Has the Universe Always Existed? (Aquinas 101)

Has the universe always existed? Or, can we prove that it had a beginning? Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P., a Dominican friar from the Province of St. Joseph, breaks down St. Thomas Aquinas on the eternity of the world.

Aquinas on the Eternity of the World (Aquinas 101) - Fr. Thomas Davenport, O.P.


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Aquinas 101 is a project of the Thomistic Institute that seeks to promote Catholic truth through short, engaging video lessons. You can browse earlier videos at your own pace or enroll in one of our Aquinas 101 email courses on St. Thomas Aquinas and his masterwork, the Summa Theologiae. In these courses, you'll learn from expert scientists, philosophers, and theologians—including Dominican friars from the Province of St. Joseph.

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This video was made possible through the support of grant #61944 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

[RealAtheology]

Fantastic video. Thank you for putting this together. It's interesting in that many sophisticated Atheist Philosophers such as J.L. Mackie, J.H. Sobel, Alex Malpass, and others actually utilize some of Aquinas' reasoning when it comes to arguing against Kalam-style Cosmological Arguments that argue for the necessary finitude for the past.

[Bullcutter]

Very interesting. I find the academic language intellectually very satisfying. Thank you for posting.

[Robinson]

" It matters what you think" ain't that the truth! Great punchline, and thanks for a nice video

[JohnR.T.B.]

I believe Thomas Aquinas says that God has instant access to every moment of creation, therefore everything is always available for God in his eternal existence as part of his omnipresent powers, but God has subjected us to a frame of time where we are limited to be or to live, wherever we are, presently. It's fair to say that the universe has always existed in God's perspective, but not in our perspectives as created beings. But that's my take on it presently.
Thanks Fr. Thomas!

[spacecoastz]

Trusting in Scripture is not a "flawed and hasty defense of the faith". It is faith.

[annakareninacamara]

This got me "the infinite Hotel with infinite rooms" flashbacks. I love it.

[acohan]

As a former atheist convert, these videos offer a all to uncommon intellectual treatment of our faith. . . ( albeit with a strong Thomistic slant. . . )

[anthonyclegg]

I can't get my head round the universe had no beginning.

[frank-uuqi]

So, does the Church teach that the world was created in time? Aquinas is arguing that it's not contradictory to think that it existed eternally and was created, but I don't see anything in the video or texts where he supports the teaching (if it is the teaching) that it was made in time. Thank you.

[johnwake]

Yes, Aquinas's reasoning does indeed help to come to richer understanding of God.

[SeaJay_Oceans]

Is the Cosmos, (all that is), inside the Mind of God ? Is the Universe a dream in the Mind of God ?

[brettmarshall]

So faith is way to rationalize weight around logic?

[PaulRezaei]

Wait, I thought Aristotle argued for the exact opposite of the eternity of the world 🤔. My understanding is that Aristotle believed there could not be an infinite chain of causes, so there needed to be an uncaused causer or prime mover that set everything into motion.

[epicon]

Relatively short time ago humans didn't know there was anything beyond earth, less than 450 years ago we found out we are going around the sun but knew little to nothing of what's beyond.

Now we can see as far as the observable universe allows us to see, but we'll never know what's beyond the point where the universe is expanding so fast it's light will never reach us, so that in mind we know just as little about the universe as the people who didn't know there were other planets in the sky because we can't see any further. Our universe could be trillions of times larger than what we think and there could be an infinite amount of other universes out there.

[brackguthrie]

So does God exist outside the universe? If so, what is the place where God exists. Both as the non-corporeal Father and Holy Spirit and as the Son in his glorified body?

[eamonreidy]

Have to wonder had Aquinas lived a few decades longer, could he have turned to the maths coming from the Islamic world and the republished works of the ancients and pushed mathematics forward a century or two

[tomdooley]

We are as on the Sharp rage of a knife, between two eternitees.
Marcus Aurelius.
( But I follow Saint Thomas Aquinas)

Big bang theory .
GOD said it, and " BANG" !!!
It happened.

[lunar-ixvu]

I wish these videos weren’t so scripted. Someone seemingly rushing through a teleprompter is not as receivable as someone who is speaking from their own understanding and heart, pausing to comment on the examples and key points given.

[Pienotto]

Is time even real? Is it something? If it is not (and we have many evidence about the fact that it has a relational, not substantial nature), the idea that there was "a beginnig" is just meaningless, as it is to say that the universe is eternal. When we say that the universe is not eternal and it's created, what we are really saying is that it's not necessary, it's not ontologically foundamental, it needs a ground. We are not really saying that time itself is finite, indeed an atemporal God could have created a universe infinitely extended in time as well in space. We don't know if God has done this, I think not because the idea of an infinite time is full of undesiderable consequences, but the revelation says nothing about this understanding of time, it just says that God is the ground of the universe, it doesn't say that God created a universe with a finite past or a finite extension in space. Moreover, the creation in the Bible is indeed the beginnig of history, not necessarily the beginnig of time itself, even the word "bara" doesn't necessarily point to a creation ex nihilo (and indeed it's not true that at the moment of the creation there was nothing, there were angels for exemple, and "Elohim" indeed is a word used for both God and angels, as you can see in the LXX translation). For what concerns modern science, it is still possible to imagine that the inflationary epoch was preceded by an eternal non-inflatiomary epoch. If this is a grand unification epoch, probably is not true, but anyway we don't know, it's a possibility.

[caiomateus]

The problem with Thomas' answer to the first argument for the finitude of the past is that the problematic sense of "crossing over infinity" does not involve intermediate terms. Traversing an infinite involves only the successive formation of infinite events, one after the other (which does not require even a single subject that remains throughout the entire change). Even if infinity were traversed by someone between one point and another, the problem would be exactly the same. And it is not enough to be able to traverse every part of the entire series, as this does not guarantee the traversability of the series as a whole (to say otherwise would be falling into the fallacy of composition).
About the infinite in calculus, it is about the potential infinity, it deals with the notion of ideal limits and not with infinitesimals. That is, it is not a number, but an indeterminately large collection. This is certainly not the case with the past, which is a determinate whole (proof of this is that if we supposed, through mental fiction, that a new object arose every moment of the eternal past, we would have an actual infinite of objects. But if this assumption were made with the eternal future, we would not reach the same conclusion, as there would only be a finite amount of objects at any one time).

As for the second argument, the problem with the objection lies in the assumption that the type of divine action undertaken is defined from God's perspective. After all, from the creatures perspective, each is really "caused now", but it cannot be caused to exist as it existed before. It must be caused to remain in existence, which is not creation but conservation. This distinction must exist, albeit by analogy, in the divine being who in fact has no distinction at all.
But beyond that, there is the big problem of saying that God can create something without Him changing and therefore implying a transition between states. This would only be possible if He were not actually engaged with the creature, which would be incomprehensible (causality is necessarily a real relationship on the part of the two terms, and there is no intelligibility in denying this).