Was God Creator before Creation?

[Afterthought]

This is in the context of divine simplicity/God being pure act/immutability. I might be asking this question incorrectly; I have heard it brought up in an attempt to weaken divine simplicity or immutability. If God did not move from potentially a Creator to actually a Creator (since God is pure act), then does that mean God must have eternally been Creator? If so, what does that mean/how is that the case? The same question could be asked of God being Redeemer and Lord.

 

[timfost]

The ability to create does not mean He was eternally Creator, just as Christ was not eternally dead.

Unfortunately, John Gill uses a similar argument is arguing eternal justification (the idea that we were not justified in time by the means of faith, but in eternity in the mind of God). His argument uses the phrasing "imminent act" to argue that it was an eternal act.

It does not compute...

 

[MW]

If God did not move from potentially a Creator to actually a Creator (since God is pure act), then does that mean God must have eternally been Creator?

It could only entail this if creation was an essential attribute of God, which it is not. It is a free act of His will which has been accomplished for the manifestation of His goodness, wisdom, and power. The difference between essential glory and manifestative glory is quite important to understanding how God relates to creation. If His essential glory were immanently affected by the creation it would mean that sin actually lessens the glory of God and righteousness adds to it. This would be tantamount to saying that God is in process with the creation.

Having said that, it is important to note that there is an essential "relation" in God that is pure act with no potentiality, which is nothing other than the Three in Unity relating to each other according to personal properties. It is this personal and relational God which creates personally and relationally, as we clearly see in Genesis One. So there is an essential and eternal act which underlies the free act of creation and constitutes it a real manifestation of God's glory.

 

[Afterthought]

The ability to create does not mean He was eternally Creator, just as Christ was not eternally dead.

The tricky thing though is that this seems to put God in a state of "potentially Creator."

It could only entail this if creation was an essential attribute of God, which it is not. It is a free act of His will which has been accomplished for the manifestation of His goodness, wisdom, and power.

Another way that some attack simplicity/immutability is, instead of saying that a new relation was established by creation to make God Creator, that the doctrine of simplicity contradicts the freedom of God in creating the world. I think below is a sample of the sort of argumentation? (from around p.195 here: http://philpapers.org/archive/MULSIA-2.pdf) A possible reply to the argument might then be that God was eternally Creator?

"Could God have created a different universe instead of this one? The answer seems to be ‘yes,’ if God is free. If God did not create a different universe, He has unactualized potential. Divine simplicity should push one to say that God did create another universe. In fact, simplicity should push one to say that God created an infinite number of universes.55 Otherwise God would not be pure act. Of course, it should be noted that God cannot create any universe that is on the whole more evil than good for that would conflict with who God is. Creating a universe where evil has the ultimate say is not compossible with a perfectly good God.

Yet even with these qualifications there is still a problem. God cannot create a world that contains our universe and another universe that contains my individual essence. My individual essence exists in this universe, so it cannot be instantiated in another universe in the actual world. He could create another universe with an essence similar to mine, but it will not be my individual essence. If there is a possible universe, different from this one, that contains my individual essence, God cannot actualize it since He has already actualized this one. As such, God has unactualized potential. There is a universe He might have created.

There is a deeper problem. Could God have refrained from creating the universe? If God is free then it seems that the answer is obviously ‘yes.’56 He could have existed alone. Yet, God did create the universe. If there is a possible world in which God exists alone, God is not simple. He eternally has unactualized potential for He cannot undo His act of creation. He could cease to sustain the universe in existence, but that would not undo His act of creating. One could avoid this problem by allowing for a modal collapse. One could say that everything is absolutely necessary. Necessarily, there is only one possible world—this world. Necessarily, God must exist with creation. There is no other possibility. God must create the universe that we inhabit, and everything must occur exactly as it in fact does. There is no such thing as contingency when one allows a modal collapse."

 

[Afterthought]

What about God's will and decree being eternal? Does this then make God's act of creating an eternal act (as it is an act of God), and so God is eternally Creator?

 

[MW]

As such, God has unactualized potential.

You have made a leap in assuming this universe is "essential" to God. Until you establish that it is essential all the potentialities in all the potential universes is not going to prove the potentiality is IN SE, i.e., in God Himself.

 

[MW]

What about God's will and decree being eternal? Does this then make God's act of creating an eternal act (as it is an act of God), and so God is eternally Creator?

No, because it is a free act of His will. The only thing that is essential is His own Being. As this is an all-sufficiency in and of itself, it needs no other thing; everything "ad extra" is contingent on His will.

Be careful when dealing with these kinds of arguments that the "dependence" of the creature is not surreptitiously made a condition of the divine essence.

 

[Afterthought]

Thank you. I will need to think about this before replying with further questions if I have them.

