Q&A: The Existence of God
The Existence of God.
Question
Hi. Two questions came up this Sabbath, and I’d be happy if you could help me with them.
1. “Who forms light and creates darkness” — how did God create darkness, when darkness does not exist in itself, but is simply the absence of light?
2. If God is indeed eternal and infinite, He could not have reached the point at which He caused the Big Bang, because before that He would have had to pass through an infinity, which would have taken an infinite amount of time — in other words, eternity.
If God is eternal, that means He existed for an infinity before “creation.”
If so, how did He reach the point of creation?
Answer
1. I don’t know. Maybe darkness too is some kind of reality. When there is no light, what existed before the light is revealed. Or perhaps once light was created, its limitation is what creates darkness. And it may be a metaphor for good and evil, as in the verse.
2. The concept of infinity leads to many paradoxes and misunderstandings. In general, there is no moment of minus infinity from which one starts moving forward. When people speak about infinity in this context, they mean that the duration of God’s existence is not finite.
Discussion on Answer
Yes, as far as I know, it’s me.
I answered your question, and it seems you’re missing some mathematical understanding. Your conclusion does not follow from the premises. And I haven’t even yet commented on the premise that there is such a thing as “before” the Bang. In the accepted view, the time axis was created with the Bang.
What causes me to believe is described in detail in my book The First Existent and in my lecture series on faith.
Oh, one more thing. Your first premise is also incorrect. It is absolutely possible to traverse an infinity. It just takes an infinite amount of time. And no, that does not mean that you can’t reach any specific point in time. Here we’ve come back to the answer I gave you.
I put quotation marks around the word “before” precisely because of that difficulty.
As for your comment on my premise that one cannot traverse an infinity, I phrased myself a bit problematically.
What I meant by “impossible” to traverse an infinity was not that it is literally impossible, but that it is problematic when one wants to reach a specific point in time, because one has to pass through infinitely many segments before reaching that point.
In short, for exactly the same reason that claiming, against the various cosmological arguments, that the universe always existed is problematic, to put it mildly.
Where can one get your book, The First Existent?
How is there no logical contradiction in this sentence:
“It is absolutely possible to traverse an infinity. It just takes an infinite amount of time”
To traverse = to reach an end
Infinity = without end
Takes = the amount of time that has passed until it ended = end
Infinite time = without end
How is the expression “possible to traverse an infinity” explained better or understood better by the expression
“It just takes an infinite amount of time”
Both expressions contain exactly the same contradiction???
Jonathan, you do not need to traverse infinitely many segments. You are using the term infinity as if it were some sort of number. That is a mistake. But this is not the place for a math lesson.
Israel, if infinity were a number, then just as one could say there are infinitely many segments to traverse, one could also say that it takes an infinite amount of time to traverse them. But infinity is not a number, and the whole discussion is based on a mistake.
With God’s help
I didn’t say infinity is a number — where did you find that in my words??
I was only dealing with the definition of the term infinity,
which certainly stands in contradiction to the concept of end, no matter what you apply the two concepts to.
They will always stand in a relation of contradiction to one another, and hence the contradiction.
Let me explain it as I wrote: why can’t you claim that the universe is infinitely old, meaning that it always existed, in order to remove God from the equation as a necessary cause?
Still waiting for an answer.
I answered that in the above-mentioned book. There is no connection at all between this question and the paradoxes of infinity. It is a completely different question. My answer, very briefly: the universe is simply not the kind of thing whose existence is necessary or that is its own cause. Therefore it is not reasonable that it always existed. Beyond that, today physics knows about the Big Bang.
Where can one get your books, and especially The First Existent?
And is there any possibility of more serious personal consultation and conversation, or are you only on the site and don’t speak outside the site?
For the books: 052-3322444 (Dafna)
For a meeting: 052-3320543
Before I respond, is it Rabbi Michael Abraham himself answering, or other members of the site team? Just curious.
Right, but with an infinite duration of existence, He still should not have been able to reach the moment of creation.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the following logical use seems completely clean:
It is impossible to traverse an infinity.
God is eternal-infinite.
God existed “before” the Big Bang.
God would have had to exist for an infinity in order to cause the Big Bang.
Conclusion: God does not exist / cannot be responsible for the Big Bang (or for “creation”).
Another question: according to what I understood from Wikipedia, you became religious.
What caused you to believe in God (if you were an atheist before), and what caused you to believe in Judaism.