God and Time

[ReachingFaith]

I was thinking of this in another thread, and I decided to ask you all (Polite help, please!)

God always was, correct? But how can that be? He is the Creator of everything, but where did He come from? Did He create Himself? And what about the other parts of Him, Son and holy Ghost…where did they all come from?

As for the world, how did God make everything out of nothing? How can you do that? How can we prove that?
I hope you can help me…please try to answer with respect.

 

[JimG]

I was thinking of this in another thread, and I decided to ask you all (Polite help, please!)

God always was, correct? But how can that be? He is the Creator of everything, but where did He come from? Did He create Himself? And what about the other parts of Him, Son and holy Ghost…where did they all come from?

As for the world, how did God make everything out of nothing? How can you do that? How can we prove that?
I hope you can help me…please try to answer with respect.

God is the Uncaused Cause. If he came from something else, he is an effect, created, not a cause.

The phrase “God always was, and is, and will be,” does not really denote an endless stream of time passing. For if God just exists in an infinite continuum of time, he cannot be God. Time measure change, and God does not change.

God has not parts. The Father, Son, and Spirit are not parts of God. They are distinct Persons but not distinct beings.

I would recommend reading through a littel book by Frank J. Sheed, called “Theology for Beginners.” Because the concept of God is not an easy one for humans to grasp, it’s worth spending some time with a serious book on the subject.

 

[billcu1]

God is the Uncaused Cause. If he came from something else, he is an effect, created, not a cause.

The phrase “God always was, and is, and will be,” does not really denote an endless stream of time passing. For if God just exists in an infinite continuum of time, he cannot be God. Time measure change, and God does not change.

God has not parts. The Father, Son, and Spirit are not parts of God. They are distinct Persons but not distinct beings.

I would recommend reading through a littel book by Frank J. Sheed, called “Theology for Beginners.” Because the concept of God is not an easy one for humans to grasp, it’s worth spending some time with a serious book on the subject.

There never was a “time” when god wasn’t nor the trinity wasn’t. God is outside of all temporospatial. He is very simple and not a complex thing.

Bill

 

[JDaniel]

I was thinking of this in another thread, and I decided to ask you all (Polite help, please!)

God always was, correct? But how can that be? He is the Creator of everything, but where did He come from? Did He create Himself?

Hi, RF:

Good to hear from you again.

Someone, a long time ago thought through that question and resolved in the following manner. He began with two postulates: (1) all things that move are moved by another, and, (2) all things are effects that have a prior cause. If you think about it, you’ll come to the same conclusions. Motion and causation are serial events. A billiard ball on a billiard table will sit there for years to come, until someone, or something, comes along and moves it. But, if you think about that someone or something, it too must have a mover. (There was a time when it did not exist. There was a time when it did not have life.) And so on. But, there can be no such thing as infinite past Time. If there was, we would not be here today. No amalgamation of finite things can ever add up to an infinity. There can be no parts, or finite pieces that make up an infinity. (Look up David Hilbert, the mathematician who proved this.) And the same is said of causes.

If there were no first mover, or first efficient cause, we would not exist here and now. St. Thomas Aquinas was the person who proved this before anyone else ,except Aristotle.

So, in each case, there has to be a First.

And what about the other parts of Him, Son and holy Ghost…where did they all come from?

Jesus and the Holy Spirit eternally proceed from the Father. They are not creatures and were not created. They are aspects of the Father.

As for the world, how did God make everything out of nothing? How can you do that?

This may prove to be the unanswerable question. There are theories, of course. Read through some of this

How can we prove that?

We prove it by the negative. We rule out everything else, one by one, if we have to, and find that we have no other alternatives.

I hope you can help me…please try to answer with respect.

I’ll bet you have more questions, as some of our answers begged for them.

