Related Videos: Five Ways to Prove God Exists: ua-cam.com/video/42Eg6UUBqqo/v-deo.html Yes, There is A Theory of Everything: ua-cam.com/video/rnzqm09adgM/v-deo.html
Catholics believe God is "a unity of three [persons]," which is what the word "trinity" means. So, does the Bible prove that the trinity exists? Not a chance! The God of the Bible has a personal name, which is Yahweh. As he said to Moses: "You are to tell the Israelites, "Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you." This is my name for all time." (Ex. 3:15) Now, is the God of the Bible a trinity? Not according to Catholic theologian Edmund Fortman, who said in his book, "The Triune God": "[The Old Testamemt] tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we take the New Testament writers together they tell us there is only one God, the creator and lord of the universe, who is the Father of Jesus." Clearly, the God of the Bible is Jesus' Father. As Jesus himself said to his apostles through Mary: "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' (John 20:17) So, can Catholics prove from the Bible that a triune deity exists? Absolutely not!!
@@salomonkalou9002 You seem not to have read the Bible at all if you disagree with what I have already said. That explains why you would leave a short comment and then run away. Come back when you have something meaningful to say.
@@salomonkalou9002 As I said before, come back when you have something meaningful to say. I have already proved from the Bible that God is not a trinity. If you disagree, then, prove me wrong. Don't say something silly like, "You seem to have not read Ps. 110:1 and Matt. 28:19," neither of which says or even implies that God is "a unity of three [persons]," which is what the word "trinity" means.
@@salomonkalou9002 Where at Matt. 28:19 does it say or even imply that God is "a unity of three persons," which is what the word "trinity" means? Do you even know what the trinity doctrine says? Apparently not. BTW, you're a pretty ignorant person who makes claims he can't prove. I've asked you multiple times where Matt. 28:19 says or implies that God is a trinity. Instead of answering the question, all you say is, 'Read it again."
This is exactly why I love the Church. It is backed by highly sophisticated philosophical and logical grounds, which are rarely seen in some fundamentalist denominations. I am lucky enough to know this channel. Keep up the good work!
I really like the fact that theists say that their scripture is absolute but in reality the interpretation of their scripture changes in almost every generation. Like in the beginning of this video ( pun intended ) the father mentions the big bang Cosmology when in fact the big bang Cosmology is incompatible with the genesis account of creation allegedly written by the same god who created the universe that we live in Genesis:1 1 In the beginning, God[a] created the heavens and the earth 14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs to mark seasons, days, and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16 God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the earth, 18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good.
@@celestialsatheist1535i think i saw this comment before Interpretation cannot change in Catholicism. It's irrevocable. That alone would disprove your post lol. But for what it's worth, the Church has made no infallible interpretation on it, except on the person of Adam being historical, and the narration referring to an actual event.
@@celestialsatheist1535 here you go. ua-cam.com/video/d2Ik1ea8yUI/v-deo.html I am not sure if you have heard, but the bible was written in a time before the scientific method even came about. I'm sure no one told you that for that reason, it was not written with the intent to be a science text book. In other words how you believe the world was initially made is irrelevant to the salvation of our soul and the truth of God's existence. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't know that catholics don't read or interpret everything in the bible literally. The Truths and wisdoms expressed in the bible are told in ways that people of the times it written in would understand. They are read and interpreted within that context as much as we have available to know and universal human nature truths. Since our human nature doesn't really change (our tendencies) it can still teach some lessons today. The bigger context as a whole is read and viewed as salvation history. Hope you are willing to look into what that actually means. I would encourage you to maybe check out a bible study called From Genesis to Jesus made by Scott Hahn and St. paul center. It may help. Maybe not. Also, feel free to call in to Catholic Answers and ask questions and even debate them if you want they are much more well formed than most of us here. Best Wishes to you in your search for truth.
@@celestialsatheist1535except... It's not true. Even the Church Fathers such as Augustine - a long time before modern cosmology - knew that the Genesis week of Creation wasn't necessarily meant to be taken literally. If you want to go for a more literalistic approach where six days can be compatible with modern science, maybe you can try the writings of Jewish physicist Gerald L. Schroeder, where he applies General Relativity to the Six Days of Creation, saying that God created over six literal 24-hour days that count as 14 billion years in our timeframe. Just some food for thought.
Aquinas 101 production team, the video and lighting of Fr. Legge looks excellent!! Looks like you learned a couple of new tricks in the animation as well. Keep up the good work.
I groan when a profound topic, dealing with the nature of God, creation, time, and ontology receives the most superficial comment imaginable: father looks good, great lighting.