However, I can say that I found this lecture on Divine eternity, which promotes the idea that God is eternally creator in order to avoid having a change in God after creation, around the 60 minute mark (especially around 65, which has a quotation from Bavinck): http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=1116151622117

I wonder if this is the same sort of thing we've been discussing in this thread, or if I have misunderstood what was said in the lecture? If I have misunderstood, I would certainly appreciate further explanation, especially as it relates to this thread.

 

[MW]

I wonder if this is the same sort of thing we've been discussing in this thread, or if I have misunderstood what was said in the lecture? If I have misunderstood, I would certainly appreciate further explanation, especially as it relates to this thread.

I have that series on my to-listen list, but I don't have time to listen to a long lecture right now (especially being immersed in the Hebrew text at the moment, and jumping from philosophy to Hebrew is not an easy transition). If you could summarise or make a quotation, that would simplify discussion.

 

[earl40]

Also another way to look at God is that the divine essence is outside of time, and thus any thought that He changed in that essence when He created would be improper. I like to think God, in the divine nature, is and always will be the same before and after He created time.

 

[Afterthought]

If you could summarise or make a quotation, that would simplify discussion.

I found the lectures overall helpful. I will summarize by quotations. The stuff I skip in "..."'s are just stutters, repetition, things that only make sense while speaking, e.g., "Does this make sense? See what I'm saying?" I have put in brackets [inaudible] when I could not make out a word from the audio, and I put in brackets the remainder of the quotation from Bavinck at the end, since Dolezal stops quoting just before the brackets begin. To make the transcript easier to read, I bolded Dolezal's quotations of Bavinck and Turretin (Turretin's quotation is from 5.1.12).

In Dolezal's words, he is responding to the claim that (what follows is a transcription from the lecture), "God cannot create or bring about temporal effects without ontologically participating in the temporality of his creation. Whether that means dumping his eternity, the way Craig thinks of it, or as never having even been eternal, the way Wolterstorff thinks of it, or as augmenting his eternity, the way Lister, Frame, and Oliphint think of it--all of them agree that creation is an insuperable problem. God as eternal cannot be the Creator because Creator has to be something new in God."


In response to this claim, Dolezal continues on by saying (another transcription from the lecture), "If Creator is something temporal that God becomes, it seems to follow that his actions in and towards the world as Creator are not properly actions of God as divine... If Creator is part of the covenantal package or the new temporal properties, well then, Creatorhood itself is now not actually identical with the divinity of God. This is the strange implication. This means the Creatorhood itself begins to be. In other words, Creatorhood itself is finite, temporal, mutable...creature. Now the Creatorhood of God is a creaturely feature of God.... A Creatorhood that begins to be cannot be regarded as properly an aspect of God's divinity as such....

Does God create eternally? I want to answer: yes. For the eternalist, God's activity toward the world as its Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer cannot be divorced from what he is in and of himself. Bavnick actually argues that God cannot have a sort of intermmediary set of properties, what Lister calls God's acting in time and what Oliphint calls covenantal properties. Bavnick says there can't be something that mediates between God and the world. That's neoplatonism. That's a demiurge. Bavnick says this, "It is God who posits the creature, eternity which posits time, immensity which posits space, being which posits becoming, immutability which posits change." And then, this is Bavnick's language. "There is nothing intermediate between these two classes of categories." There is no intermediating set of properties that God has to sort of take on in order to pull off his relationship to the world. That's what we're being offered by Frame and by Lister and by Oliphint.

We also, secondly, would say that while we name God as Creator from the effects of Creation, the act of Creation itself is not temporal. In other words, God didn't go to bed early the night before Creation because tomorrow was a big day. You see what I'm saying? It's nothing like that. There's not God saying, "Tomorrow I become...what I never was: Creator."

So how is God eternally Creator? The reason we say that God is eternally Creator is because God's act of creation is really nothing other than his act of willing to create. God's act of Creation just is his decree to create. So in a human planner, let's say I'm building a house, I might first plan or decree...purpose to build a house...but there's a real distinction between my planning or my willing to build a house, and my actually getting out there and swinging the hammer and driving in the nails. The actual building follows the intention. What we're saying is, that for God, the intention is the act of building. My will to create needs to be supplemented by something in addition to my will. I could wish all day long to build a house but until I actually get out there and start using my motor faculties and swinging hammers and driving nails, my will is just going to be an unrealized dream. See what I'm saying? But with God, his will is not just a plan that then requires some other action in addition to his will in order to accomplish the plan. We are saying that God's will is itself the effective act of creation. God creates sheerly by willing it. That's the act of Creation, not something God began to do after for a long time he didn't do it.

Turretin says that, "In creating, no new will enters into him, but only a new external work proceeds from his efficacious and omnipotent will." That is to say, my will is not efficacious and omnipotent. I can plan and...a lot of my plans never do come to fruition because it takes a little more than planning for me to pull off the plan. But for God, God does not need to supplement his planning with some subsequent activity in order to pull it off. The planning, the purposing, just is the act of creating, and insofar as God eternally purposes and wills the world, he is as such eternally, actively the agent of Creation, and therefore, eternally Creator.

Turretin goes on, "By the same practical volition"--practical volition means not hypothetical, but actually, working volition--"which he had from eternity, he created the world in time--produced it actually in the beginning of time." But that act in God was not something God began to do whereas before he didn't. It was nothing but the eternal act of his will. The question then is, does God create the world as eternal, or does he need to take on a temporal package of actuality in order to pull off Creation and Redemption and relate to [inaudible]....

I close with the words of Bavinck. Bavinck says, "On the one hand, it is certain that God is the eternal one. In him there is neither past nor future, neither becoming nor change. All that he is, is eternal:"--Frame and Lister and Oliphint, do not believe that--"his thought, his will, his decree. Eternal in him is the idea of the world that he thinks and utters in the sun. Eternal in him is also the decision to create the world. Eternal in him is the will that created the world in time. Eternal is also the act of creating as an act of God:"--because that's nothing but the act of the will--"an action both internal and imminent."--that is to say, in God. Now, Bavinck says this, "For God did not become Creator, so that first for a long time he did not create, and then afterward, he did create. Rather, he is the eternal creator. And as Creator he was the eternal one. And as the eternal one he created. The creation therefore brought about no change in God[; it did not emanate from him and is no part of his being. He is unchangeably the same eternal God.]" God didn't begin to be what he wasn't. That which he created began to be, but his creating did not begin."

 

[MW]

To make the transcript easier to read, I bolded Dolezal's quotations of Bavinck and Turretin (Turretin's quotation is from 5.1.12).

Thankyou for doing the leg-work. Turretin's third question, sections 11ff., denying the eternity of creation and the possibility of it, is also relevant. I think difficulty of comprehension will emerge simply by trying to find a meeting point between time and eternity, a little like seeing the ocean and the skyline in the distance; you can view a point from a distance but if you come closer the point keeps moving away from you. This is especially the case with the decree and its execution, where eternity and time are so closely connected together in the eternal Will.

On an "eternal Creator," the ambiguity in the words do not help to give a precise concept. The Creator is eternal, and the eternal is the Creator, but at no point are you saying he is an eternal Creator in the full sense of the term.

Turretin says a number of helpful things in Q. 3, without directly addressing this issue. First, sect. 11, God is not an eternal agent in this sense because he began to act out of himself in time. He then relates this to purus actus. Then, sect. 12, a sufficient cause from eternity is affirmed, but an eternity in action is denied. Sect. 13, It is denied God changed from potency to act because He effects things by volition. Sects. 14, 15, Defect of power in the creature explains the change from potency to actuality. It is not in God, but in the things made.

These points have a bearing on the question. Having given it some thought I think the independence of the Creator and the dependence of the creature has to be clearly kept in view. It is common for the work of creation to be seen as an act of emanation from a metaphysical point of view, and that is where we need the clear revelation of creation ex nihilo to guide our thoughts.

 

[Justified]

Eleanore Stump deals with this exact issue in her article she cowrote on divine simplicity. If you can get a hold of it, I recommend you read it: http://philpapers.org/rec/STUAS-2

 

[Afterthought]

Thanks! I shall read through those sections of Turretin when I get a chance.

Eleanore Stump deals with this exact issue in her article she cowrote on divine simplicity.

Downloaded! Having access to a large university library is very nice.

 

[Afterthought]

My apologies for taking so long to get back to this; I am very busy (Likely, I won't get to the 30 page essay Evan posted until some time later).

I suppose we would say then that God was not eternally in action creating the world. But God's eternal purpose was to create the world (with time, because it could not be done otherwise) and create the world at the "moment" that he did? Hence, although God's will is his action, his will to create in its totality was to keep that will internal until the "moment" God saw fit to make that action external? So I guess the key here is the difference between God's internal act and God's external act, which means God is Creator, Lord, Redeemer, etc., by virtue of an external relation, rather than something internal to God. I guess those seeing God needing to be Creator from eternity (i.e., an agent eternally in action) in order to remain pure act view "Creator" as an internal change to God, which is perhaps a positing of a human psychology back onto God? (And I guess, this is what you said from the beginning--that creation is not an essential attribute of God).

I hope my thoughts are coherent enough to reply to. Doctrine of God can be tricky stuff.

 

[MW]

I hope my thoughts are coherent enough to reply to.

Yes; you seem to be on top of it. We are viewing what God did from time and space. We have a tendency to see God as acting with our own limitations, and so we tend to see the beginning of creation as a movement from one temporality to another. Seeing time itself as a creature is necessary. It is not that God had this "moment" of creation in view, as if His eternity was somehow divided between non-moment and moment. The creation itself as a moment was a part of its constitution as something different from God and dependent on God.