweet Lord, George Harrison

Isn’t that what we all want– to know that which cannot be known? To see that which is hidden from us? To touch the face of God? But just because you want something, that doesn’t mean you can have it.

We need a new definition of God– one that acknowledges the limitations about our understanding of God. And so I will offer you my own:

God is that which makes reality possible.

Note that this definition does not say how, or when, or why. It purposefully leaves unanswered the question of whether God created God. And yet I claim that this definition gives monotheists everything they want without giving them the one thing they cannot have– existence.

There is one and only one reality. Therefore there can only be one “that which makes reality possible.” The notion that there is only one God in the universe falls naturally out of the above definition.

Reality envelops us. Everything you can do, or think, or imagine, or dream– everything you know and touch and believe– is a component of reality. So “that which makes reality possible” is absolutely necessary. Logically necessary. Therefore God is the logical antecedent of reality. And God is logically necessary.

But this definition of God says nothing about the existence of God. That’s not a limitation of the definition. It’s a simple statement of the limitation of our knowledge about God.

Did God create himself? The definition above gives us no answer– but it also doesn’t exclude the possibility.

The Big Bang Theory is on par with the other great scientific theories of our time: Electricity and Magnetism; Special and General Relativity; Plate Tectonics; Quantum Mechanics; Biological Evolution… But there is one respect in which the Big Bang theory is distinct from the others. It is the one over-arching scientific theory that unites all of the others in one narrative of the origin and evolution of the universe as a whole. And as such it explains the origin of atoms and molecules, of stars and planets and galaxies, of the evolution of life– in fact the origin of everything that modern science comprehends.

But there is one thing the Big Bang theory does not explain– the why of creation. That is the ultimate mystery. We have learned much about our vast and complex universe. But in my view we will never know the answer to why the universe was created.

To define God as “that which makes reality possible” is to associate God with the why of creation. And in that respect God is the ultimate mystery– the question we would most like to answer, but the one that we will never fully resolve.

2,500 years ago the leaders of the Israelites asked their people to believe that their God could not be represented as a physical statue. They said that God’s purposes are beyond human understanding. Now I ask you to carry that principle to its logical extent by recognizing that God cannot exist for the simple reason that God is transcendent. The God that has made reality possible is necessarily beyond reality– and existence.

I really want to see you Lord, but I know that I cannot.

Copyright (c) 2025, David S. Moore

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