Who made God?

Philosophy Updated November 2026

If everything needs a maker, who made God? It is a fair question, and it is the right place to be honest about what believers actually claim.

What believers say

The classical argument is not “everything needs a maker”. It is that everything that began, or that could have failed to exist, needs an explanation. Ibn Sina called God the Necessary Existent: the one thing that exists by its own nature and so needs no maker. The Qur'an: “He has not fathered, and was not born” (112:3). Christians and Jews say the same: God is uncreated.

What sceptics reply

Why stop at God? If something can exist without a cause, why not the universe itself? Bertrand Russell put it that way in 1948; many philosophers still do. Others ask whether a “necessary being” makes sense at all.

Where it stands

This is philosophy, not science, and serious people stand on both sides. What everyone agrees on: the question “why is there anything at all?” doesn't go away.