Q&A: Question: When was the world created?
Question: When was the world created?
Question
I was asked a question, and I don’t know how to answer it.
It is explained in Ramchal’s The Way of God that “the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world at the time when it arose in His will.”
The question is: what does “at the time” mean in this case? After all, the Holy One, blessed be He, is eternal. And one could ask: why did it not occur to Him earlier?
On the other hand, before that there was no concept of time. If so, it cannot be divided into “before that” and “after that.”
So if one asks when it arose in His will, the answer would be: “That question does not exist.”
However, this seemingly leads to the thought that the will arose immediately with the “beginning” of God’s existence. And that is not applicable.
Seemingly, this leads to something like Spinoza’s assumption, that God’s existence and the world’s existence are parallel things. And that is also problematic.
As for me, it is clear to me that this question falls under “what is before and what is after,” and our thought cannot grasp such matters. But the baal teshuva I am dealing with finds it hard to accept that.
What is the answer? And what should one say?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question.
First, why is Ramchal relevant here? If he hadn’t written this, would you not have understood on your own that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world when He willed it? And if everything is clear were it not for Ramchal, then just set Ramchal’s words aside and that’s that. Are his words a law given to Moses at Sinai?
Second, what is wrong with your claim that before that there was no time? What does that have to do with the beginning of God’s existence?
Third, what is the problem with saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided in advance to create the world at such-and-such a point on the timeline? It is not that the matter arose in His will at that very moment. By the same token, one could say that this was the plan from the outset: that when this moment in time arrived, a world would be created. In the same way, you could ask why He decided to create man specifically on the sixth day and not on the fourth or the first.
Discussion on Answer
David, do you know why the world was created?
Do you know what God did before the world was created?
There are answers to that in the literature of the Sages and in the midrashim.
Have you read them? And do you remember? Which explanation did you connect with?
1. Right. That was only to say that my own words were not what created the problem. 2. In a place where there is no time, from our perspective things happen simultaneously. 3. But we do say, “It arose in thought to create in Nisan, and it was created in Tishrei.” 4. Regarding the order of the clarifications after Genesis, and why man was created almost at the end, there are explanations.