As I was browsing Facebook, I came across a post about human Evolution. If humans evolved from an ape like ancestor, what did that evolve from? It seems like a fair question to me. If you're going to claim humans evolved, it makes sense to get your story straight. But one Evolutionist didn't want to answer. Instead, he said:
"This is where the obnoxious Christian keeps asking where did that come from, where did that come from, where did that come from?
But then the god of the Bible gets the "eternity" pass. Everything has to come from somewhere but him."
Naturally, I responded, and I would like to do so here, too.
The first point I made is that God gets the "eternity pass" because God is eternal. This is an attribute of God described multiple times in the Bible. We are told He never changes (Hebrews 13:8), that no one preceded Him (Job 41:11), that there were no gods formed before Him, nor shall there be after (Isaiah 43:10), that He is the first and the last (Revelation 1:11), and that He is from everlasting to everlasting (Psalm 90:2). Even the name Yahweh means "I AM".
So, God's eternal nature is one of His attributes. You don't get to just change an attribute of God just because doing so disarms a particularly strong argument for His existence. That's called a straw man argument, and suggesting Christians are obnoxious for being consistent with their Scriptures is, ironically, quite obnoxious.
You also have to consider that the Bible was written at a time when people were ignorant of the finite nature of the universe. In those times, even an atheist wouldn't have found it unthinkable that God is eternal. If you asked them "what caused the universe?", they would simply say it's always existed. It is only now, in our scientific era, that we know it is impossible for anything in this universe to exist without cause.
But we do know this now. We know that there is nothing in the universe that can exist without cause. I have two parents. They have two parents. They have two parents. So on and so forth, all the way back to our first ancestors, whether you believe that's Adam and Eve, or a self-created single-celled organism. But then you've got to explain where they come from, because they can't create themselves. Then you have to ask where that came from, and so on and so forth.
But then you have a mathematical problem: You can't ask "so what caused that?" ad infinitum, because then you'd have as much of a past as a future. Put simply, there has to be a finite number of yesterdays in order for there to be a today, because if there was an infinite past, the present could never exist. So there must be a first cause. Math absolutely requires that there be a god of some kind (where god is defined as the source of reality, including time). The question is what is this god? Atheism can't answer. Christianity, by contrast, can explain what that god is. The God that exists is the God who sent His Son into history to be born of a virgin, live a perfect life, die for your sins and rise again.
And that's where this entire debate hinges. Either the resurrection happened, or it didn't. If the resurrection happened, Christianity is true, and there's no point even trying to defend things like Evolution because you're literally standing against the Creator. If the resurrection didn't happen, Christianity is false, period, and we're left asking the big questions without even knowing if we have the ability to search for the answers. So, my advice to you is not to bother thinking about how many candles God puts on His birthday cake and instead start asking "did Jesus really rise, and what does that mean for me?" The answers to that are yes, and that means that you can be reconciled to God and inherit eternal life just by confessing Jesus as Lord and believing He rose from the dead.