...And Then Bang, It Happened: God the Prime Mover

"Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God."
-Psalm 90:2

There are a lot of firsts in everyday life: The first person in my family to come from Ireland was my Great-Grandmother. The first day of the work week is Monday. Sir John A. Macdonald was the first Prime Minister of Canada. All of us are constantly living a sequence of events all day long. One thing happens first. Then something happens next. We know something came before us. We know something came before that. Scientifically, we also know (from testing cosmic background radiation) that the universe had a beginning. But what came before that? Now how about before the thing that came before the universe? This is what's called the problem of infinite regress. A sequence can't go backwards forever; in the chain of events there had to be a first link. Many philosophers have called this first link a Prime Mover who acts upon other things as the first Cause but itself is not caused by anything. The Bible calls this being God: "Before... you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." (Psalm 90:2).

Philosophers have been thinking about this problem for thousands of years now, from at least as far back as Aristotle all the way to Thomas Aquinas and down to the present day. Although many have been skeptical of religion, this problem has still caused many of them to believe at least in God as the necessary explanation for how the universe got its beginning. (On its own, this belief is known as Deism, which even critics of religion have held to including Thomas Paine.) Some have tried to argue that infinite regress is possible; these include the Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell who used the example of how negative numbers can go "backward" infinitely from zero to prove his point. However, -1 doesn't really come "before" 0, it comes after--it's measured as one less than zero, just like -2 is two less than 0, and on and on. Although numbers can go on infinitely, they all have 0 as their starting point. Although this is not necessarily a proof for Christianity but more for the existence of God in general, it is another instance where approaching the universe using reason has given us a picture of God which happens to line up very well with the picture of God that is given to us in Scripture.

Here's what this means for us. Since God is the First Cause, then we know He has a will: He moves and acts on His own, deciding what to do before He does it, and therefore we can trust that God has a reason for everything that He does even if we don't understand that reasoning. Since God is the Prime Mover, He is powerful enough to set the whole universe in motion. That means nothing is impossible for Him. He is also able to do "immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine," (Eph. 3:20). Since God, being the Cause of the universe, is greater than that which is caused, we should acknowledge Him in our lives and serve Him with thankfulness. Since God is eternal and not caused by anything that came before Him, maybe we might approach God, who Daniel calls "the Ancient of Days" (Daniel 7:9), the way that we would approach a very elderly person who has lived lots of experiences: as someone, who owing to their age, has seen it all before and who has important lessons to pass down to us. So we should approach God with an attitude of learning. If God is the designer of a universe which has the appearance of design then we should wonder what His purpose for designing us is, what we're made for, and we should seek God through prayer and through His Word to find out.[3]

Today, take time to look outside in nature (or watch Planet Earth on Netflix) and think about God: he began everything, and everything has Him to thank for our existence. What a gift!

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[3] The descriptions in italics each riff on one the "Five Ways" of Aquinas.