@@marbonifacde it’s important as well. No point in trying to educate people if they can’t hear you for poor audio quality or not understand you for bad illustrations.
Absolutely astonishing work! In trying to meditate and think about God’s creation, I had forgotten that Time itself is a creation. Thank you for your channel and sharing the wisdom of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who in my mind might very well be the smartest man to ever put pen to paper. May God bless you and the Virgin Mary protect you!
Father Legge, I am so grateful for your work in providing these videos but even more for your stewardship of the Dominican House of Studies. The environment provided for those who study there is so fundamental in the formation of these gifted individuals. Listening to these bright, talented, dedicated men and women uplifts and affirms my faith and trust in God, His Church, and our ability to know Him.
I stumbled across this video about a month ago, and put it on my Watch Later list. I am so glad I finally did watch it. What an amazing explanation! Time to browse the channel for more videos on extremely important topics!
Many claim philosophy has no utility. But everything is based on it. Am glad TI countering the prevalent culture of relativism and liberalism thru this going back to basic videos. Bless you more TI….❤from the Phils
I prefer St. Augustine's famous formulation: "Everlasting God IN WHOM we live and breathe and have our being" [emphasis added] I believe the universe - Creation, us - exists in the mind of God. Personally, I think this resolves many theological, ethical, philosophical and even scientific dilemmas. God is both Creator and Sustainer. God will be Judge at the end of time.
This is TRULY one of the best explanation/formulation I have ever heard on this topic… thank you so much for sharing this… it is an eye-opener for me… really. A shame our religion teacher couldn’t explain it so well 40 years ago…😞 I need to dig deeper into this and think/meditate… or just be silent and listen for god. Good night everyone, wishing you a blessed new day tomorrow, and stay healthy! Best wishes❤️ Steven
Loved this video. Because I was thinking of this topic today, that we in modern times tend to....anthropromorphis God, if that’s the right term. Not that God isn’t a person in a sense, he’s more of a person then anyone on earth, but we tend to simplify him as an old man in the sky. We seem to have forgotten how complex he truly is.
I believe to avoid these misleading concepts we must use apophatic theology (negative theology) terms. Positive statements (cataphatic theology) can only be used as analogous, similar but never to be understood at the same level of analysis as that of the created things, due to our inadequacy to grasp divine things we must speak negatively. Positive terms makes us feel like we understand God in a way, but in the end if we lack the proper virtues we may fall into the trap of "caging" God in human concepts, making idols and false gods in the process.
Aprende, if we lack the proper virtues, however we speak of God, we will entrap ourselves. Put another way, properly speaking of God depends more on our growing in love than on our growing in knowledge which is certainly also required. Truth proceeds from love, truth being divine love. Thanks for your provocative insight.
@@PhilMatous This is true, but we can recognize that positively speaking of God leads to more misunderstandings, because we push our finite understanding of things to the unboundedness of God. We only concieve things as finite, terms like "infinite" for example, can never be fully grasp by us. So to speak about the Love of God, saying that "is not" finite helps us more than just saying he "does" loves you, since we may confuse our finite and bounded love with God's love. Positive theology needs a bunch of apophatic premises to work properly; that's why we often find Thomists say things like we are "not to" understand God's. (insert attribute) in order to make it palatable.
@@tryhardf844 Saint Thomas wasn't a Thomist he was a lover and a seeker of God, that's why he became a Saint, not because he wrote the Summa Theologie. If we want to seek God we won't be trapped into one line of seeing and describing him, we will be humble servants open to him in every single way possible.
What do you mean? 🙂 Let me ask then and try to correct me according to your way. As I've understood there are two (2) things here, 1] God is holding the universe in place or keeping it on it's intended course. 2] God is holding the universe against NOTHINGNESS, because if not, NOTHINGNESS would swallow everything. - as we also know about motion, things at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by force and things in motion will remain motion if acted upon, as well. So what's keeping things in motion is not any invisble hand but because it has always been that way it's just that no force has acted upon it that would change it's course. So, I don't understand what it means by holding them in place. What's holding them in place is the presence of equal opposing forces, or absence of forces. All these natural way to keep things moving or to keep them in their trajectory need no God. - As he said, absolute nothing can't be thought about, it cannot exist. So when it's said god is holding the universe from NOTHINGNESS tha's a self-reflecting act. When you think of nothing since it does not exist it relfects back to the universe itself. There's no Nothing that would SWALLOW the universe. The Universe is all there is.
Things are created in time and in the nature of our creation we are inside the parameters of time , because matter can’t exist out of time. Since God is not bound to or of time ( the instance of matter-time) he is by potency omnipresent, He is God.
