There’s a question I often hear from young people that sounds simple on the surface—but it reveals something profound once you dig into it. A ten-year-old once asked me, “What is God made of?” It’s an incredible question, because it forces us to think beyond what most of us naturally assume about the world.
When we talk about things being “made of” something, we’re operating out of our experience in a physical, material world. Tables are made of wood. Mugs are made of ceramic. Glasses are made of plastic. Everything in our daily lives seems to have substance—something we can hold, shape, or measure. Our instinct is to reduce all things to material building blocks. So when a child asks, “What is God made of?” he’s applying that same reasoning to the divine. But God doesn’t fit into that category.
God isn’t made of anything. He’s not constructed from matter or energy because He’s not a material being. God is immaterial—a spiritual reality that exists apart from the physical world. To put it another way, asking what God is made of is a bit like asking, “What is my mind made of?” You can talk about your brain, sure, but that’s not the same question. The mind and the brain are not identical. The brain is physical; the mind is immaterial. One is observable under a microscope, the other is not. Yet no one denies that minds exist; we experience them every day when we think, choose, imagine, and love.
When I was an atheist, I rejected anything immaterial precisely because of that assumption—that if it couldn’t be measured, it couldn’t be real. But that worldview hit a wall when I began investigating the origin of the universe. Everything physical—every bit of matter—had a beginning. Whatever caused the universe must have existed before it began. And if that’s true, that cause couldn’t be made of matter, because matter itself didn’t exist yet. The best explanation, then, for the existence of the material universe is an immaterial, timeless, powerful creator: God.
Now, when we talk with children about these ideas, our goal isn’t to give them a college course in metaphysics. It’s to open up a new category of thinking. Kids usually assume there’s only one kind of reality—the physical one they can see and touch. But when they hear that God, angels, souls, and minds exist beyond the material world, it starts to expand their imagination and understanding. They begin to see that not everything that’s real can be placed under a microscope.
This is a crucial step for helping kids develop a grounded faith. If they grow up only hearing that reality is limited to what science can measure, they’ll miss out on an entire dimension of truth. Under an atheistic worldview, there’s no room for immaterial realities at all—no souls, no spirits, no minds, and certainly no God. But the Christian worldview invites them to see more, not less. It tells them there are invisible truths that give meaning to everything visible.
That’s why, when I write books for kids like God’s Crime Scene for Kids, I try to do what I call “throwing the ball so they can catch it.” Complex philosophical ideas—like the distinction between mind and brain—have to be explained in a way that helps a child understand something new without overwhelming them. If they can walk away recognizing that their brain and mind are not the same thing, they’ve just taken a major step toward understanding why an immaterial God makes sense of the world they live in. When a child asks, “What is God made of?” it’s not just a question about theology—it’s a doorway to deeper truth. Share on X
So when a child asks, “What is God made of?” it’s not just a question about theology—it’s a doorway to deeper truth. It gives us a chance to introduce them to a reality that goes beyond what they can see. And once they discover that there’s more to existence than matter, they begin to grasp that an immaterial, intelligent Creator is not only possible but necessary. That simple question, asked by a ten-year-old, reminds us of something profound: it’s often the childlike curiosity that leads to the deepest discoveries of all.
For more information about the scientific and philosophical evidence pointing to a Divine Creator, please read God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe. This book employs a simple crime scene strategy to investigate eight pieces of evidence in the universe to determine the most reasonable explanation. The book is accompanied by an eight-session God’s Crime Scene DVD Set (and Participant’s Guide) to help individuals or small groups examine the evidence and make the case.
