Who Made God?
This is the question that I find stumps most Grades 1 and 2 teachers that I've encountered, faced with the question by some of their more philosophically minded students. "Who made God?" they ask. Smart kids.
The question demonstrates an amazing awareness, a philosophical realization (that not everyone makes, by the way) that EVERYTHING that we observe in this world appears to come from somewhere. Every effect has a cause. Every creature has a creator. We come from our parents, etc. Science has, for centuries, been motivated by finding the explanation for things, to finding where everything came from - from the Origin of Species to the Big Bang Theory.
So if everything comes from somewhere, for God to be real, God would have to come from somewhere too. Right?
Well, no, because what makes God God is the fact that he DOESN'T need someone or something to come from. If he did, he wouldn't be God, he wouldn't be a SUPREME being, just a SUPERIOR one.
Maybe we were created by beings that were created by someone else, like aliens or angels or something like that - but these beings wouldn't be GOD, not by our definition of God.
So this is what would make God unique in this universe, God's lack of a need to come from someone or something else. Does such a thing exist? Can it exist, when nothing else that we have observed to far seems to be this way? Well, if it does, it would have to be God. If we believe in God, we believe that such a being can exist. If we don't, we don't. Ultimately it becomes a circular argument, and nothing can be determined about whether God exists or not on the basis of the premise.
Some would argue that if such a thing (that has no source) can exist AS A CONCEPT IN OUR HEADS, it would have to be possible in the real universe. St. Anselm argues along lines like these - but these are super-complicated arguements now, way beyond the scope of your grade 1 and 2 classes.
See? Does that make sense? Hope so, because its the only answer I have.
But it does open deeper philosophical questions. We have historically taken the axiom, "That everything, except God, has to come from somewhere" as essentially self-evident - this would be called "self-evident causality". But is it? Modern Physics is starting to deal with the possibility that maybe the Universe itself doesn't need to come from anywhere - that was just always there, and therefore wouldn't need a God to create it. Philosophers too are dealing with the possibility that not every question needs an answer - in particular, "WHY does the universe exist? WHY are we here?" Maybe there is no answer to this question, and maybe there doesn't have to be an answer. I don't buy this argument personally, because in my experience, every question has had some kind of answer - but I have to admit, we can no longer take causality as being self-evident, as once we did.