Q&A: The Eternity of the World and the Eternity of God
The Eternity of the World and the Eternity of God
Question
I do not understand the difference between the claim that the world is eternal and the claim that the world was created by an eternal God.
If God is eternal, meaning uncreated and without a cause, it sounds like there is such a thing as an eternal world, or at least some sort of space in which this God exists, and therefore the world always existed.
Is the issue of the eternity of the world speaking only about the world as we know it (the universe, the Milky Way, planet Earth, etc.), while the space in which God always was and always will be is some other place that is not part of the discussion (the World to Come / the world of souls…)? Is that place eternal?
Answer
I did not understand the question. God is not located in some place. He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place. Beyond that, when people reject the claim of an eternal world, they mean the world as it is known to us today (the material world). Not space in itself, but the content that fills it.
Discussion on Answer
He also has the right to argue that a rooster has six wings. This is not about rights but about plausibility. Our reality is familiar to us, and it is not something that has necessary existence and does not require a prior cause.
I elaborated on this in The First Existent and in the second and third notebooks.
In my opinion, the atheist argument goes like this:
If a believer is allowed to say that God has no beginning (starting point) and that He requires no explanation,
then the atheist also has the right to argue that all of reality has no beginning—that everything is eternal, not just the world but also whatever existed "before" the Big Bang—and that it exists without explanation. And the believer cannot have any claims against that, since he is saying the same things about God.