God and the Universe

[puckettm]

I have been wondering lately about the universe. It is billions of years old and humankind has only been around for thousands of years. What did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind? I just am confused. It seems that all of our talk about faith and salvation concerns only a relatively few minutes in the history of the universe. I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

I am catholic and practice my faith as best as I can.

Thank you.

Mike Puckett

 

[Catholic_Dude]

I have been wondering lately about the universe. It is billions of years old and humankind has only been around for thousands of years. What did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind? I just am confused. It seems that all of our talk about faith and salvation concerns only a relatively few minutes in the history of the universe. I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

I am catholic and practice my faith as best as I can.

Thank you.

Mike Puckett

Thats a good question and shows that claiming the world is billions of years old might not be correct. I personally believe Creation was near if not totally instantaneous.

The idea that God had to sit around for billions of years waiting for His most prized creation to evolove doest sound right to me.

 

[a_priori]

I have been wondering lately about the universe. It is billions of years old and humankind has only been around for thousands of years. What did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind? I just am confused. It seems that all of our talk about faith and salvation concerns only a relatively few minutes in the history of the universe. I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

Good question. I don’t think there is any good answer for this since we are human and limited in our capacity to understand God.

God didn’t do anything “before” humankind. God “exists” (whatever that means) outside of time and space so therefore words like before and after don’t really apply to Him. It seems that God has His being (whatever that means) outside the universe. The universe consists of space that is actually rolling out like a carpet and expanding even now. God is not confined within it.

 

[a_priori]

The idea that God had to sit around for billions of years waiting for His most prized creation to evolove doest sound right to me.

It doesn’t sound right to me either and I believe in an extremely old earth and evolution as a tool of God.

 

[Riley259]

I have been wondering lately about the universe. It is billions of years old and humankind has only been around for thousands of years. What did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind? I just am confused. It seems that all of our talk about faith and salvation concerns only a relatively few minutes in the history of the universe. I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

I am catholic and practice my faith as best as I can.

Thank you.

Mike Puckett

God is eternal so He isn’t limited by the passage of time like we are. God possesses the fullest of existence all at once so everything that has happened and will happen is known to Him all at once. This concept of eternity is difficult to understand from our perspective because we are limited and bound by the dimension of time but God is not and so the notion that He was waiting all those billions of years for us to come into existence isn’t applicable to Him.

 

[mlchance]

I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

Perfect Love’s ability to be “so intimately involved in our lives” is limited by time? How, then, could God love you at all, since you’ve not even been around for century?

– Mark L. Chance.

 

[VociMike]

I could answer that queston in two different ways.

First, if God is outside of time (and why wouldn’t He be, since He is outside of space, matter and energy?), then a billion years is quite literally nothing to Him.

But, if God is not outside of time (or if you have a hard time imagining that He is), then let’s suppose God did wait 14 billion years for us to be ready for Him. So what? God is perfect and complete in Himself. He doesn’t need anything. The Trinity could exist, lacking absolutely nothing, for a trillion trillion trillion eons. And the angels, in God’s presence, could do the same. Neither God nor the angels needed us, so there was no question of “what did they do before we were around”. They simply existed in their perfection - God’s by His very nature, the angels by God’s grace.

 

[Liberian]

The idea that God had to sit around for billions of years waiting for His most prized creation to evolove doest sound right to me.

Catholic Dude,

If you please, God is outside of our space and time. He did not “sit around for billions of years” waiting to create us. He is more like the author of an extremely large book who didn’t get around to introducing us as characters for the first billion pages. But there are all the hosts of Heaven to whom He could have been showing off His handiwork of those first billion pages.

• Liberian

 

[Liberian]

Mike,

Hello and welcome to the Catholic Answers Forums. I hope you have a blessed and fruitful time here.

The question about “what did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind” is kind of ill-posed, God and the angels live outside of our time scale, in eternity. A good analogy is that God is like an author and our universe is like a book He has written. He doesn’t have to wait for something to happen; He can just turn to the correct page.

