Supernatural

I would like to take a minute to address a fundamental question that I’ve heard and seen discussed, argued, and debated many times: “Where did God come from?” To an unbeliever, the concept of God’s origin may seem difficult to understand. This is a normal feeling to have, as God’s origins are indeed difficult, if not impossible, to understand.

To talk about this, we must set the context of our discussion: the natural world. Whenever we have a conversation in this universe, it’s important to remember that we are doing so in the natural world. We speak, write, type, or even use sign language within the limits of our universe. Or rather, we could say that the natural world allows us to do many things, but not all things.

This is a key point to understand before discussing God, because God by definition is not a natural being. His origins are not natural. This is not a concept original to New Testament Christianity, but indeed spelled out in the Old Testament, as well as shared by almost every other notable religion on Earth. We know that it is natural to think about this, after all the historic writings, art, and excavated sites which we have up until know discovered, showing us many different cultures, each in their own search for meaning inside themselves as individuals, as a community, and outside their natural world.

This understanding lays the groundwork for the concept of the word “supernatural”. This word of course is used to describe something beyond natural, and something beyond scientific understanding. Science is a way to study and understand the natural world. Science by definition is not a way to study the supernatural. And yet, science still has its purpose. It is important to test notions that every weather phenomenon, every force acting upon us is a supernatural force beyond our understanding. We know now the natural explanations of many things which we previously considered purely specific divine actions, like natural disasters. However, it should also be mentioned that using science with the hope of disproving the very existence of the concept of “supernatural” is not only in bad faith, but also foolhardy, given science’s natural limitations.

And though we are naturally limited by our language, our lifespans, and our intellectual capacity, we still have enough of these resources to understand the basic concept that the supernatural exists outside of the natural. I believe that we can know that from our consciences, as well as basic observation of the world around us. This can be seen in a study of all the many human civilizations, each admitting the existence of the supernatural. But even if you would deny that, we cannot deny that up until now, we have not found any substance which can create itself from nothing. We can make more of us; we can combine animals to make a new animal, and we can observe the break-up and fusion of elements. But it seems quite clear that in our natural world, things do not create themselves from nothing.

This is the notion of God. God is the entity that exerted a force to create the natural. He must exist based on the mere fact that the natural world is temporary, and cannot create itself. That is simple logic. It is also simple logic to say that we don’t know where He came from. How can we know the origin of something supernatural? We cannot use any of our natural resources to give us the answer. More importantly, how can we know that something supernatural has an origin?

We’re exiting our natural world here, meaning that all bets are off. We know nothing of the subject in and of ourselves. The only way we could possibly know would be if the answer arrived in our natural world from the supernatural. If something supernatural passed us information in natural form, we might be able to know something of the supernatural world. Fully understanding any of this information might be difficult, given our natural limitations, but we would have some answers to our many questions, assuming the information given to us was correct, of course.

Therefore, the only definitive answer to the question “Where did God come from?” is “We don’t know”. That’s the reality of living in the natural. Though the answer is simple, it is important to understand the logic behind the arrival at this conclusion, as it is the fundamental nature of our world.