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Headless Man
leeroy
http://www.gotquestions.org/
What was God doing before He created the universe?
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God doing before
Question: "What was God doing before He created the universe?"
Answer: Our finite minds find it hard to comprehend that before the universe was created, God existed alone. We know from John 1:1 that Jesus also existed: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The preincarnate Christ was intimately united with the Father, so as to partake of His glory and to be appropriately called God. He has Himself explained it in John 17:5: “And now Father, glorify Me with Yourself with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”
We also know that the Holy Spirit was present before we were created. Genesis 1:1 describes the Spirit “hovering over the face” of the dark and formless earth. So, before time even existed, God existed in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity existed in perfect harmony and flawlessness, having all they needed in one another. David said in Psalms 16:11 that "joy and pleasures forever more" are in the presence of God. That means to be in the presence of God carries with it an overwhelming sense of joy, fulfillment, and pleasure. Before creation, God felt complete joy and fulfillment as He perfectly beheld and communed with Himself. God has and always will experience complete joy because He has complete and perfect knowledge of Himself.
So before He created the universe, God experienced absolute satisfaction in Himself. God dwelt joyfully alone in eternity as the Trinity. These three were together in fellowship with one another from all eternity. They loved each other. We know at some point they discussed the redemption of mankind (Ephesians 1:4-5; 2 Timothy 1:9; John 17:24), but everything else lies in mystery.
Recommended Resource: Knowing God by J.I. Packer.
Related Topics:
Who created God? Where did God come from?
| 13 years ago. Rating: 1 | |
Question: "Did God create the universe?"
Answer: The scriptural teaching on the origin of the universe is found in Genesis 1:1, which states that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Steven Hawking attempts to circumvent this truth (or, at the very least, render a Creator logically superfluous to the issue of the beginning of the universe). However, his ideas are not new, but are rather the latest versions of some classic attempts to explain getting something (i.e., the universe) out of nothing.
Hawking’s support for his work comes from the existence of the law of gravity. It is known to physicists that the energy associated with the gravitational force is negative, while the energy associated with most ordinary objects (baseballs, cars, etc.) is positive. It is possible for these positive and negative energies to cancel, resulting in zero net energy. Two situations with the same energy (or zero energy difference) are, in a physical sense, equally preferable. An example would be a soccer ball on the kitchen floor; the ball could sit by the refrigerator or the stove or the table without wanting to roll anywhere else. This is because each position on the kitchen floor which the soccer ball could occupy would have the same energy, so none of the positions is energetically preferable to the others.
Hawking envisions the origin of the universe in a similar way. Since it is possible to think of the creation of the universe as a “zero net energy process,” Hawking suggests that there is no need to explain how it could have been created. But this inference is based not on the physics, but on Hawking’s own philosophical presuppositions. In the example of a soccer ball on the kitchen floor, it is conceivable to imagine the soccer ball sitting anywhere on the floor without needing an explanation; however, it is quite another thing to say that the soccer ball and the kitchen floor came from nothing.
Hawking's attempts to address this problem are not in any way new to philosophers; it is one of the oldest issues in Epicurean philosophy: “ex nihilo nihil fit” (literally, “nothing comes out of nothing”). Hawking’s ideas may establish that two physical situations (the universe existing versus not existing) are energetically equivalent, but it does nothing to address the issue of cause and effect. I don’t need an explanation as to why the soccer ball is sitting by the stove rather than by the refrigerator, but I do need an explanation if I see the ball move from the stove to the refrigerator. In physics, a change never occurs without an explanation; in philosophical language, an effect never occurs without a cause.
Hawking’s ideas do nothing to address this; the issue of the universe’s origin is the same as it was before. It is not possible to get something from nothing. Only the idea of a Creator can adequately explain where the universe could have come from. Moreover, Hawking’s statement that science will always prevail over religion “because it works” reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophy of science. Truth is not determined by “what works,” but by whether it conforms to the reality around us. When I say that a particular statement is “true,” I am saying that the content of that statement actually describes the way things are. This connection between a statement and the reality it describes is independent of me and my mind. A statement may be true or false, irrespective of whether or not it appears to me to describe the correct state of affairs. This is what we mean when we say that truth is objective; a statement’s “truth value” is a quality which it possesses independently of my knowledge thereof.
