Nobody made God. The question assumes God belongs in the category of made things, and Scripture consistently places him outside it. Psalm 90:2 says that from everlasting to everlasting, he is God, and Isaiah 43:10 says plainly that before him no God was formed. A made God would not be God; he would be one more thing inside the universe needing an explanation.

What do I say if my child says that is not fair?

Take the objection seriously, because it is a real one. The child has noticed that you appear to have exempted God from a rule that applies to everything else. The answer is that it is not an exemption made up to win the argument. Every explanation has to stop somewhere, or nothing ever gets explained. Christians say the stopping point is a person rather than a thing.

For parents

"Who made God?"

Q: What was God doing before he made the world?

Augustine took this question seriously sixteen hundred years ago and gave an answer that still holds: there was no before. Time is part of what God made, so asking what came earlier is like asking what is north of the North Pole. For a younger child, it is enough to say that God was never lonely and never bored, because he was never alone.

Q: Is it bad that my child is asking this?

No. It is a sign of a mind working properly. A child who asks who made God has understood that things generally have causes and is applying that rule consistently. The response that damages faith is not the question; it is being told the question is not allowed.

Written by AskScripture · Every verse checked in context · Updated 12 August 2026

It usually arrives about ten seconds after you have explained that God made the world. The child follows the chain one link further than you expected, and asks the obvious next thing. Most parents feel briefly caught out — partly because the honest answer is harder than the question, and partly because nobody ever gave them a good one either.

It is worth knowing before you answer that your child has just independently arrived at one of the oldest questions in philosophy. Aristotle worked on it. Aquinas built an argument around it. It has a name — the problem of infinite regress — and adults have been circling it for two and a half thousand years. Whatever you say next, the first thing to say is that it is a good question.

Why it is a better question than it sounds

Everything in a child's world was made by somebody. The house, the dog's bowl, the moon in the picture book, the baby brother. A four-year-old has learned a reliable rule about how reality works and is applying it without exception, which is exactly what you would want a mind to do.

So the question is not really "who made God?" It is "does the rule ever stop?" And that is worth answering carefully, because the way you handle it teaches something bigger than the answer itself: whether questions are welcome here.

The short answer

Nobody made God. Not because the question is off-limits, but because it contains a hidden assumption — that God is one of the made things. He is not. A God who had been made would be part of the universe rather than its explanation, and you would immediately need a bigger God behind him.

The technical word theologians use is aseity: God exists of himself, dependent on nothing. It is one of the few doctrines every branch of the Christian church has agreed on for its entire history. You will not start an argument with it in any congregation.

What Scripture actually says

The Bible never asks who made God, which is itself telling. It simply keeps describing him as the one thing that was not made.

Before the mountains were born Or You gave birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.

Psalm 90 : 2 · NASB

Moses is writing about human frailty — the psalm goes on to say our days are seventy years. The contrast is the point: everything else has a start date.

… Before Me there was no God formed, And there will be none after Me.

Isaiah 43 : 10 · NASB

"Formed" is the word for something manufactured. Isaiah is speaking to people surrounded by gods that were literally carved, and drawing the hardest possible line between those and the God speaking.

… "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "This is what you shall say to the sons of Israel: 'I AM has sent me to you.'"

Exodus 3 : 14 · NASB

Moses asks for a name and gets a statement of existence instead. Every other name in the ancient world located a god in a story — son of someone, born somewhere. This one refuses the frame.

"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty."

Revelation 1 : 8 · NASB

First and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Not "he lasts a very long time" — he is the bracket around the whole thing.

Read together, these are not four verses that happen to mention God's age. They are a consistent refusal to place God inside the sequence of caused things. That is the answer to your child's question, and Scripture gives it without ever treating the question as impertinent.

What to say, by age

The truth does not change with the child. How much of it can land at once does. Below is roughly how the same answer shifts as the child in front of you changes. Both panels below are actual AskScripture answers to this same question, asked against two different child profiles and condensed for length.

Pre-K · 3–4 Story-based

God did not have a beginning or a maker, because he is the one who made everything else. He is different from everything we can see.

Help her understand God is different

Everything she knows has a beginning — her toys, her family. God is different, because he has always been.
Use a story: imagine a big chain of friends holding hands. Everyone was helped by someone else, but God is the first friend who started the chain and didn't need anyone to help him.
Tell a story about a little girl who asks who made the sun. The sun was made by God — but God was never made by anyone.

Encourage questions and wonder

Say it is okay not to understand everything about God, because he is very big and special.
Keep the words calm and loving, so she feels safe being curious.

High School · 15–18 Analogies & Comparisons Has doubts

God is different from everything else because he didn't have a beginning — he is the one who made everything else, including time and space.

Explain the idea of a first cause

Everything we see around us was made by something else, the way a toy is made by a person.
If everything needed a maker, there would have to be a first maker who didn't have one.
A row of dominoes: each falls because the one before pushed it, but there has to be a first domino that started it all.

An analogy he can hold onto

"God is like the reason why the game exists, not a player in the game — the starter of a race who begins it but is not one of the runners."

Address his doubts with respect

It is okay to have questions and doubts, because faith is a journey and many people have wondered the same thing.
Encourage him to keep asking and exploring rather than shutting the question down.

Three things not to say

These are the common misfires, and each one costs more later than the awkward pause would have.

"Don't ask that." The question is not irreverent, and treating it as though it were teaches a child that faith is fragile and cannot take pressure. That lesson outlasts the conversation by decades.

"It's a mystery." True of many things, but not the right answer here — this one has a real answer. Reaching for mystery when an answer exists trains a child to expect that Christianity's response to hard questions is a shrug.

"He just always was," delivered as a full stop. The content is right. The delivery is the problem: said in a tone that closes the topic, it sounds like you are hoping he stops. Said as the interesting thing it is, it opens one.

Worth reading next

Two books written for parents rather than for children, both aimed at the conversations rather than the doctrine:

Natasha Crain — Talking with Your Kids about God Hillary Morgan Ferrer — Mama Bear Apologetics

Common follow-up questions

What do I say if my child says "that's not fair"?

Take it seriously, because it is a real objection. The child has noticed that you appear to have exempted God from a rule applying to everything else. The answer is that it is not an exemption invented to win the argument: every explanation has to stop somewhere, or nothing ever gets explained. Christians say the stopping point is a person rather than a thing.

What was God doing before he made the world?

Augustine took this seriously sixteen hundred years ago and gave an answer that still holds: there was no before. Time is part of what God made, so asking what came earlier is like asking what is north of the North Pole. For a younger child, it is enough to say God was never lonely and never bored, because he was never alone.

Is it bad that my child is asking this?

No — it is a sign of a mind working properly. A child asking who made God has understood that things generally have causes and is applying the rule consistently. What damages faith is not the question; it is being told the question is not allowed.

My child asked where God lives. Is that the same question?

Close, but it is usually a different worry underneath. "Who made God" is about explanation; "where does God live" is often about distance — is he near me, at night, in this house. Answer the second one with presence rather than cosmology, and the theology can wait for a calmer hour.