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[Zombie Nixon]

I've seen the question "Where did God come from" asked and answered countless times. The answer is generally along the lines of "God exists outside of our concept of time and space, and has always existed with no beginning or end".

Okay fine, I don't find that a particularly satisfying answer, but it is an answer.

The question I can never seem to get an answer on isn't "How or where", but "Why". Why does God exist? Under what circumstance would an eternal entity exist with the intellectual complexity and power to design and command a universe? Why not nothing at all?

[jimwalton]

God just IS. Existence is the ground of reality, but there's no "why" to pursue. It's like asking, "Is 'Stop Yelling' true?" But I'll take a stab at an answer. God is life and the source of all life; the reason He exists is as the ground of all other existence. Without such a ground, there would be nothing rather than something, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. In that case the existence of God is a First Principle. You can't verify your assumptions without first having knowledge, but you can't get any knowledge without first verifying your assumptions. Immanuel Kant would say the only option is to pick one or the other and run with it (a procedure you assume but cannot prove will yield true knowledge, like positivism does with science; or choose instead some tenets of knowledge that you assume are true even though you can't verify them, which is called foundationalism and is the process used in nearly all of philosophy). The way to verify (or contest) truth in a Kantian system isn't to verify (or contest) the first principles, but to test for coherence: a system based on faulty assumptions (or an inaccurate procedure) will eventually either contradict reality, or contradict itself.

So we presuppositionally regard the existence of God as a First Principle and the ground of all existence. We have no place to stand without a foundation, but we have no grounds upon which to build a foundation unless we already have a place to stand.

God is truth and the source of all truth, so that could be a reason, too. God maintains and sustains the universe, but this is something that God does to make the universe ontologically and physically possible.