Is God the Creator — or Is the Creator God?

There is an important difference between arguing that the Creator is God and arguing that God is the Creator.

Many traditional arguments for God take the first route. The universe began. Everything that begins has a cause. Therefore, the universe has a cause, and that cause is God. This is the cosmological, or Kalam, argument. It moves from creation to a Creator.

While I think that this approach has significant merits, it nonetheless faces challenges.

First, and this is the biggest problem, even if the universe has a cause, why assume that cause is intelligent? Why couldn’t it be an unintelligent set of laws? The cosmological argument may get you beyond the universe, but it does not obviously get you to an intelligent, purposeful God.

Second, is the universe’s beginning absolutely proven? The standard Big Bang model strongly suggests a beginning, but cosmology is not definitively settled. Physicists such as Roger Penrose and Paul Steinhardt have proposed models that reinterpret the data in ways that allow for eternal or cyclic universes. Multiverse theories attempt to push the beginning further back or dissolve it into a larger framework.

These alternatives have significant problems, and the multiverse has fatal flaws. But their existence shows that the case for a beginning, while very strong, is not beyond debate.

Third, philosophical arguments against an infinite past are subtle and contested. For millennia, thinkers have disagreed about whether an eternal universe is possible. These arguments are far from universally accepted.

For these reasons, I prefer starting somewhere else.

The laws of nature are fine-tuned and designed in a way that produces structure and complex order. That convincingly points to intelligence as opposed to a blind mechanism. In other words, in modern physics, the design argument is even more convincing than the cosmological argument. 

Once you have reason to believe that an intelligent, foundational reality exists, the question of creation looks different. Now, the beginning is not proof of God; it is the natural interpretation of the scientific evidence given our knowledge of divine intelligence.

In that sense, I find it more persuasive to argue not that the Creator is God, but that God is the Creator.