God, the Universe and Creation

[John Zeger]

In what is sort of a koan (a Zen puzzle), I would like to ask the question "If God created the Universe and if God is eternal, then at what point in time did God create the Universe?" Of course, that question cannot be answered because it has contradictory premises, yet many people think along these lines. Alan Watts once said that a question that has been around for a long time and has never been answered satisfactorily is usually one that is asked the wrong way.

In the question that I posed, one or more of the premises are obviously wrong. Did God create the Universe? Is God eternal? Was the Universe created at a single point in time? My intuitive grasp of things leads me to accept the notion that God is eternal but to question whether the Universe was created at a particular point in time, as the theists or deists believe. Rather is more intellectually satisfying for me to think that the Universe, like God, is eternal and flows out of God in a continuous process that never had a beginning and will never have an end. This idea is very similar to the thinking of Plotinus who was one of the greatest mystics and philosophers of all time.

[Clara]

John,

In one translation of the Tanakh (the Jewish Hebrew Scripture), the wording of Genesis, is not God created.. but rather the wording is "create" - a present tense, rather than a past tense. I'm traveling now - so I can't tell you which translation of the Tanakh sits at home - but I am most definitely sure that the wording was "create" not "created." And in that particular translation, of course - then the implication is that creation is an ongoing process as you have described above. And personally, at this point, I prefer that interpretation.

Clara

[John Zeger]

Again from the Jewish tradition, some Kabbalists believed that God created the Universe out of necessity and not choice. This is an unusual point of view that flies in the face of the notion that God is complete in Himself. But why else would God create the world.? Vedantists believe that God created the Universe as an eternal game (lila) in which he loses Himself by playing at being everything in creation. This idea has a lot of merit but I think that God has a more serious reason than just to entertain Himself.

In his book Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre suggested such a reason. There Sartre wrote that if Absolute Mind (God) contemplates Nothingness, it becomes Absolute Nothingness. Perhaps, then, God created the Universe in order to avoid His own negation.

[Rev Bev]

In the tradition of the Koan is the answer not - In and with the first moment. Time is a product of creation, God is.