Contradiction?

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Hi everyone. I have a question about God and the universe which has puzzled me, though I’m sure there’s a very simple answer for it.

If God is infinite, and He created the universe apart from Himself and exists outside of time, wouldn’t all of creation exist within Him and therefore in eternity? :confused:
 
TruthLoverJC said:
Hi everyone. I have a question about God and the universe which has puzzled me, though I’m sure there’s a very simple answer for it.

If God is infinite, and He created the universe apart from Himself and exists outside of time, wouldn’t all of creation exist within Him and therefore in eternity? :confused:
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:hypno:

I don’t follow your logic.

Perhaps you are thinking of time as an infinite line stretching forever into the past and future, and God placed us on it like a conveyor belt. That’s close to some of the ancient Greeks’ view of time, but not ours. Time did not exist until God created it, along with the universe.

So God created time, the universe, and us. He placed us in time. What’s the problem?
 
Yes I realized after posting that there really was NO issue. Oops. Thanks for your reply though.
 
TruthLoverJC said:
Hi everyone. I have a question about God and the universe which has puzzled me, though I’m sure there’s a very simple answer for it.

If God is infinite, and He created the universe apart from Himself and exists outside of time, wouldn’t all of creation exist within Him and therefore in eternity? :confused:
Click to expand...
Or you could say that God created a universe that’s outside of eternity. Meaning that God created a universe external to Himself, but as God He can occupy all points in space/time. Christ’s Crucifixion was one event in space/time that extends to the past and to the future.
 
TruthLoverJC said:
Hi everyone. I have a question about God and the universe which has puzzled me, though I’m sure there’s a very simple answer for it.

If God is infinite, and He created the universe apart from Himself and exists outside of time, wouldn’t all of creation exist within Him and therefore in eternity? :confused:
Click to expand...
Yes, the universe is within God and exists within eternity, but God also created time with the universe, which we experience.

I was once taught to think of it as God in eternity is like a sheet of paper that goes on forever in all directions, and the universe is an infinitely small line segment on the sheet of paper where one end of the line is the beginning of the universe, and the other end of the line is the end of the universe.

Don’t know if that helps with the mental picture, but since it is outside of time, it is hard for us to comprehend what God experiences since we are not him.
 
I would say that the thought of creation is timeless in that it was in God’s mind from eternity, but once the contingent world was created it has a beginning and and end I don’t see any contradiction here? So you are correct in the sense that all of creation including yourself was in the mind of God from time immemorial just as God told Jeremiah that before he was born He knew Him; but this doesn’t mean that Jeremiah was eternal but rather God was speaking in phenomenological terms (similar to saying sun rise at 7:00 AM or the sun crossing the sky). What God was saying was that He knew that Jeremiah would be born and God had a plan for his life.

BUT again as Paul wrote in Him we live and move and have our being, so in another sense nothing can escape the presence of God. There is a movement called Open Theism which tries to deny God’s perfect foreknowledge in order to preserve free will. But they don’t realize that nobody can escape the sovereignty of God and secondly foreknowledge does not imply any causal relationship to future actions. And finally as I rant about Open Theism, it is a real stretch to imply that God knows things as we humans do, They assume that God cannot know the future since it doesn’t exist. But they are subscribing to a theory of time and this issue is very complex because it is more than just time they are talking about (of which nobody really knows what time is) but the concept of existence. But I believe it is more rational to believe that God who is perfectly eternal being knows things in ways we cannot imagine. So what they are doing when they apply their epistemology to God is similar to doing calculus with algebra. They also don’t understand that their epistemology is fallacious and there is not one system of epistemology that is indefeasible so they are arguing for a bad system of knowledge as well. God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts.
 
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bzkoss236:
Yes, the universe is within God and exists within eternity, but God also created time with the universe, which we experience.
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In what sense is the universe “within” God? It is clearly not spatially within Him, and provided He is eternal, He cannot change, so it cannot be in any way part of Him… not sure what else you could’ve meant by that.
 
SentinelofTruth said:
In what sense is the universe “within” God? It is clearly not spatially within Him, and provided He is eternal, He cannot change, so it cannot be in any way part of Him… not sure what else you could’ve meant by that.
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If God is omnipresent (everywhere) and infinite, it could be reasoned that the universe which is finite exists physically within God who has no physical form.

But I’ve also heard it said that the universe exists within the mind of God, as like a thought in his mind.
 
SentinelofTruth said:
In what sense is the universe “within” God? It is clearly not spatially within Him, and provided He is eternal, He cannot change, so it cannot be in any way part of Him… not sure what else you could’ve meant by that.
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Space is simply extra degrees of freedom for movement of Mind state within Mind. It is simply an illusion since we are minds intertwined to each other like a dot surrounded by nothingness.
 
It tends to help me visualise creation as a bubble, like the kind kids blow. The bubble exists because the materials (water,soap) are mixed in the right order and because the child’s breath caused it to expand. So the child can be outside the bubble looking into it and yet the air from their lungs is also inside it at the same time.

I guess if the child wishes to exist within the bubble in a more physical way they simply need to wet their finger.

Sorry if this makes no sense.:o
 
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bzkoss236:
If God is omnipresent (everywhere) and infinite, it could be reasoned that the universe which is finite exists physically within God who has no physical form.
Click to expand...
It can’t exist physically within something immaterial.
 
God is entirely separate from His creation. His creation has and always will exist as an idea in His Divine Intellect, but not as a physical reality. If the purely contingent could exist in both the eternal and in the time bound that would be a contradiction in the principle of non-contradiction. Even God cannot violate that.

Linus2nd
 
God is entirely separate from His creation. His creation has and always will exist as an idea in His Divine Intellect, but not as a physical reality.
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👍
 
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