However, once we begin to try to decide whether a particular statement is true or false (as happens in both science and religion), the only way we know how to proceed is to try to test the statement to “see if it works.” As an example, suppose I want to decide whether the statement “All cats are brown” is true. I can begin my investigation by gathering cats together and inspecting each of them to see if any do not conform to the statement in question, thereby rendering it false. I only need to find one gray cat to know that my original statement is false: not all cats are brown.
But what if every cat I was able to find was, in fact, brown? Clearly, the world does contain felines of many other varieties and colors. In this case, even though my statement “works” (from my investigation, all cats do appear to be brown), it is clearly false. Thus, the issue of whether science or religion “works” is completely irrelevant to the issue of truth in each of these disciplines. While truth can be discovered by noting what works, simply because a statement appears to work does not in fact imply that it is true.
To summarize, Hawking's reasoning fails on philosophical grounds. Hawking attempts to substitute God with a particular physical law (gravity). However, Hawking fails to address the key issue at hand - that is, the origin of physical law in the first place. Where did the law of gravity come from and how does nothing produce something? A physical law is not nothing. Moreover, Hawking's conception of a plethora of ensemble universes to escape the conclusion of fine-tuning is philosophically unsound, metaphysically motivated, and less parsimonious than the theistic interpretation.
Why does man seek to eliminate God from having had any role in the creation of the Universe? It's very simple. Man hates God and does not want to be subject to God's law, or held accountable for his actions. As Paul writes in Romans 1, "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles."
Recommended Resource: The New Creationism by Paul Garner.
| 13 years ago. Rating: 0 | |
Upon the completion of His creation activity, including the creation of time, what did God conclude? “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Indeed, God is spirit in the realm of timelessness, rather than flesh in the sphere of time.
As believers, we have a deep sense of comfort knowing that God, though timeless and eternal, is in time with us right now; He is not unreachably transcendent, but right here in this moment with us. And because He’s in this moment, He can respond to our needs and prayers.
Simply put, God always existed, He is omnipresent and not a temporal being like we are.
| 13 years ago. Rating: 0 | |
Andrew
bluedeath
As an atheist I would say the universe came first for obvious reasons. But for the sake of argument, if there was nothingness everywhere, where would god exist that was not a void? But lets say, again for the sake of argument that the big bang theory was correct, I would argue that God was that pinpoint in the fabric of void and as He expanded, so did the universe. Using that argument, I would claim that neither existed first, that they both expanded together as one, meaning God would be everywhere all at once, all around us. But as an atheist, again for the sake of argument, I would say the universe began with out input from any being, supernatural or natural.
| 13 years ago. Rating: 0 | |
there might be a end if the universe keeps expanding, kind of like fireworks, it will eventually burn out,
quite possibly, but then again, maybe there was a beginning but will be no end, or vice versa.
Gward
Since God created the universe then God existed before the universe. We know scientifically that there are other dimensions, we exist in a universe of 3 to 4 dimensions if you include time. But there is nothing that limits other existence beyond the 3 to 4 dimensions that we know about. Science is expanding knowledge about the early beginnings of the universe and the cause of the universe expansion (i.e. Big Bang. This is an unexplanable and without cause event as far as we know; other than to say that God was the originator of that event. There are many things beyond our ability to measure with our limited resources. The best an athiest can say is "to the best of my knowledge I have no experience of God". This hardly eliminates the existence of God. It certainly does not prove it, but the bible tells us there are thing we must take on faith. It is foolish for any person ro rule out the existence of God as that woudl imply that that person or persons have all knowledge. The world we live in today would never have been predicted by people 3000 years ago based on their knowledge. We have just receltly discover the substance called dark matter with occupies over 70% of the universe and that ordinary matter represents only about 10% of what we can actually measure. Imagine that for years we thought we knew about msot of the material universe, but know it comes to use that really have only been studying about 10% of the actual universe. There is nothing that says that even now the 10% we think we know about may only be 1% of the material in the universe. The more we study, the more we find out that we do not know. Therefore think carefully before you rule out God! The bible says that only the fool has said in his heart "there is no god".
| 13 years ago. Rating: 0 | |
Who created God ?