So what came before God?

I hear this question often. It is a childlike question (I mean that in the best sense), and I heard it most poignantly when my daughter asked it. The answer is very hard to understand, but I think despite the fact that a very complex thinker, Augustine, has the best answer, children have the mental creativity to try and picture it - to a much greater extent that adults do, anyway.

Augustine notes (and modern scientists agree) that time (and anything linear like time) is a property of the universe. You can't speak of a "before" the universe, because the word "before" refers to time, and nothing like time exists outside the context of the universe.

God's "eternal-ness" is exactly that - it is a state of being outside concepts of "before" and "after." I realize how difficult it is to understand that, because we live within time and cannot imagine existence outside of it. But our lack of ability to comprehend should not be conflated with this actually being a problem.

His own words, from Confessions, Book 11

"Those who say this, do not yet understand you, O Wisdom of God, Light of souls. They do not understand yet how things are made, by you and in you. Yet they strive to understand the eternal, while their heart flutters in the movement of the past and the future, and is still unstable... See, I answer him that asks, 'What did God before He made heaven and earth?'...

"Nor do you in time, precede time: for how else could you precede all time? But you precede all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and you surpass all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but you are the same, and your years do not fail. Your years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. Your years stand together, because they do stand; nor are your years pushed out by coming years, for they do not pass away; but ours shall all be, when they are gone."

I'm not sure if she even remembers my answer, which was just a simplified version of the above. But she seemed satisfied with my answer.