*_Brilliant!_* And I'm only halfway through the video. God's act of creation is NOT in the past, but perpendicular to the timeline; just as His cause is from the side instead of behind the past. The Buddhists also have a good handle on the separation of "creaturely" vs. the "divine." The Bible was written in the language of spirit; not human languages. Yet, too many people read only the *_ink_* and miss the *_spirit._* (2 Cor. 3:3-8)
Everything exists here and now. Everything really is the same moment. There is only one moment in creation. And what you call diferent moments, is really the same moment from diferent points of view.
My brother once told me he thought God must be something like a 17th dimension or something. (I still don’t know if he was just trying to rile me up or if he really believed that). I knew he was wrong, obviously, but didn’t know how to respond. But now I can see an answer to his idea….His God is too small. Each dimension: length, height, width and time are elements of creation. If there are some higher dimensions that we are unaware of then even those would simply be additional “creatures”, not the Creator. Now if only I had thought of that thirty years ago when he said that comment…
God cannot "windup the universe and let it be" because this would remove his love from the universe. God is love. God created ... loved ... the universe into being. By removing his love, God would deny himself. And God cannot deny himself.
So basically the difference between deism and theism. Although it is important to highlight _ex nihilo_ because modern materialists always strawman a counterargument to this by insisting something can come from nothing, when that is not at all possible. Hence, Fr. Dominic explains, yes, even gravity is creatio ex nihilo.
One might start to question a tradition because of how much it leans on one man from the middle ages. I personally prefer the theology of many early church fathers Would Abraham be able to recognize this God of first causes?
It is a bit more complicated than that. St. Thomas pulled together the work of earlier theologians in his Summa. In that sense, his achievement was like Euclid's in geometry, creating a synthesis of prior works. Most of these books had been written against prevailing heresies at the writer's time. The result was by the 13th century, a student of theology would not know where to begin. The Summa Theologia solved that. In the process, Aquinas introduced some new language and concepts, drawing on Aristotle and others available in his time.
Wonderful. God is present in all things at all times and His power holds all together. His power is out of this world and incomprehensible, He permeates all things.
This is next level... throughout the video, I had to stop it seven to eight times, bcz I had that much ahhaaaa moments.. May God bless Fr Legge n his team... ❤❤❤ Apart from that I loved the new animation tricks which helped to convey the meaning better 😍
Great video! The editing and production was very well done. A question pertaining to the interpretation of God's creative acts: does God's sustaining of the universe and reality entail that he is continually creating? I pose this question because the video states clearly that creation is an ongoing activity of God. I don't believe that sustaining and creating can be used interchangably here. God created in the beginning in six literal days, rested on the seventh day, then sustains reality and the universe while at times acting in what we perceive as miracles.
I have to look into it more but I hear that the actual word used way back then was "ages" or "era". Makes more sense for him as he perceives time completely different than us.
This presentation sounds very similar to how John Owen describes and given his training and knowledge he likely read Aquinas thoroughly. Though carefully reading Scripture will clue one in pretty quickly too. I like to point to God’s answer to Job that Creation is an ongoing activity.
In the book "The Book: The Realm of Time," Dr Zolb explains that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" can be translated "God chose the universe to order," which He does by the introduction of time more specifically the realm of time which is still being unrolled throughout the cosmos and this is why the universe is still expanding as it slowly succumbs to the realm of time; the prison of us all. Time does not create it is the created as St Augustine points out or as Confucius tells it, "'Time is created, to say you don't have the time to do something is the same as saying you won't do it,' homework procrastinators!"
I was just reading Philo of Alexandria's writing about Creation. He is a pretty interesting Jewish writer I am learning about, from the same time of the life of Jesus, and was influential on early Christians and maybe even the New Testament. For instance I was really interested to read today the same thing I have said many times about how we are "in the image of God" as primarily having to do with the soul's powers of intellect and will, that I probably learned from St John of the Cross, is present already in Philo's writing, he says the important way we are in the image of God is not our body (God is spirit) but the higher aspect of the soul, the mind.
Creation is the Holy Spirit, for in the beginning of creation the Spirit of God hovered over the waters and God said "Let there be Light" and there was light. The same Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary and she conceived. Christ Jesus is The Light of the world. From the beginning of creation God the Creator spoke this Cosmos -time space and matter into existence. And in Christ Jesus all things hold together. And "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made_ without Him nothing was made that had been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of people. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it... The True Light that gives light to every Man was coming into the world. He was in the world and though the world was made by Him - the world did not recognize Him. He even came to that which was His own, but his own did Not receive Him. Yet to all who receive Him, to those who believe in His Name, he gave the right to become children of God, children born not of human decision or of husband's will_but born of God. The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His Glory, the Glory of the One and Only, Who came from the Father full of grace and truth.
