@voiceindarkness,
In the beginning, there was nothing.
But that’s not true either. There was one ‘thing’ -- a pinpoint of concentrated energy. It had ‘always’ been, but the word ‘always’ is also meaningless in the absence of time. (The concept of eternity is every bit as difficult for the mind to grasp as the concept of nothing.) Then -- for lack of a better word -- it ‘decided’ to become ‘something.’ And, thus, the Big Bang, which is not an event that occurred some billions of earth-years ago but is happening right now.
Now there was motion, therefore there was also space (there can be no motion of anything outside of a space to move in) and time began. But our concept of ‘time’ is also a slippery eel of a notion. We speak of ‘years’ as though this was a meaningful measure in general. It is meaningful only on this planet. We speak of ‘years’ when what we mean is ‘earth years.’ A year on Jupiter, say, or on Venus is something entirely different than an earth year. It is as meaningless to speak of ‘years’ when considering the ‘age’ of the universe as it is to speak of ‘days’ when taking the Biblical view of the so-called Creation.
In the final analysis, nothing was ‘created.’ It always was. It always will be. It simply changed form.
Spinoza probably said it best when he defined God as a causa sui whose very essence involves existence and whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing. For Spinoza, God simply is in much the same way that ‘nothing’ is not.
Poor Baruch Spinoza. He was formally cursed and exiled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam where he had come of age. He was, after all, a heretic. Later on he was in difficulties with the Church and most of his writings were not published during his own lifetime. He was accused of being an atheist although he never claimed to be one. Theologically Spinoza was a few centuries ahead of his time. He uses the words ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ virtually interchangeably. For Spinoza, there can be no Creator which is separate from his creation. God (or Nature, if you will) is self-creating and eternal. Causa sui, a cause of itself.
This almost echoes the Islamic dictum that God ‘does not beget and is not begotten.’ (Which, of course, makes nonsense of the notion that God somehow got Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, pregnant! But that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Time is an extremely subjective yardstick.
God created the world in six days. That can be an absolutely true statement, depending on your definitions of ‘God’ and of ‘day.’ (I doubt, however, that this deity ‘rested’ on the seventh day. A cosmic force needs no rest and, as I already pointed out, the work is continuing. All is motion, all is flux.)
