my previous post has raised a little bit of discussion which you might find interesting.
based on the premise of ugleyvicar that God is unchanging and therefore he is eternally Saviour and Creator, I suggested that this makes Creation necessary to define God and also makes Creation eternal.
One commenter disagrees with me.
you'll have to see for yourself.
the original discussion can be found on this thread on fulcrum. John (ugleyvicar) tells me he will be publishing it on his own blog soon.
for a bit of light relief here is a musical interlude.
based on the premise of ugleyvicar that God is unchanging and therefore he is eternally Saviour and Creator, I suggested that this makes Creation necessary to define God and also makes Creation eternal.
One commenter disagrees with me.
you'll have to see for yourself.
the original discussion can be found on this thread on fulcrum. John (ugleyvicar) tells me he will be publishing it on his own blog soon.
for a bit of light relief here is a musical interlude.
1 comment:
Unfortunately, and ironically, lack of time prevents me making any real response on this topic. However, any discussion of God which includes the 'e' word (for eternity), ought to take into account St Augustine's musings on this topic found in his Confessions. He got it right long before Einstein and Hawking:
(14) This is my reply to anyone who asks: ‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’ My reply is not that which someone is said to have given as a joke to evade the force of the question. He said: ‘He was preparing hells for people who inquire into profundities.’ It is one thing to laugh, another to see the point at issue, and this reply I reject. I would have preferred him to answer ‘I am ignorant of what I do not know’ rather than reply so as to ridicule someone who has asked a deep question and to win approval for an answer which is a mistake. No, I say that you, our God, are the Creator of every created being, and assuming that by ‘heaven and earth’ is meant every created thing I boldly declare: Before God made heaven and earth, he was not making anything. If he was making anything, it could only be something created. I only wish that other useful matters which I long to be sure about I could know with an assurance equal to that with which I know that no created being was made before any creature came into being.
(15) If, however, someone’s mind is flitting and wandering over images of past times, and is astonished that you, all powerful, all creating, and all sustaining God, artificer of heaven and earth, abstained for unnumbered ages from this work before you actually made it, he should wake up and take note that his surprise rests on a mistake. How would innumerable ages pass, which you yourself had not made? You are the originator and creator of all ages. What times existed which were not brought into being by you? Or how could they pass if they never had existence? Since, therefore, you are the cause of all times, if any time existed before you made heaven and earth, how can anyone say that you abstained from working? You have made time itself. Time could not elapse before you made time. But if time did not exist before heaven and earth, why do people ask what you were then doing? There was no ‘then’ when there was no time.
(16) It is not in time that you precede times. Otherwise you would not precede all times. In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future, because they are still to come, and when they have come they are past. ‘But you are the same and your years do not fail’ (Ps. 101: 28). Your ‘years’ neither go nor come. Ours come and go so that all may come in succession. All your ‘years’ subsist in simultaneity, because they do not change; those going away are not thrust out by those coming in. But the years which are ours will not all be until all years have ceased to be. Your ‘years’ are ‘one day’ (Ps. 89: 4; 2 Pet. 3: 8), and your ‘day’ is not any and every day but Today, because your Today does not yield to a tomorrow, nor did it follow on a yesterday. Your Today is eternity. So you begat one coetemal with you, to whom you said: ‘Today I have begotten you’ (Ps. 2: 7; Heb. 5: 5). You created all times and you exist before all times. Nor was there any time when time did not exist.
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