Interesting material. Thank you! I´m an interfaith UU Christian, and calling myself an empirical theist with Multidisciplinary Philosophy as a basis for Multidisciplinary Theology. While the speaker comfortably discuss God as a higher order cause, the original and necessary one, in terms of Aquinas, I see beyond the merely Thomistic to the need to help raise understanding about spiritual-religious experience, personal effort in spiritual practice, and the human mind, along with emergentism. I´m glad that you Catholics are doing such good work. I look forward to making my own contributions to the dialogue in the spirit of interfaith syncretic Christianity, US-type Civil Rights, UN human rights, and the meaning of Jesus´ legacy in University-based, globalized society in desperate need of sustainability. May Greenpeace type activism inspire us all, as well as Fair Trade and pro-poor Grameen Bank type.
@@elinelcrat8272 That´s you talking, and all you´re really showing is who you are. Still, that´s not saying much at all. It also leaves the real world as bad as it ever was.
"Creation is not an event in time. Rather, time itself is part of creation i.e. time is (always) being created by God." (Paraphrasing). As someone who got sucked into the New Atheist trend (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.) for a while as an adolescent, it always amazes me to see something like this and reflect on how shallow the New Atheists’ understanding of Christianity really was. I heard a thousand times that "even if God created the universe, it’s still necessary to explain what created God, and thus the existence of God has little explanatory power in relation to the existence of the universe" and even thought this was a good argument. But it’s a total strawman. Christians don’t believe that God CREATED the world (past-tense), rather that He is the ontological ground of Creation itself. But seeing as scientistic currents of thought like New Atheism have basically no concept of ontology, it’s not surprising that such errors were made.
@@brunonascimentolima5971 ua-cam.com/video/KYXPIy3MzoM/v-deo.html this video of Bishop Robert Barron critiquing Stephen Hawking's own critique of religion comes to mind. Interestingly enough, my own readings of the atheist philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche each greatly contributed to my disillusionment with new atheism. This is because both of them, though atheist, actually take Christianity seriously and understand something of the Christian worldview. Much of Nietzsche's work in particular is focused on understanding the implications of the "Death of God" which is his metaphor for the decreasing relevance of Christian theology to the modern Western understanding of the world. He understood that Christianity had been the theoretical-ideological foundation of Western society's understanding of itself, the wider world and the human condition for over a millennium and explained how the progressive secularization of Western society was leaving a gaping hole in this understanding that would need to be filled by something else. Once you are exposed to ideas like this it's really hard to be satisfied with new atheism, which pretends like Christianity had merely been 50% childish superstition and 50% precursor to modern secular science. Science has not filled the void Christianity left, and New Atheism thinks otherwise only because it fails to grasp what Christianity actually was/is.
This is one of the reasons I can't believe any religion. All these people claiming to understand an invisible, intangible, unproveable entity who cannot be proven to have ever interacted with the universe. Hogwash.
Similarly to how we come to know aspects of each other by voluntarily divulging personal information to one another. It is better explained by the Apostle Paul: "When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power. "Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom-but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God, which He destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Rather, as it is written: 'No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.' But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit. "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. "The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. 'For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ."--1 Corinthians 2
@@thomasdykstra100 these are all claims you make. I have reason to believe that you exist, because I see what you have written. If godcis speaking to me, it is not nearly as evident.
Aquinas was a genius IMO. Created causality is nothing but another property of creation, it's not the cause of creation. Even if Darwinian evolution were true, it would still be just a descriptive mechanism of how creation looks from left to right, not from inside out. It took quantum physics for us to learn that not only space but time also is quantized and that every moment in time is created from here to the next one. Time doesn't just exist. It is being summoned into existence. If spacetime is a grid, then pure nothingness is the transition from one sector in the grid to its neighbour. Every object that moves through this grid necessarily goes through multiple nothingness-es only to reemerge existing within the neighboring sector. This process requires recreation every time it happens and it happens all the time, as nothing stays still.