God bless,
jd

 

[ReachingFaith]

Infinite past time??? have mercy on me, I’ve been on the go with classes all day…I’m not understanding.
God came from nothing? How can He have always been? everything has a start, doesn’t it? I don’t understand. How could Jesus still be a part of God while He was on earth? Was He detached from God? Because they are distinct, right?
How could God forsake Himself? On the Cross, Jesus asked for God’s help…he said “Why have you forsaken me?” But how could that be?
Geez, how, how, how. I do ask things so nicely, don’t I?
Thanks for taking time to help me!

 

[Frankenfurter]

That force that created the universe, created the potential for a beautiful baby and a summer day and a sea lion, and everything else in creation, that force, I call God. He created something from nothing at the big bang. He created the rules of nature that are just so in balance that life is possible. Rarer still, an appreciation of a cool day, while hugging your loved one, that in some way, returns the love of creation back to the Father.

Thank you Father for creation.

I don’t explain it in terms if things I already understand. I learn from it directly.

 

[norain]

I see God as the sum of reason, the sum of all Platonic universals. Timeless, without form, causal, and all-powerful.

Time is the measure of movement of things between points in space. Before there was any matter, there were no photons by which to measure time. Time did not exist yet. God was already there.

In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The “logos”, or reason, as the Greeks called it, as referenced in John 1.

 

[littlestsouls]

Infinite past time??? have mercy on me, I’ve been on the go with classes all day…I’m not understanding.
God came from nothing? How can He have always been? everything has a start, doesn’t it? I don’t understand. How could Jesus still be a part of God while He was on earth? Was He detached from God? Because they are distinct, right?
How could God forsake Himself? On the Cross, Jesus asked for God’s help…he said “Why have you forsaken me?” But how could that be?
Geez, how, how, how. I do ask things so nicely, don’t I?
Thanks for taking time to help me!

I will give a quick, simple response to some of your questions.

“Time can extend infinitely into the past” = a paradox.
Infinity has no end. The past HAS and end (otherwise we wouldn’t call it the past). Therefore the past is not infinite.

God is a necessary being. An eternal God must exist. Here is a brief argument taken from scandalon.co.uk/philosophy/cosmological_aquinas.htm :

There exists things that are caused (created) by other things.
Nothing can be the cause of itself (nothing can create itself.)
There cannot be an endless string of objects causing other objects to exist.
Therefore, there must be an uncaused first cause called God.

Some qualifiers could be added to this syllogism, but it’s probably best to keep it simple.

As to Jesus being “forsaken”: He was quoting from Psalm 22, which would have been familiar to those who heard His lamentation. Here is a very useful link on the topic:

haydock1859.tripod.com/id746.html

God bless.

 

[JDaniel]

Infinite past time??? have mercy on me, I’ve been on the go with classes all day…I’m not understanding.

RF:

There are some people that think that Time started in an infinite past and will proceed into an infinite future. Infinite past time is what we call Time that supposedly stretches back into the past to infinity.

God came from nothing?

God always existed. We do not say that He came from Nothing, only that the Universe came to be where there was nothing, but God always was (is and will be). Nothing can bring itself into being and nothing can pre-exist itself in order to bring itself into being. You may have heard that God does not do what is impossibly contradictory. That is logically true.

How can He have always been? everything has a start, doesn’t it?

By our faith and our dialectical inquiry, we believe that God did not have a beginning. If He had a beginning then something else must have made Him come to be. If something else brought Him into being, then that is God - not the entity that we first thought was God. We have already taken this regress back to the postulation of an infinite regress - which cannot be. It’s an argument that is sort of like, if you had a large, heavy statue in your house, and one day you and your parents returned home to find it missing and the front door lock was broken, you could only conclude that it was stolen. Well, if there is no actual infinite regress of Time, then there is only one answer.

I don’t understand. How could Jesus still be a part of God while He was on earth? Was He detached from God? Because they are distinct, right?