As for why He made so much of creation before He made us, I cannot say. Perhaps He was having fun; perhaps He was showing the angels a few things. But I speculate.

• Liberian

 

[Catholic_Dude]

Catholic Dude,

If you please, God is outside of our space and time. He did not “sit around for billions of years” waiting to create us. He is more like the author of an extremely large book who didn’t get around to introducing us as characters for the first billion pages. But there are all the hosts of Heaven to whom He could have been showing off His handiwork of those first billion pages.

• Liberian

I never meant that God was literally waiting for stuff to come about, my point is that in the history of the creation of the world, if man is the highest creation and which salvation history revolves around, what was the point of billions of years?

The intro to a book doesnt make sense considering the very very short timeframe from which man (the most important part) is actually going to be part of the story. For example if the earth is 4 billion years old and yet Adam was only around say 10,000 years ago, Christ 2,000 years ago, give us Christians 1 million more years on earth (for arguments sake)…that means God wrote a 4 billion page book with the only relevant part comprising less than 1% of the book.

The instantaneous creation makes more sense, the story starts with man on the scene and ends when Christ returns, no filler.

 

[VociMike]

I never meant that God was literally waiting for stuff to come about, my point is that in the history of the creation of the world, if man is the highest creation and which salvation history revolves around, what was the point of billions of years?

The problem with this line of thinking is that it does not account for the million billion billion stars in the observable universe. Why make so much “stuff” just to arrive at mankind?

I think the right way to look at both the age of the universe and the size of the universe is simply to accept that God is an extravagant Creator.

 

[Contarini]

I have been wondering lately about the universe. It is billions of years old and humankind has only been around for thousands of years. What did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind? I just am confused. It seems that all of our talk about faith and salvation concerns only a relatively few minutes in the history of the universe. I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

First of all, the traditional, orthodox, Catholic view is that God does not experience time. Eternity is not just a bunch of moments of time stuck on end. It is, in the words of Boethius, “the complete, perfect, and simultaneous possession of unending life.” So God doesn’t “wait,” nor is “doing things” important to God. God simply is–He did not need to create us or to create anything, but did so out of generosity.

In the second place, you’re assuming that because God is intimately involved with us therefore we must occupy a major place in God’s designs. I suspect that with God there is no major or minor, and certainly the Incarnation showed how important we are to him, but it’s not as if He lacked anything before we showed up.

Finally, you are assuming that size and duration matter. They matter to us. Why do you think they matter to God?

Edwin

 

[Catholic_Dude]

The problem with this line of thinking is that it does not account for the million billion billion stars in the observable universe. Why make so much “stuff” just to arrive at mankind?

I think the right way to look at both the age of the universe and the size of the universe is simply to accept that God is an extravagant Creator.

Thats a good question about the stars, maybe its just a display for us to be amazed at all God has made.

 

[DaisyD]

I have been wondering lately about the universe. It is billions of years old and humankind has only been around for thousands of years. What did the Holy Trinity and the angels do during all the time before humankind? I just am confused. It seems that all of our talk about faith and salvation concerns only a relatively few minutes in the history of the universe. I just don’t understand how it can be that God is so intimately involved in our lives when there were billions of years before us when the universe existed.

I am catholic and practice my faith as best as I can.

Thank you.

Mike Puckett

I thought the creation account in Genesis stated everything was created about 6-7 thousand years ago. Is that false?

 

[mlchance]

I thought the creation account in Genesis stated everything was created about 6-7 thousand years ago. Is that false?

Yes, it is false. There is no mention in Genesis 1-2 about how long ago Creation happened.

– Mark L. Chance.

 

[DaisyD]

Yes, it is false. There is no mention in Genesis 1-2 about how long ago Creation happened.

– Mark L. Chance.

It does say it took six days for creation and Adam was created within the six days. We also have geneologies from Adam to Jesus with specific life spans. So if we add up the life spans it comes out to around Six thousand or so years.
Which is false the geneology of Jesus or the six day creation?

