If God created everything, who created God? Saying God just exists without a cause is special pleading — you exempt your own explanation from the very rule you used to get there.

Why people find it persuasive

The objection has real force because it targets a genuine fallacy. If the reason we need God is that everything requires a cause, then God requires a cause too, and if God can be an exception then so can the universe. Richard Dawkins pressed exactly this in The God Delusion, arguing that the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger question of who designed the designer, and most people meet the argument for the first time in that form.

Important distinctions

• • "Everything has a cause" (a premise no serious theist defends) vs. "whatever begins to exist has a cause" (the premise actually used).
• • Beginningless existence vs. self-causation — nobody claims God caused himself.
• • Explanatory regress vs. a terminating explanation that is explained by its own nature.
• • Temporal causation (before and after) vs. causation as ontological dependence.

Christian response

• • The first thing to establish is what the premise actually says. In the Kalam argument, defended in detail by William Lane Craig, the causal premise is not 'everything has a cause' but 'whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.' That restriction is not a dodge invented to protect God; it is the version of the principle we actually use in every other context. We do not ask what caused the number seven or what caused the laws of logic, because those are not the kind of thing that comes into being. So the honest question to put back is simply: are you claiming God began to exist? If not, the objection has not touched the premise.
• • The next step is to say why anyone should think there is a first, uncaused term at all rather than an infinite chain. Aquinas' point in the Second Way, and Robert Koons' more recent formalizations of it, is that an explanatory series in which every member borrows its existence from a prior member never accounts for the existence of any member. Borrowed existence has to be borrowed from something eventually, and a chain of borrowers of any length, even an infinite one, still has nothing to borrow. The regress does not merely need stopping for tidiness; it needs stopping to explain anything at all.
• • Third, there is a real difference between the theist's terminating point and the atheist's. A necessary being is not something that happens to have no cause; it is something that could not have failed to exist, whose existence follows from what it is. That is a categorical claim about its nature, not a special exemption granted by fiat. The universe, by contrast, appears contingent through and through: every constant could have been otherwise, and physics itself treats initial conditions as things that call for explanation. Leibniz's version of the argument turns on precisely this asymmetry.
• • Fourth, note that the objection, if consistent, proves too much. Applied generally, the demand 'you must explain the explanation before the explanation counts' would destroy ordinary scientific reasoning. Archaeologists infer a maker from a pot without first explaining the maker; cosmologists posit inflation without first explaining the inflaton field. Philosophers of science call this the requirement of explanatory sufficiency: a good explanation earns its keep by what it explains, not by being itself explained. Dawkins' version of the objection was criticized on exactly this ground by philosophers across the belief spectrum, including Michael Ruse and Thomas Nagel.
• • Finally, be honest about what has and has not been shown. This response does not prove God exists; it shows that the 'who made God' objection, in its popular form, misidentifies the premise and applies a standard of explanation nobody uses anywhere else. The real debate lies further down: whether the concept of a necessary being is coherent, and whether a necessary being is a better terminus than a brute physical fact. That is a serious argument worth having, and it is a different argument from the one the objection usually makes.

Christian counterresponse

The theist replies that the two stopping points are not on a par, because the universe wears its contingency on its face: its constants, quantity of matter, and initial entropy could all have been otherwise, and a thing that could have been otherwise is exactly the kind of thing that demands an explanation. A necessary being is not a label attached arbitrarily but a claim that some reality exists in a different mode. Whether such a mode is coherent is the genuine point of dispute, and it is where the conversation should go.