Where did God come from?

Where did God come from? Don’t we have to assume that if there is God, then there must have been something before Him that created Him?

These questions assume that everything, including God, is subject to the limitation of time and space, an assumption that the scientific community has questioned and virtually dismissed since Albert Einstein first published his special theory of relativity in 1905.

Einstein demonstrated how time and space are not absolute and that the perception of time is dependent on one’s frame of reference. For example, he showed how the rate of a moving clock would appear to decrease as its velocity increases. Even absolute time has been excluded from modern physical reasoning because it cannot be measured by human means. This widely accepted scientific postulate suggests that the common frame of reference that all things originate and operate within the context of fixed time and space — that nothing, therefore, exists outside of time and space — is not necessarily correct.

While this context does not make the concept of eternality a simple notion to grasp, the facts do make it easier to accept the biblical teaching that God does in fact exist outside of time and space as we know them. And Einstein’s theory only seems to corroborate the biblical perspective of time:

“For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4).

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

“But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8).

To accept that God exists outside the framework of time and space as we know it renders any question of what came before Him irrelevant. These questions might be legitimate if God is subject to our constraints of perception, which He is not. The Bible teaches that God is not bound by time or space, and that He simply has not chosen to reveal to us all that took place before He created the universe.

Excerpts taken from Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart. Tyndale House Publishers, 1980.
Scripture quotations are taken from the New International Version.

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