 

[batteddy]

Hmm…lots of creationists will say I am using that “vague” “metaphorical” “abstract” language they seem to hate so much…

But I would say that it is FACT that the universe is 13 Billion years old and created in the big bang. But TRUTH that it was created in 6 days.

They will say, “all fact is truth” etc…because they have no nuance. They will call my statement “poetic fluffery at best” because they cannot think abstractly (honestly, most people can’t…hence the question about “what was God doing all that time?” in the first place).

But there is a difference between fact and truth. Fact is mundane. And the mundane fact is a 13 billion year old universe.

But Truth is always eschatological, always teleological, always Imminent and Transcendent. And the Truth is that the world was created in six days.

Were these “literal” days? Such a question totally would indicate that the person asking missed the nuance of my point and the teaching of the Church.

Arguing about petty stuff like the literal days of mundane historical creation is not religion exactly because it is an argument about a natural FACT. It is for the natural philosophers to sort out how much natural, historical time was needed to make the world. Not within the sphere of religion.

But religion’s TRUTH is that the world was created in six days. But the supernatural meaning of “create” is totally different than the natural. The mystical religious meaning of “six days” is entirely different than the scientific meaning.

BOTH sides (religious and scientific) miss this point. Sort of, I think, like the arguments between Catholic and Orthodox (which are largely over terminology and misunderstood phrasing).

So when I see a Christian zealous argue that 6 24-hour periods (in the natural sense) were needed to make the universe…it saddens me.

So too am I saddened when I see a scientist argue that, “a deity capable of engineering all the organised complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, . . . must already have been vastly complex in the first place . . .”
As if the laws of thermodynamics would apply to God.

To avoid modernism, clearly the FACTUAL TRUTH of some things (like the Ressurection) must be literally proclaimed. These truths mainly relate to the life of Christ in whom Natural and Supernatural, Physical and Spiritual, were reconcilled and where, therefore, fact meets truth.

But arguing that the earth was created in a week 6000 years ago misses the poetry of Genesis, the mystical signification, and shows simplicity, lack of abstraction, and ultimately carnality…a being tied down to a concrete physical mindset.

 

[Durendin]

Remember that we’re all looking at this from a human perspective? To God, a billion years might be nothing or a long time. So the Earth might be 4 billion years old and mankind only ten thousand years old. That’s not to say we don’t have billions of years to travel ahead of us!

Besides, who here is confident that this planet is the sum of all the life that God created? It’s not like he stopped at creating one flower!

 

[Augustine22]

I don’t see it as God sitting around with nothing to do for billions of years, if that’s what happened. I agree with what Liberian had to say on that.

Whether it took billions of years or 6 days to create the visible universe doesn’t really matter, does it? Heaven doesn’t work our way in terms of time. Time is part of the visible-material creation, if I understand it right.

Maybe its a little like that old question, if a tree falls in the forest and theres no one to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is no.

Sounds WAVES, yes. But sound is what happens when sound waves interact with the ear that receives and sends the message to the brain. That sort of thing.

So if the universe wasn’t inhabited by be beings that live in “time”, in one kind of way, the idea of time was meaningless.

But I’m just thinking out loud here and getting a headache. I’m no philosopher.

 

[a_priori]

Years ago when I was an evangelical I did a stint in the charismatic movement and became a lifetime member of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship. I live in a college town and at these meetings I met a professor who holds a Ph.D. in the biological sciences and is very respected in his field of study. He is as devout as one could be in his faith and absolutely steadfast in his views about the truth of Christianity.

I asked him one night after a meeting whether or not he believed in evolution as a mechanism used by God to bring about mankind. I will never forget what he did next. He pulled me aside and told me that he refuses to openly discuss these things for fear of causing others to stumble in their faith. He then told me that the evidence for an old earth and an evolutionary component to the arrival of humans is overwhelming. He said there is no doubt at all that the earth is old but that, for some, this could be a faith wrecker so he refuses to speak of it around believers. He would never cause others distress over this issue so he avoids it.

He insists that Christianity and evolution are not mutually-exclusive and I agree.