Eternal Creation Ex Nihilo vs Modern Cosmology

[tdgesq]

Than why does the article say that Bonaventure “unlike Aquinas, thinks that since creatures are temporal they need a maintenance in being, called conservation”.

Right, but the article goes on to explain that Aquinas also believes in the principle of God’s conservation, but that it is a different mode of conservation than offered by Bonaventure. While Bonaventure believed that (1) God conserves all initial being that comes into existence (causally, not necessarily temporally), he also believed that (2) that conservation must extend to the maintenance of temporal being. Bonaventure and Aquinas would agree on (1), but Aquinas would disagree with Bonaventure on (2).

This doesn’t all fit together. If it can be reasonable to assume that the world is eternal, how can it be from nothing unless that means conservation from nothing?

Because Aquinas does maintain that it’s conservation from nothing, as you put it. His argument is that even assuming the universe is eternal, it still must be causally conserved. William Carroll asserts that for Aquinas, there really is no difference between creation and conservation. Conservation is the continuation of creation, whether that creation be from eternity or not.

 

[thinkandmull]

When we say that God created out of nothing, it sounds like we are claiming the seemingly impossible. You can’t get something out of nothing, no matter how powerful you are right? The footnotes to the article point this out in quoting from an old Islamic phisolopher who believed the heresy that God created out of His own essense. But aren’t we Catholics defenseless against those who say that the world popped into existence from nothing? Perhaps something can come from nothing. After all, THAT would be a real miracle. Creation from an all powerful God ain’t no miracle at all if you come to think about it, any thoughts?

 

[thinkandmull]

Here’s the footnote:

1. Even though Averroes claimed that an eternal, created universe was indeed probable, he rejected the idea of creation out of nothing in its strict sense. He thought that creation consisted in God’s eternally converting potentialities into actually existing things. For Averroes, the doctrine of creation out of nothing contradicted the existence of a true natural causality in the universe: “[al-Ghazali’s] assertion [in defense of creation out of nothing]. . . that life can proceed from the lifeless and knowledge from what does not possess knowledge, and that the dignity of the First consists only in its being the principle of the universe, is false. For if life could proceed from the lifeless, then the existent might proceed from the non-existent, and then anything whatever might proceed from anything whatever, and there would be no congruity between causes and effects, either in the genus predicated analogically or in the species.” Tahfut al-Tahfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), trans. by Simon Van den Bergh (London: Luzac, 1954), p. 452.

Maybe we can also bring this from Aquinas into the discussion, since its in the footnotes two

The second thing is that non-being is prior to being in the thing which is said to be created. This is not a priority of time or of duration, such that what did not exist before does exist later, but a priority of nature, so that, if the created thing is left to itself, it would not exist, because it only has its being from the causality of the higher cause. What a thing has in itself and not from something else is naturally prior in it to that which it has from something else. (In this way creation differs from eternal generation,(65) for it cannot be said that the Son of God, if left to Himself, would not have being, since He receives from the Father that very same being which the Father has, which is absolute being, not dependent upon anything.)

So creation of the Son was necessary??

 

[tdgesq]

When we say that God created out of nothing, it sounds like we are claiming the seemingly impossible. You can’t get something out of nothing, no matter how powerful you are right?

God is something, and something can obviously create something else. Creation ex nihilo simply states that God didn’t create new things from already existing things, material, matter, whatever.

The footnotes to the article point this out in quoting from an old Islamic phisolopher who believed the heresy that God created out of His own essense. But aren’t we Catholics defenseless against those who say that the world popped into existence from nothing? Perhaps something can come from nothing. After all, THAT would be a real miracle. Creation from an all powerful God ain’t no miracle at all if you come to think about it, any thoughts?

As you correctly pointed out, from nothing comes nothing. You would have to explain conceptually how “no thing” (something non-existent) could create something. That’s the problem.

 

[thinkandmull]

Creation didn’t come out of God. That is heresy; no emanation. Is there any way of understanding something coming from nothing?

 

[tdgesq]

Well, you’re right that creation was not made out of the “substance” of God, but that isn’t what I was proposing. I’m not sure exactly what you are asking, but efficient cause is a concept that most of us can understand. There isn’t anything conceptually that requires preexisting material for things to be created out of. We can certainly imagine something coming into existence without it being created from preexisting material.

 

[thinkandmull]

Its like giving God nothing and asking him to make something out of it with adding anything to it. For some reason I can imagine something disappearing into nothing, but not the reverse.

 

[tdgesq]

It may seem that way, but I don’t think “nothing” is something we are capable of having images of. I think we can conceive of “nothing,” but only as a being of reason that exists in the mind.

 

[thinkandmull]

This is very deep. I was looking at the fire in the fireplace and had a flicker of a thought or two. I guess it takes great wisdom to see creation from nothing

 

[Linusthe2nd]

This is very deep. I was looking at the fire in the fireplace and had a flicker of a thought or two. I guess it takes great wisdom to see creation from nothing

Indeed, it is just as inconceivable as God himself.

Linus2nd