I have some questions, which although they can’t be answered to any degree of certainty, I would like to ask them anyway. It’s aimed primarily at Christians and those of the Jewish faith.
Let me set the scene. I have no problem with believing that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” as described in Genesis 1 and it fits nicely with what Einstein later discovered in his work on relativity. What I can’t seem to comprehend though is what came before God created.
We could say that there was just God + nothing, where nothing is “what rocks dream about” to quote Aristotle (I actually think that is a pretty good definition of nothing myself). So one might be tempted to ask, what was God doing before He created the universe, which naturally leads on to how long was He doing it for? But, it doesn’t make sense to ask that, because there was no time before God created it. Also, God can’t be infinite in time, if time itself is finite, so by what method can we use to describe the period of God’s existence before creation, since we can’t use time?
Let me set the scene. I have no problem with believing that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” as described in Genesis 1 and it fits nicely with what Einstein later discovered in his work on relativity. What I can’t seem to comprehend though is what came before God created.
We could say that there was just God + nothing, where nothing is “what rocks dream about” to quote Aristotle (I actually think that is a pretty good definition of nothing myself). So one might be tempted to ask, what was God doing before He created the universe, which naturally leads on to how long was He doing it for? But, it doesn’t make sense to ask that, because there was no time before God created it. Also, God can’t be infinite in time, if time itself is finite, so by what method can we use to describe the period of God’s existence before creation, since we can’t use time?