To understand this, does take a high degree of conceptual ability and that few seem to have.
Humility aside, I have absolutely no trouble understanding your entire treatise here. In fact, you explained the issue so well that I am bookmarking this thread for reference.
Be not disheartened when others hear you speak thus, stand there blinking at you with glassy eyes, and change the subject. I’ve had it happen to me.
As soon as you reveal the truth that there is a God with a will to create, it necessarily follows, from all eternity, that there is a universe.
I will take issue with this. It may be merely one of hair-splitting, but I maintain that it is important nonetheless. God has Free Will. He has the freest of Free Will, which is the source of our own Free Will. Free Will of necessity means that God had a choice to create or not create the universe; He was not under any compulsion or necessity to do so. In fact, even when God had not yet created anything He was already complete and not lacking in any way; had God been incomplete or lacking of anything He would not be the Almighty, for He would not be able to bring into being something which He himself fundamentally lacked. That we were created is a blessing to us and magnifies His love, but there was no necessity that the creation should exist so that the creator could be complete.
Metaphysically speaking, God exists before time in a hierarchical sense, in the sense of being necessary to the existence of time; not in the sense of having an extension in space-time.
It is a limitation of the English language that we talk about God existing “before” time. “Before and after” are words we use casually because of our “within-time” worldview, but those words themselves only make sense within the boundaries of time. I prefer to speak of God’s fundamental nature being
outside of time, existing when and where time does not exist, but being fully able to enter and exit time as He wills and interact with us within time in a way we can understand. Thus the bible speaks of God waiting for us, making promises and threats to induce us to change, and even relenting of his threats and withdrawing them.
I never said that the universe had a beginning. I am not sure how you came to that conclusion? It has always existed as an act of Gods reality, since it began in time; and thus, as an extension of Gods free existential act, the universe exists necessarily. But it is not a logically necessary being because it does not contain within it by virtue of its own nature the nature of existence, but instead participates in the nature of existence.
The word “beginning” is used here only analogously in order to signify absolute existential dependence. I am expressing only the fact that time was metaphysically created and does not exist merely by virtue of an infinite regress.
The first words of Genesis are “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In this a literal statement is made that the universe did have a beginning. Now if God exists outside of time, time is by necessity also one of the realities dependent upon God, and therefore time had to have a beginning simultaneously with the universe having a beginning.
The only problem i have is when somebody says that the universe exists by logical necessity, rather than by the actual necessity of being caused into being by the will of God.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes much the same statement:
CCC 295 We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any [logical] necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance. We believe that it proceeds from God’s free will [actual necessity]; he wanted to make his creatures share in his being, wisdom and goodness.
CCC 296 We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of [logically] necessary emanation from the divine substance. God creates freely “out of nothing”:
If God had drawn the world from pre-existent matter, what would be so extraordinary in that? A human artisan makes from a given material whatever he wants, while God shows his power by starting from nothing to make all he wants.
So in light of all the above, and accepting the argument that God creates from His own divine essence, how then are we to understand that God creates “out of nothing”? Clearly His divine essence is not “nothing”. We can understand this by realizing that “out of nothing” refers to “nothing outside of Himself.” God had no necessity for any other simultaneously eternally existing anything to give Him the material to create. Yet even though God was already complete, because in being God He had to be always complete, He chose to create something outside of Himself and dependent upon Himself which did not already exist.
? I never said that the universe had a beginning. I am not sure how you came to that conclusion? It has always existed as an act of Gods reality, since it began in time; and thus, as an extension of Gods free existential act, the universe exists necessarily. But it is not a logically necessary being because it does not contain within it by virtue of its own nature the nature of existence, but instead participates in the nature of existence.
I’ll try to post a better answer in a few days.