Dave writes:
----- Original Message -----
From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
To: gmurphy@raex.com
Cc: hvantill@novagate.com ; rjschn39@bellsouth.net ; asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 2:53 PM
Subject: Re: Current Events
With panentheism, while the deity is "greater" than universe (not equated with it as in pantheism), deity and universe are necessarily interacting. This brings up all the problems both of you [and Ted] mention. But there is more that is independent of Christian theology. If God and "creation" are so intertwined, exhaustive alternatives are: (1) both are eternal in the sense of existing in infinite past time; (2) the deity existed eternally before "creating"; (3) both deity and universe sprang into existence simultaneously.
skip--
If (2), we have the problem of what the deity was doing earlier, what kind of "finger-twiddling" engaged it in eternity past. More difficult a problem, what triggered the sudden initiation of matter? How could it take an eternity of discursive reasoning by this deity to come up with a desire to "create"?
Bob's comment:
On (1), I wish I could find the exact passage, but somewhere, perhaps in ST I, Aquinas argues that a theology of creation is not necessarily dependent upon the belief in a temporal beginning; however, he rejects the notion of the eternity of the world on the basis of revelation. If the term "creation" is understood in part as referring to the ontological dependence of the world upon God, then one might construct an argument for an eternal God and an eternal world existing together. I would not.
On (2) Aquinas writes: "God is before the world by duration. The term 'before' here means the priority of eternity, not of time. Or you might say that it betokens an everlasting imaginary time, not time as really existing, rather as when we speak of nothing being beyond the heavens, the term 'beyond' betokens merely an imaginary place in a picture we can form of other dimensions stretching beyond those of the body of the heavens." I think Thomas would interpret Dave's "earlier" in the same way. The question Dave asks is the kind of natural question anyone would ask, but can it really be answered? Is "eternity past" to be measured in time? Especially if time is a creature, as Augustine, and apparently Big Bang, suggests? Perhaps God and Wisdom were imagining the world that God called into existence. I'm confident, with Augustine, that God was not creating hell for those of us who ask such questions.
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