A theory that I subscribe to is Yppop’s theory, found in an earlier thread entitled, Space, which you can read here. One explanation is that God may be Infinite, continuous Space. As such, space can be represented as a 3 dimensional lattice that has at each of its corners, point particles, such as fermions (the physical building blocks of matter). Within each 3-dimensional lattice, is Infinite Space, or God. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost are God, and that aspect of God we call, Jesus, simply inhabited a configuration of s-points, that was the form of Jesus. Later, the form of Jesus the man simply reconfigured itself into a dead Jesus, and the anima that was Jesus’ Spirit, simply shrugged it off, at least as something tied to the imperfections of matter.

How could God forsake Himself? On the Cross, Jesus asked for God’s help…he said “Why have you forsaken me?” But how could that be?

Christ spoke those words for the sake of the witnesses, and they remind us that even though Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are aspects of the One God, they still have real distinctness.

Geez, how, how, how. I do ask things so nicely, don’t I?
Thanks for taking time to help me!

Yes you do!

God bless you,
jd

 

[LaMusicaSenior]

I was thinking of this in another thread, and I decided to ask you all (Polite help, please!)

God always was, correct? But how can that be? He is the Creator of everything, but where did He come from? Did He create Himself? And what about the other parts of Him, Son and holy Ghost…where did they all come from?

As for the world, how did God make everything out of nothing? How can you do that? How can we prove that?
I hope you can help me…please try to answer with respect.

Hi! Let me see if I can help you:

There are only two ways to exsist: a being can either be contingent (it receives it’s existence from another source) or it can be neccesary (it owes it’s exsistence to nothing.)

You are contigent. If your parents had never met, you would not exsist. But a neccessary being must exsist, could never NOT exsist, owese it’s exsistence to nothing - infact, it is existence.

We obviously can point to a lot of contingent beings. The only explanation for contingent beings is a neccesarry being. The neccessary being is God.

God causes everything to be. He is the creator, but also the conserver - creating things directly and through secondary means (like parents conceive a child, yet God is still the cause of the child’s exsistence).

God must be eternal (as the neccesary being). If there ever was a time when there was nothing, there woudl be nothing now because something can’t come from nothing. God can’t have an end - he can’t stop existing because he is dependent on nothing.

God has no parts - if he had parts, someone would have to put him together, so God would owe his exisitence to the thing that put him together.

But why is it neccesary to point to God as the creator of all contingent beings out of nothing? We could just trace each effect back to a casue, and the cause back to a cause, and on and on and on to infinity - infinite regress in an attempt to prove that the neccesary being is not needed. Yet each contingent is a factor, and a contingent on it’s own is a zero. So when you add up a bunch of zeroes…you get zero. When you subtract all the contingents, you would be left with nothing and nothing can’t come from nothing. If we point to the neccesary being, God cannot be subtracted. With infinte regress, we still have no explination without God.

And while we cannot make things out of nothing, God can because he is omnipotent (an do all things becuase he is the cause of all things), omniscient (all knowing, omnipresent (everywhere), a pure act (cannot change,) unique (only one neccessary being), simple (has no parts,) perfect (no limits on perfection,) and spiritual(not composed or dependent).

Sorry for the LONG post, hopefully this helps? let me know if you have any other questions.

 

[maypoe]

Study cosmology. Cosmologists have concluded that indeed there is a creator. Science has caught up with Genesis! PTL!!

It’s in the math.

 

[ReapReason]

Study cosmology. Cosmologists have concluded that indeed there is a creator. Science has caught up with Genesis! PTL!!

It’s in the math.

what are you talking about?

 

[504Katrin]

How could God forsake Himself? On the Cross, Jesus asked for God’s help…he said “Why have you forsaken me?” But how could that be?

He prayed. He only prayed the first line out loud, but people would know the Psalm by its first line…

Read it. When you read it you can literally see him pray it on the cross before your eyes… It’s Psalm 22.

