The First Cause

People ask, 'who created God?' or, 'Where was God before He created time?'

Time is one of the things He created. He is as far outside time as an artist is from his painting (except for the Incarnation)…

In S. Thomas Aquinas’ article on the Proofs of the Existence of God, The Second Proof is from cause and effect.

Look at it this way. Do you believe that your thoughts have *any* relation to reality? In other words, do you believe that every action is an effect of a previous cause… Or do you believe that they are just random nerve impulses in the grey matter of a relative of the apes? If the latter, then why bother arguing – it is futile. Better to spend your time eating, sleeping and reproducing. If the former… if you believe in Cause and Effect…. Then the observable world is like the last links so far in a huge chain of cause and effect. Now a chain can’t just hang in the air; it must have a firm ‘hook’ – logic comes us to deduce that there must be a First Cause whose origin is in itself, not dependent on a external cause: because if there were no First Cause, then there would never, ever, have been any subsequent events to be a secondary Cause along the chain. And this First Cause, as Aquinas observes, ‘Is what everybody calls ‘God’.

We cannot picture this in our minds, but our logical minds deduce it as a necessity.

Note that this First Cause is not exactly a first link in the chain, which would make it of the same nature as the other links. It is more like the artist who has painted a long chain.