I heard a new objection to God as creator. That God couldn’t have created the world because there is the Law of Conservation. Mass can never be added to or taken away. So therefore the world and everything has already existed for eternity. What would be a proper response to this? Thanks and God bless.
Montie,
Try running this by whomever you heard this from and check out their response:
The mind’s capacity for meaning and value is realized to be exhausted or exhaustible by nothing that is limited, and therefore only by the unlimited. Thus by experience of the finite our minds inevitably become aware of the fact that visible or limited entities cannot be the total object of which human reason is consciously capable. No degree of the finite realizes the fullness of meaning of which the human understanding is capable. Though indeed we have no positive idea of, or adequate desire for, the infinite, we are clearly aware of the insufficiency of everything other than the infinite.
The verdict of our whole nature is that the finite is not the All of meaning or being. The partial cannot be the whole. We do not directly see the intrinsic possibility of the infinite, but we do directly see the impossibility that limited beings should constitute the whole of existence or exhaust the meaning of reality. This brings us clear knowledge that the meaning of being implies the real existence of the Infinite. It is precisely because we realize that things and persons are limited that we are unable to suppose that being as such must be restricted solely to them. They cannot embody the whole possibility of being, or comprise a sufficient reason even of their own finite existence. The inadequacy of the finite thus indicates that complete or perfect reality and meaning exist in the Infinite alone, constituting the sufficient reason of the infinite itself as well as of the finite.
Infinite being is therefore superior to the limitations of material volume and of discursive reason. Infinity is spiritual greatness of a unique and superlative order. Our mental imagery and our relative concepts of spatial extension are therefore incapable of representing it.
God’s Omnipresence or spiritual immensity is thus entirely different from the mode of “presence” whereby finite objects “occupy” a defined place and sustain a relative position in regard to each other. The Infinite is “present” according to its subsistent mode of being. All that is related to the infinite is related to the whole of infinity, for no partial relation is possible in regard to that which is indivisible. To be restricted to any spatial position is itself a limitation. The human mind, though finite, is in some respects superior to material or spatial restrictions, and Infinite Spirit transcends them all. It is by uniting the idea of spiritual life with the negation of of all limitations that we can attain the most adequate mental “analogue” of the positive infinity of supreme being. The phrase “infinite matter” would be self-contradictory, for matter is essentially finite. Subsistent Mind can alone be consistently thought of as Infinity, as the philosophies of the East and West abundantly illustrate.
