If the universe needs an intelligence to explain its complexity, doesn't that intelligence need an intelligence to explain it?

The objection is sharper than most, and it deserves a real answer rather than a slogan. But it attacks an argument nobody actually made, and it does so by changing the premise halfway through.

1. The argument never said everything needs a cause. The kalam form is deliberately narrow: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. God is not claimed to have begun, so the first premise never reaches him. The objection refutes a rule the argument does not use.

2. Grant the point where it really bites. Complexity of the kind we observe is complexity of parts: a thing assembled from components that could have been arranged differently. If God were such a thing, he would need an explanation for the arrangement. That is exactly why classical theism denies that God has parts at all.

3. Divine simplicity is not a dodge. Classical theists hold that God is not composed of matter and form, of act and potency, or of spatial extension. What has no parts has nothing to assemble, so there is no arrangement for a designer to explain. You may reject the doctrine, but then you are arguing against a different God than the one the argument reached.

4. The question smuggles in its own answer. "Who made God?" assumes God is the kind of being that gets made. It is like asking who married the bachelor: the description already rules out the answer. William Lane Craig calls this line of objection a road to nowhere, because the same question can be asked of every proposed cause forever.

5. Applied consistently, it destroys every explanation. If every explanation must itself be explained by a further thing, no explanation ever terminates, for the theist or for the skeptic. The critic's own account of the universe faces the identical regress. So the objection does not refute theism; it refutes the demand for total explanation, which is the critic's demand, not the theist's.

6. An infinite regress explains nothing. A series of contingent things, each of which might not have existed, never accounts for why there is anything at all. A necessary being, one whose existence is not borrowed from anything else, is what terminates the series. That is a conclusion drawn from the argument, not an exemption invented to protect it.

7. The multiverse is not the simpler option. A rival explanation still has to be eternal, uncaused, and capable of producing a life-permitting universe. An eternal ensemble of universes is not observed; an eternal mind is not observed either. Both are metaphysical posits, so the complexity calculus cuts both ways.

8. What the argument actually delivers. The conclusion is a cause that is beginningless, immaterial, enormously powerful, and personal, since it chose to create. It does not deliver the Trinity, the incarnation, or the Bible. Those need separate argument, and pretending otherwise is what makes Christians look overconfident.

9. Scripture describes God as uncreated. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (Psalm 90:2). He is "the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God" (1 Timothy 1:17), and the universe was "created by the word of God" (Hebrews 11:3). None of that describes a larger creature inside the universe.

The objection is a good test of whether the argument has been understood, and it fails as a refutation because it swaps the premise. The real question is whether a beginningless, immaterial, personal cause is more reasonable than a universe that simply exists with no explanation at all.

Sources: William Lane Craig; Edward Feser; Thomas Aquinas.

Related challenges:
• IF God exists, He’s maniacal. If He WANTED to forgive sin, He’s 'all-powerful' and 'all-loving' – He could just, SHAZAM, forgive sin. Instead, He sends down His only Son to be slaughtered and murdered to take care of the sin problem. Now THAT’S evil!
• I hear a lot about “intelligent design.” Has this now proven God and falsified evolution?
• How would you respond to Victor Stenger’s stinging assertion that religious argument leads universally to dismal failure and untold suffering?