 

[ReachingFaith]

Here’s the biggest question I have:
Why does the necessary Being have to be God? Can’t we just say the universe was created, but that is all we know? How can we (aside from citing the infinity thing) point out, with certantity, that God is actually responsible for our world? Do you understand what I mean? Like, in my Apologetics book, they were happy to say “There is a world, it must have been created, it needed an infinite Creator, that is God.” But why, and how did we prove that?

 

[LaMusicaSenior]

Here’s the biggest question I have:
Why does the necessary Being have to be God? Can’t we just say the universe was created, but that is all we know? How can we (aside from citing the infinity thing) point out, with certantity, that God is actually responsible for our world? Do you understand what I mean? Like, in my Apologetics book, they were happy to say “There is a world, it must have been created, it needed an infinite Creator, that is God.” But why, and how did we prove that?

Does a necessary being exist? Here is the proof that it does. Dependent beings cannot cause themselves. They are dependent on their causes. If there is no independent being, then the whole chain of dependent beings is dependent on nothing and could not exist. But they do exist. Therefore there is an independent being. (quoted from seperate thread)

 

[greylorn]

I was thinking of this in another thread, and I decided to ask you all (Polite help, please!)

God always was, correct? But how can that be? He is the Creator of everything, but where did He come from? Did He create Himself? And what about the other parts of Him, Son and holy Ghost…where did they all come from?

As for the world, how did God make everything out of nothing? How can you do that? How can we prove that?
I hope you can help me…please try to answer with respect.

You seem to have run across some contradictions in religious dogma, leading you to question a few fundamental beliefs. I did the same a half-century ago and came up with some notions about the nature of “God” which are non-Catholic, but also non-contradictory.

Addressing your points in the context of these ideas…

God came into being from a collision between dark energy and a different kind of substance, aeon. You (at the level of soul) came into existence at the same instant, along with other components that may be regarded as parts of “God.”.

God differs from you in that He became conscious all by himself, whereas you (and the rest of us) are only beginning to come into rudimentary consciousness thanks to the existence of a complex brain/body system existing within an even more complex support system (planet, solar system, galaxy, etc.).

God did not make everything from nothing. He made it from dark energy.

 

[Portofino]

Here’s the biggest question I have:
Why does the necessary Being have to be God? Can’t we just say the universe was created, but that is all we know? How can we (aside from citing the infinity thing) point out, with certantity, that God is actually responsible for our world? Do you understand what I mean? Like, in my Apologetics book, they were happy to say “There is a world, it must have been created, it needed an infinite Creator, that is God.” But why, and how did we prove that?

You raise a valid point, in my estimation. And I could be mistaken, but I believe that most Catholics who argue for theism on this site would agree that demonstrating the existence of a God is not the same as demonstrating the existence of the God of Christianity.

Theism vs. atheism is the first hurdle, so to speak; the second hurdle is to arrive at *Christian *theism, in particular. This requires different arguments, that obviously are more Biblically-centered, as opposed to purely philosophical.

I think you’re also right that a Creator God is not obliged to have created objective moral value; is not required to intervene in human affairs; is not required to love us (the attitude could be anything from indifference to simply benevolent good-will) ; nor to have made us in his image and likeness; finally, such a God is not required to give us eternal life, nor to punish what we call wickedness and reward what we call righteousness.

I suppose that’s why I identify myself as an “agnostic theist” – I believe in something, but am not confident we can ever know–whilst we draw breath–what that “something” is. My revelation, I suppose, is the here-and-now, admiring or marveling at what is immanent and daring to believe or hope that it it reflects (in its “best” aspects) what is transcendent.

There’s another potential problem with the God explanation, which non-believers have pointed out. In saying that God caused the universe, one can turn around and say, “what caused God?” If the buck stops with God – that the Creator wasn’t created, period – then why not stop the buck with nature? You are still left with something that was uncreated, regardless. For many non-believers, they are willing to live with the paradox of an uncreated nature, rather than posit an uncreated God.

