Q&A: A Created World
A Created World
Question
Hello Rabbi, if you could help me solve this question I’d appreciate it.
The question is: how can it be that the world was created?
Assumptions:
1. The Holy One, blessed be He, is infinite in time.
2. The Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, and the world did not exist for an infinite amount of time.
Conclusion: The Holy One, blessed be He, did not create the world. Because in order to create it, an infinite amount of time would have had to pass before it was created. But since infinity, by definition, is endless, it could not have been traversed. Therefore: The Holy One, blessed be He, did not create the world.
Answer
This whole discussion is framed like medieval philosophy (see Sha’ar HaYichud in Duties of the Heart). Vague definitions and incorrect assumptions.
1. You need to define what “infinite” means. The question is whether the time axis itself is infinite.
Conclusion: incorrect. You are assuming that the process begins at negative infinity and then advances. That is not a mathematically well-defined process. Of course, this is connected to point 1. According to your approach, even the Holy One, blessed be He, could not exist for an infinite amount of time, since He too would have had to begin at negative infinity and move forward, and He would never reach the present.
Discussion on Answer
What I mean is that the time axis itself is not necessarily infinite, and therefore there is also no need to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, exists for an infinite amount of time. Even if time is infinite, that itself requires definition. You should realize that on an infinite time axis there is no first point from which it begins, and therefore you cannot define the process as starting from a first point and continuing until the moment of creation or until the present.
Is there no need to say that the counting has to start from negative infinity?
After all, the Holy One, blessed be He, certainly was not created, so He had to exist at every point in the past no matter how far back it is. That implies that by the time the world was created, an infinite amount of time had passed.
Is the Rabbi saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, was “above time” before He created the world, and therefore it makes no sense to speak about how much time passed before the world was created?