Does the Creator Require a Creator?
By Jim J. McCrea
It is said that the complexity of creation requires a creator. Christians make that claim. Atheists and materialist evolutionists deny it. Leaving aside answering the question, for the moment, as to whether or not creation requires a creator, lets us assume for the sake of argument that it does.
Atheists would say that there is a problem with that. For such a creator would have to be more complex than the universe he created to be an effective agent of creation. Then the question would arise: what created that creator? For he himself would require a creator if everything complex requires something to create it. Then that in turn would need a creator, and so on. As a result, it would be Gods all the way down, each one being more complex than the preceding (not such a good example of Ockham's razor).
The answer to that is that if complex creation required a creator, that creator would be absolutely simple, not complex. In that way, he would require no outside explanation for himself, because being absolutely simple he would have no parts that would require an explanation as to why his parts are arranged the way they are to constitute his being.
God, being the absolutely First Cause, must be perfectly simple. This is because if he had parts, those parts and the principle of their composition would be in some manner prior to him, thus no longer rendering him the first cause.
This is the answer to the atheist's claim that they would believe in God if his existence could be tested by empirical experiments that could then be replicated by others and that would pass peer review (if that were accomplished, the discoverer could claim his Nobel prize they say). God being absolutely simple is completely unlike any physical thing or process that could be experimentally verified. The only way to properly grasp God is through a type of intuition (though rational arguments for his existence exist). You would simply "see" him as he is absolutely simple.
This intuition, in its supernatural aspect, is what we call supernatural faith. God directly communicates himself to the intellect of the believer (now intuition is not feeling, as is commonly supposed, but is the direct seeing of a truth by the intellect apart from any discursive analysis).
