The one stumbling block I run into is whether or not God had a beginning. Everything finite does, God is not finite, but how could he always exist?
It’s a difficult concept to grasp because we are trying to apply something particular to the universe to something outside the universe where the concept is not quite the same. Time, as we know it, is a measure of a quantity, just like gallons or liters or cubic feet. All of those depend on a universe to exist. If you had no universe, where would you find a liter of anything or 2 lbs of something? You can’t.
Likewise with time. Time has to be a measured “something.” Today we use the standard of an atomic clock, which measures the very precise frequency of microwave radiation given off by electrons as they change energy levels in an atomic structure. Less than two years ago the National Institute of Standards and Technology built a clock from aluminum and mercury atoms that loses less than one second in a billion years. Point is, something has to be measured. You can’t measure anything in a universe of nothing.
St. Thomas Aquinas used an example of time in terms of a person walking along a road and not being able to see others who walked the same road before or after him. But, he said, if one was to observe the road from a high spot like a mountain, where they could see far ahead and behind, they could observe several different people walking at any point along the road. This, in his analogy, would be like being able to see the past, present and future, where someone on the road could only see their own present.
Going back to the question of God as a first cause, that is, a being who causes but was not Himself caused, time would not be able to exist prior to being caused. It would have to come at some point after the first causer. Such a being, with the capacity to create time, would not Himself be constrained by it. That would violate the concept of first cause and the idea that nothing created is itself greater than the one who created it.
Time also has to do with matter and space. What if there is no matter and no space as we understand them, such as in a spiritual existence? We aren’t sure what that entails exactly other than the idea of it being eternal. That is an imperfect understanding because the concept of eternal, in our understanding, is time-based; it means forever, as in time continuing with no end point. It doesn’t really address what “outside time” would be, but only helps us to understand the concept though in an imperfect way.
). The one stumbling block I run into is whether or not God had a beginning. Everything finite does, God is not finite, but how could he always exist?
: We are human. Our entire body of knowledge, both of self and the universe is based on ourselves. Our senses, our brain, our experiences etc. But can we imagine something, no SOMEONE, that is so transcendent of all that humans know? Yes! Because we are given a special power, by virtue of Faith (which comes from God.) Because of Faith, I CAN IMAGINE Someone so transcendent, that nothing in my experience would suggest it. How is this possible – I don’t know!