Finally, it occurs to me the universe could well have been created by Gods (plural), in partnership with each other. Indeed, theism does not make monotheism logically necessary. Thus, even saying that there must be “a” God is somewhat presumptuous; it is more proper to say, there must be at least one God, if not more.

 

[JimG]

Study cosmology. Cosmologists have concluded that indeed there is a creator. Science has caught up with Genesis! PTL!!

It’s in the math.

I presume you are speaking of the Big Bang, with it’s begining being coterminous with the beginning of matter, space, and time.

That’s plausible. One might say that the Universe began with the singularity we call the Big Bang. Perhaps that was the first instant of creation.

But philosophically and theologically, I think, there is nothing inherently impossible about a universe in which time extends infinitely into the past and into the future. Such a universe would have no temporal beginning, but it would still need a Creator.

We do know of actual mathematical infinities, after all. The series of whole niumbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., is infinite in both directions, negative and positive.

Still, I do like the idea of the Big Bang as a temporal beginning point.

 

[greylorn]

Study cosmology. Cosmologists have concluded that indeed there is a creator. Science has caught up with Genesis! PTL!!

It’s in the math.

Would you kindly back up that claim with some references to cosmological theory— or even better, the theorists?

I’d like to connect with some of these people, if they exist.

 

[greylorn]

You raise a valid point, in my estimation. And I could be mistaken, but I believe that most Catholics who argue for theism on this site would agree that demonstrating the existence of a God is not the same as demonstrating the existence of the God of Christianity.

Theism vs. atheism is the first hurdle, so to speak; the second hurdle is to arrive at *Christian *theism, in particular. This requires different arguments, that obviously are more Biblically-centered, as opposed to purely philosophical.

I think you’re also right that a Creator God is not obliged to have created objective moral value; is not required to intervene in human affairs; is not required to love us (the attitude could be anything from indifference to simply benevolent good-will) ; nor to have made us in his image and likeness; finally, such a God is not required to give us eternal life, nor to punish what we call wickedness and reward what we call righteousness.

I suppose that’s why I identify myself as an “agnostic theist” – I believe in something, but am not confident we can ever know–whilst we draw breath–what that “something” is. My revelation, I suppose, is the here-and-now, admiring or marveling at what is immanent and daring to believe or hope that it it reflects (in its “best” aspects) what is transcendent.

There’s another potential problem with the God explanation, which non-believers have pointed out. In saying that God caused the universe, one can turn around and say, “what caused God?” If the buck stops with God – that the Creator wasn’t created, period – then why not stop the buck with nature? You are still left with something that was uncreated, regardless. For many non-believers, they are willing to live with the paradox of an uncreated nature, rather than posit an uncreated God.

Finally, it occurs to me the universe could well have been created by Gods (plural), in partnership with each other. Indeed, theism does not make monotheism logically necessary. Thus, even saying that there must be “a” God is somewhat presumptuous; it is more proper to say, there must be at least one God, if not more.

Addressing only your “stopping the buck” comments.

All theories about the beginning come down to a fundamental single thing at the beginning. Monotheistic theology assumes that this thing is an omniscient, omnipotent God. Cosmology assumes that this thing is a “physical singularity” (an absurd concept, less verifiable than a non-physical God).

These two concepts are functionally identical. Each proposes the eternal existence of an entity which contains the potential to develop all the matter and energy in the universe and organize it into independently functional components, like you and (on a good day) me. Each of these concepts is that of an exceedingly complex entity.

It is much simpler and easier to assume, instead of the pre-existence of a single complex entity, to make a different assumption.

Since we live in a cause-effect universe in which two things must interact in order for something to happen, why not assume that this universe began with two things?

Moreover, let’s assume that it began with the interaction of two extremely simple things, each possessing a single force. This leads to a clear and simple interpretation of the origins of the universe and of ourselves.