Everyone Believes in an Eternal ‘being’
Though not everyone believes in an eternal Being, everyone believes in eternal being. To exist is to have being, and no one can deny that there is existence.
One often thinks the divide between believers and non-believers comes down to this question: Does God exist? But there is a deeper, more unavoidable issue that cuts across every worldview. If anything at all exists right now, then something must have always existed. Eternal being (existence itself) is not up for debate. It is the only logical conclusion. If there were ever a point when literally nothing existed, then nothing would exist now. The fact that anything at all exists means that “nothing” has never been ultimate reality.
This is why philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas, and even modern thinkers who would not call themselves religious, have agreed on this much: a something must be eternal. There is no escaping that conclusion.
This is where the real debate begins. The question of how there could be an eternal Being such as God seems perplexing, even impossible, to imagine. Yet in reality, everyone, whether they realize it or not, already believes in eternal being, though not necessarily in God. The disagreement is only over what form that eternal being takes.
Some argue for eternal matter, the idea that physical stuff has always existed in some form and created everything else.
Others propose eternal laws, such as quantum fields or mathematical structures, that govern reality without themselves having a beginning.
Still others point to an eternal multiverse, endlessly generating new universes.
And of course, theists affirm an eternal Being, God, who exists without cause and gives rise to all else.
Strip away the labels, and the common ground is plain: everyone acknowledges that something must be without beginning.
Often the claim is made that science is free of these ultimate commitments. Though some feel empowered by claiming this, that isn’t true. It can’t be true. A cosmologist who insists that quantum fluctuations explain the universe is, in effect, saying that quantum fields are eternal. A naturalist who says the laws of physics “just are” has as much faith in eternal reality as the theist, only their eternal reality is impersonal.
Imagine walking into a library filled with books and asking, “Where did these books come from?”
One person says, “The books are eternal. They’ve always been here.”
Another says, “No, the eternal laws of syntax produced these books.”
Then a third chimes in: “There’s an eternal Author who wrote them.”
At this point a skeptic interrupts: “But who created the Author?”
The skeptic’s question sounds clever, but it actually undermines their own position. Why? Because even if they deny the Author, they are still left treating the books themselves (the specified information, the words and sentences) as eternal. They don’t escape the need for something eternal; they have only shifted it from a personal Author to impersonal books. The skeptic doesn’t notice that he never applies his question consistently: he doesn’t ask the one who claimed syntax produced the books, “But who created the laws of syntax?” Nor does he think to ask, “Where did the syntax come from?” He avoids that, because to press the question evenly would expose that eternal existence is already being assumed.
Even saying nothing more than “the books just are” is still to admit that existence itself is eternal, if only tacitly. The logic is biased in that it refuses to see how proposing information as self-existent is every bit as perplexing—if not more—than an eternal Author.
The funny thing about the ‘Who made God?’ question is that it already presumes eternity — an endless ‘before.’ Even assuming there must be a before is itself a claim that ‘befores’ are eternal. No amount of abstraction or vagueness removes the fact.
So when someone asks, “How is God possible?” the deeper dilemma is: How is anything possible at all? The only real question is what, or who, that eternal being (existence) is.
This article doesn’t settle every question about existence or God. But it clears away one of the biggest confusions in modern debate. No one is exempt from belief in eternity. Even the loudest critic of religion must anchor their worldview in something that never began and will never end. If anything exists, there was a before, even if outside what we think of as time.
Recognizing this forces honesty. It is not a choice between belief in God and belief in nothing. It is a choice between competing visions of what eternal being really is. One view says eternal reality is impersonal, mindless, and governed by chance. The other says eternal reality is personal, purposeful, and the source of meaning.
The Big Bang may describe a beginning to our observable universe, but it does not remove the question of why energy, space, or quantum laws exist at all. Multiverse theories push the question back but never escape it. Behind every scientific model stands the same unavoidable truth: something must have always been.
That’s why the ‘Who made God?’ gotcha question backfires. It points out a problem that the skeptic already accepts without realizing it. Everyone believes in something eternal; the only real debate is whether that eternal reality is impersonal and blind, or personal and conscious.
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