Article
Q: "Where did God come from? Doesn't everything have a beginning?"
A: This is not a question I can answer fully. There are thousands of books written on this, some using math formulas I can't even pretend to understand. But I have studied enough to give you a little bit of a taste of the idea.
First, the question you are asking is a question of cosmology. "Cosmology" is easier to understand if we misspell it as "cause-mology." It is the study of what caused "mology" ----wait a second! Let's try that again. It is basically the study of what "caused" everything.
If you look at your question, it can get pretty confusing. There is an old story that says:
A man in ancient times had questions about the universe. He approached the wise chief of his village and asked, "I am confused because the world is just hanging in space. What keeps it from falling?
"Young man, you know the story. The world is supported on the back of a giant turtle."
"But then what is holding the turtle up?" asked the man.
"That turtle is on the back of another turtle," said the chief.
"And that turtle?"
The chief replied, "It's turtles all the way down."
OK, apart from the wonderful Yurtle tie-in (should be the next Seuss movie), the point is that what the chief said is absurd. Even if the world was on top of a turtle, on top of another turtle, on top of another turtle..., the stack would have to end somewhere. There would have to be something on which all of those turtles were supported by that was itself not supported by anything. Get it? My brain hurts now too.
Or look at it another way. Suppose I were to stand dominoes up on their ends, spaced apart so they make a design, but close enough so that they would create that chain-reaction domino effect when they fell. I could do that for weeks on end until I had used up all the dominos. Then, when the video camera is recording, I push over the first one. They all come crashing down, one by one, by one.
Now, if you picked one domino in the middle and asked, "What caused that domino to fall?" the answer would be "the domino right before it. But when we keep going back in the chain, eventually we come to find out that the first domino was pushed over by my finger. Nothing moved my finger, except me. To the dominos I am the first cause.
So when it comes to the universe and everything that is, the dominos of time have to start somewhere. There has to be something that caused everything, and that thing could not have a cause itself. It has to be timeless, eternal, un-caused. That "thing" is God. God was not caused, or made. He is. That's it. He just is. Eternally. Pretty hard to understand...but pretty amazing.