“Who Created God? The Answer Nobody Expects | Theological with Shabbos Kestenbaum
2K Video Views·May 2, 2026
It's the oldest objection to God's existence—and most people have never heard a satisfying answer.
In this excerpt from Theological with Shabbos Kestenbaum, Dr. Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science and author of Return of the God Hypothesis, flips the question entirely: every worldview—whether theist or atheist—requires an uncaused starting point. The real question isn't whether a prime reality exists. It's which one the evidence actually supports.
And when you look at what modern physics and cosmology are telling us about the origin of the universe, one answer holds up far better than the other.
Watch the full episode on Theological with Shabbos Kestenbaum for the complete conversation on intelligent design, fine-tuning, DNA, Einstein's greatest blunder, and the scientific case for God.
🎬 Full Episode: https://youtu.be/s7g95CDJl6I 🎟️ The Story of Everything—in theaters now: https://l.prageru.com/4tdQE4u
If God exists outside of matter, if God exists outside of space-time, if God exists outside
of all physical dimensions, okay, then who or what created God?
Yeah, that's an easy one.
Okay.
Every metaphysical system or worldview has to posit something as the, sometimes it's
called the primitive, or the ground of all being, or the prime reality.
The thing from which everything else comes.
The self-existent thing from which everything else comes.
For Jews and Christians, for theists, the prime reality is an eternal self-existing
God who is a conscious mind and creative powers, etc.
For materialists, there's also a prime reality, a thing from which everything else comes that
is not explained in terms of anything more fundamental, and that is matter and energy.
And the question that then arises is which of those two postulates better explains the
evidence that we have from the natural world.
We can't get around the need for a primitive, an ontological ground of being a prime reality.
We have to have come from something.
Every system of thought posits something as the thing from which everything else came.
Right, that makes sense.
That is not a liability in theistic thinking any more than it is in naturalistic or materialistic
thinking.
Instead, the question is which of those posited grounds of all being or prime realities makes
more sense in light of what we know.
And because there are multiple indicators of the beginning to the universe, both from
theoretical physics and from observational astronomy, I think that the theistic postulation
makes much more sense.
Matter and energy, space and time, I think, become a kind of crummy candidate to be the
eternal self-existent thing because we have so many indicators that they themselves came
into existence a finite time ago.
Whereas there is a loophole in the singularity theorem of Hawking, but a loophole that has
only been closed at the expense of providing other grounds for theism, which we'll get
into.
There's another proof that's based not on general relativity but based on special relativity
called the Borg-Guth-Volinkan theorem that also points very strongly to a beginning and
does not require meeting the same conditions that are difficult to meet in the singularity
theorem of Hawking, Penrose and Ellis.
So in return to the God hypothesis, I argue that you never get an absolute proof in science
because every proof is conditioned on some sort of axiom.
But we have from theoretical physics one strong and one very strong indicator of a beginning
and from observational astronomy multiple pointers as well to a beginning.
So with that in mind, I think that the theistic idea of a pre-existing mind better explains
everything that we see than does a pre-existing or self-existent matter.
There's a big hairy equation that's developed called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.
And the idea is that we're going to represent, because it's a quantum situation.
So remember from basic quantum mechanics, you can have a wave and you can have a particle
in multiple places at the same time.
It acts in a wavelength, spatially extended, and in a particular way as well when it's
observed.
And so in this new quantum cosmological model, the idea was that you could have multiple
possible universes existing in the quantum cosmological terminology as superposition
with one another.
And then you would have a function called a wave function describing all those possible
places where possible types of universes that could exist with different configurations
of matter in different spatial dimensions.
And so you represent that as a function called the universal wave function.
And the idea of quantum cosmology is that once you solve this big hairy equation and
you get this wave function, if it includes a universe that has our properties, that's
like ours, among the possible universes, then we will explain where our universes come from
out of this giant mathematical apparatus.
But that's the real strange thing.
So either the universe had a beginning and you've got a strong argument for the existence
of an external creator for that reason, or if you try to avoid it with these newer cosmological
models, you end up reaffirming theism but on different grounds.
I encourage everyone, go out and see the film The Story of Everything.
You can get tickets at thestoryofeverything.film.
Hey everyone, Shabbos here.
Look, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Theological and I hope it left you wanting to go deeper.
Can you believe in God and science at the same time?
Are science and religion inevitably in conflict?
Have they always been?
If God exists, then the world didn't just evolve by chance, but by deliberate design.
Is there an afterlife?
Life after this life ends?
Whatever caused the universe to exist would need to exist beyond space and time.
This sounds like the first words of the Bible.
So you can start learning today for free.
Just click the link in the show notes or go directly to prageru.com slash 101.
That's prageru.com slash 101.