PART 1
How might a being create physical matter and energy while yet being intangible, unreachable, untouchable, or otherwise non-physically present? Essentially, how might such a being create matter from effectively nothing?
That is actually a very good question and I must commend you for thinking of it, even if I don’t particularly like answering it because of how it makes my head hurt.
Firstly, it must be pointed out that I am not discussing the creation of the universe from nothing in the sense that nothing caused it. I am discussing the origin of the universe in the sense that it was made from nothing *material * (creation ex nihilo). In other words, God didn’t use anything (like clay, marble, formless matter, etc.) when he created the universe. In the view of theists, the universe was created with an efficient, but not material, cause. (If you don’t know what these terms mean, they harken back to Aristotle. The Efficient cause of a statue, for example, would be the artist who created the statue. The Material cause would be the stuff the statue was made of.) So it is clear from the examination of the universe that it could not have had a material cause. The universe and everything in it was not made from anything material because of course, at one point this material did not exist and there was nothing prior to that. So this leaves us with only efficient causation. We believe that God is the efficient cause of the universe.
You may then (and probably will) rightly ask, well, how is this possible? To quote William Lane Craig:
Well, of course, I don’t think anyone knows. It is sort of like asking how can God be omnipotent? God simply has the power to do everything that is logically possible and there is no logical incoherence in creating something without a material cause. We can give some analogies to this. For example, in physics you have what appear to be analogies of creation out of nothing. For example, in the expansion of the universe – as the universe grows, space seems to come into being out of nothing because there is more space now than there used to be when the universe was denser. So in that sense, space if you think of it is something that is coming into being out of nothing. Or even energy. For example, virtual particles that come out of the vacuum. The vacuum has just as much energy afterward as it did before the virtual particles appeared. So it hasn’t been depleted in any way by the appearance of these particles. In that sense it seems that they originate without any material cause. They have been caused by the vacuum but there doesn’t seem to be any material cause. And in human productions, many people think that things like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina exist and they are not identical to particular marks on paper or particular published books. These exist as sort of abstract entities. A physical copy of Anna Karenina or a score from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is just an instance of that. It is not the thing itself. Now, where did these come from? Well, most people would say they were created by Tolstoy and Beethoven – they created these things. So some people would say these would be examples of things that exist that have been created out of nothing. That example is, I think, especially provocative because in this case you have the creation of something by sheer thought, by a mind. And God is a mind, so maybe as an infinite mind God has somehow thought the universe into being. Maybe by thought he produces and creates a physical universe just as we by thought can create a symphony or a novel.
Read more:
reasonablefaith.org/creation-out-of-nothing#ixzz47uHoaxAH
Drawing on this, one possibility that
I have always favored is the creation of information. A mind is capable of creating many different forms of information – computer code, words, laws, etc. When we study the universe on its deepest levels, we see that it is indeed ruled by information – Biology is reduced to the information in DNA, Physical interactions are reduced to natural laws, which are ultimately forms of information, even things like Moral law (which I believe exists just as objectively as matter and space/time) ultimately seem to reduce to forms of information. Information, I would argue, is a very plausible explanation for the fundamental stuff out of which things are composed.
Furthermore, information, as we create it, indeed appears to be formed out of nothing. I am not taking some matter and then fashioning it into information. Matter is being used as a tool of conveyance of information, but the information itself was not created out of the matter. Prior to the thinking of a particular idea (the creation of information), that idea did not exist in any form. So from my philosophical standpoint, which holds that information is the prime basis of reality, I would say that mind is actually an imminently *plausible *explanation for the creation of the universe.
Regardless, even if you find this logically ridiculous, we don’t have to show *exactly *how God was capable of creating the universe for our arguments for Him to work. Obviously, to a certain extent, we may never be able to comprehend this reality. To Quote William Lane Craig again, we can come to this conclusion through a process of elimination, meaning we do not specifically have to comprehend the how:
