Augustine on creation and Aquinas on the existence of God.

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           Kimbel Farwell

Phil 20B

1/5/2010

Augustine

In Augustine’s writing, The Confessions, he philosophically attempts to answer the problems that arise within religion, specifically in regards to Judeo Christian beliefs, pertaining to God, time, and creation. Augustine first addresses the belief that God created everything. He tries to provide a coherent explanation for his claim that God’s ex-nihilo (“out of nothing”) creation of the Earth is a sound statement, given that God created everything, and with it time. Thus, the notion of time never existed before its very point of creation.

        However, given that God created everything, and thus the universe, what was God doing before the universe’s creation that caused him to decide to create it or that it was now necessary as opposed to before. Furthermore, if God even had to make the decision whether or not the universe’s existence was necessary, making him arbitrary, wouldn’t that inherently falsify the claim that God is a perfect being (omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent) and thus is immutable. Augustine objects this claim by stating that God is eternal, in that he is timeless, and so exists outside the realm of time. He is therefore not bound (or defined) by any temporal concept. So, when faced with the problem of what God was doing before he created the universe, Augustine simply claims it is an illogical question. He justifies that if one accepts the belief that God is eternal and created everything, than one can’t logically ask what God was doing at a certain point before the creation of time itself, as it was not yet in existence.  

        Augustine continues the debate on time, by calling its very existence into question. Augustine questions the commonly accepted notion of time by providing his theory of “presentism,” which basically reduces time into only the present tense. Augustine claims that when people talk in terms of the past, present, and future they’re only really talking about various forms of the present. Augustine tries to explain the various complications that arise when trying to determine the duration of present time. It is difficult to compare two different measurements of time if each period of “present” time given can be reduced into a minute instance of time that quickly disappears. So, one cannot measure something that has happened, because once it is in the past, it no longer exists.

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        Augustine accepts that their appears to be an irrational aspect of presentism, in that by accepting the present as the only form of time, one would then seemingly have to agree that it wouldn’t make sense to refer to any moment of time occurring in either the past or the future. Augustine rationalizes any reference to the past, by defining it as the minds ability to recall imprinted memories of images left in the mind through the medium of one’s senses. Similarly, the foreseeing of future events is merely the act of prediction based off of things that were already ...

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