Personally, I believe using God to explain our existence or to explain the "mystery" is always going to appear faulty and flawed. For a start, to do it we'd have to go through that messy process of trying to actually define the word "god" again, and as the question states we just end up where we started with the whole "who created God". Indeed, one of the biggest problems for many defenders of God's existence and the Christian Faith is that they try and fit their beliefs into a very rational and logical type of philosophy that is ultimately self defeating? Why?
For me the problem is that I believe the God of the bible is beyond our rational proof. If we could "prove" God, I believe God would cease to be God! The God who has expressed himself through the bible is far beyond our proofs, arguments and efforts to understand or pin him down (sorry to all the females out there, using "him" is just easier for me, i don't actually think God is a male...but thats for another topic). That’s exactly why he is the Creator and we are the creature, called to obey and trust him. It’s beyond us to try and do anything beyond that. As the question that began this blog stated, before there was anything there was God...which for us is indeed a great mystery.
However, this probably sounds like a great cop out. I could just be doing the old trick of telling everyone to "just believe and accept", or then coming out and telling people they needed to know God "subjectively" through experience. But again, I think the problem here is that we need to look at what we mean by "god" before we try to prove "god"(s) existence, and we need to look at how the God of the bible chooses to reveal himself to people.
Once again, the God of the bible reveals himself primarily through history...by "doing stuff" not by giving us rational arguments or proofs of himself. God's first chosen people, Israel, knew their God primarily because he was the one who had made a covenant (a sort of unbreakable agreement/bargain between people and God that has an ultimate purpose) with the people and then had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. The other people and nations were then to know who God was by looking at Israel; the people and community who were meant to act justly and reflect the character and image of their God.
For most of us non Jewish folk, it seems hard for us to know a God who hasn't dramatically rescued us, and we might feel little connection with some weird “god” of the Old Testament (the whole Israel-Palestinian situation makes things even more tricky and weird for us here). In fact, one of the problems was that by the time of Jesus, Israel hadn't done the best job of showing the world who the Creator God was. This was because they had tended to store up the blessings of the relationship for themselves; and at times they simply forgot the God who had rescued them completely. But God always intended for us to know who he was, and to reveal himself...and not just "subjectively" through personal experience, or "objectively" through logical argumentation.
The only way I know God and call myself a "Christian" or a "follower of Jesus” is because Jesus himself was God; the one who was the creator, who was the God of the Old Testament, of Abraham and the Jewish people. The bible claims Jesus was both the "the image of God", "the Word...who was God", the one through whom all things were created, but also one who was fully human. This is the only reason that most of us who aren't Jewish know who God is. The German theologian Yurgen Moltmann , a former Nazi soldier who became a christian in POW camp, profoundly remarked "Without Christ I personally would be an Atheist. I believe in God only for Christ’s sake, not in a general “higher being” or whatsoever”.
Because Jesus was a real human being doing "real stuff" and an actual figure of history, he is someone we can indeed study and really know about. This means knowing God is not a complete mystery, but has some sort of reality grounded in our real world. We might not be able to know everything this is to know Jesus, or know him "objectively" (surely we all know that no historian can ever present history truly objectively and "how it was"), but we can sketch a pretty good portrait.
So, before you write off God altogether as unproven and a mystery...have you considered who Jesus might have been, both as God and a historical figure? I will save such a topic for a future post.