This is where Science and Theology will always break up. There are several theories in Science to account for time creation itself (from prior steady state universe) and also energy (as long as there is vacuum there can be potential energy at the Planck Scale)
Sort of. Yes, there is science relating to nothingness only being an average of nothing and not pure nothingness, ( an absolutely amazing scientific discovery! ), but all that means in this context is that there is always matter in existence within space-time. Theories surrounding the dimension of time always involve some prior state, and so just offset the ultimate question by one degree. Where Science and Theology definitely will always break up is where there is no proof or substantial, measurable evidence, because then it is no longer science by definition but is, again by definition, mysticism. In my own view, Theology is highly over rated and pretty much futile as it attempts to describe the ineffable. Science, on the other hand, can only know the knowable and can only describe what is measurable, and so is just as inept as theology when it comes to speaking of God. Philosophy and mysticism seem a better approach, in that they speak generally in metaphor and are constantly flexible in that they remain always in the business of pondering mystery and what ultimately cannot be fully understood.
This is exactly why I ended up as a Catholic and not a Protestant (although I knew that after 2 weeks when I came to faith in Christ), I was also fascinated by Orthodoxy, but I did not find the clarity and unity I found in Catholicism (not the Novus Ordo Church) with Sola Scriptura you simply discard all the philosophical treasures of Historical Christianity. The faith goes beyond scripture, The Logos is also logic and philosophy, it's the full incarnated wisdom of God.
You would do best to set all else beneath the instruction of the Holy Spirit: "When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power. "Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom-but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God, which He destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Rather, as it is written: 'No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.' But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit. "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. "The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. 'For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?' But we have the mind of Christ."
Excellent explanation. A being within time and space trying to conceive of the reality of a being outside of time and space is like the 2 dimensional beings of Flatland thinking they "see" a 3-D object, when in actuality they are only grasping the smallest fragment of it that can enter their sensory perception. When you reflect on Biblical excerpts like "how high are my ways above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts", "tell them that I AM has sent you" or the magnum opus which is the beginning of the Gospel of John, you get a sense how the authors, while inspired by the Holy Spirit and trying to put the truth in intelligible human words, still worked with the restrictions of human comprehension while at the same time illustrated how the manifest reality of God must be what it is for anything else to be. You end up talking in circles if you try too hard to put it into words, because what you're talking about is what is allowing you to talk about it.
Thus, we continually bump up against the limitations of our mental and spiritual autonomy (10-12% brain usage) that God himself bestowed upon us. I wonder whether our next Tower of Babel will be Elon Musk's NeuralLink. What happens when you unlock the power of the other 90% of your brain? Do we all become gods, or even Gods? The prospect both frightens and fascinates me.
I appreciate this video although I’m not a believer in the supernatural. The assertion made at 5:48 that God exists necessarily is one that requires support, it does not stand firmly absent some support. It is no different than suggesting that the universe itself is uncaused. We have evidence of neither, therefore unfortunately the best we can say is “I don’t know” and leave it there.
i am reading a book on the history/philosophy of science, which notes that all the sciences currently point to a creator, no exception. this was a timely video to watch
Here's a question though, if God created the universe out of nothing, is He STILL creating things in our universe in the same way? Are black holes literally God's boom-tube/colider or a path for molecules from Him to us in an act of creation?
Causality imposes a time arrow in the subject of the timelessness of God's relationship to "creation". Creation itself implicates God of existing with time. I would argue, God is time, for time is what predicates all other things. This is why we have a hard time defining both time and God. Time is not a simple part of God's creation, it is God acting.
This is why the concept of simulation fits perfectly with the existence of God and the creation of our universe. Obviously a simulation outside our knowledge and control. In this way, it removes the point that people make: if God created us, then who created God. Who created God doesn't matter since we are a simulation/creation of his outside our universe. Let our Creator to describe his own theology. God needs to be outside the universe to create it. God is not bound by the physics and time of our universe. The space he used to create it might have been empty or not, but from our point of view, inside, we can't tell what is outside our space. In that sense, acting through the physics of this universe he creates things. He knows the finality of His creation at all times. He knows its finality already and he told us how this ends to make sure that His greatest creation, us, is not lost when it is turned off. Obviously He doesn't want to carry own the bugs in the program to the next creation.
In the light of science, philosophy, and critical Biblical exegesis I have found that the fundamentalist/literalist take on creation to be possible only if one does one of the following 1. Simply refuse to think about it at all. 2. Try to explain it away by distorting or cherry picking your facts. 3. Put it all down to some kind of conspiracy.
After watching this, i still don't get how creatio ex nihilo makes any sense at all. I get that he tries to address it, but saying that creation is a relation of god and everything is ambiguous. Am i missing something on the video?
So, is it accurate to say that, when we procreate, we are participating in the goodness of God by creating life? (Sex, between a man and woman married, for the purpose of creating life is "good")
I struggled with the relationship between primary (God) and secondary (natural) causes. I believe the underlying assumption is that effects have logically concommittant efficient causes: primary (one) and secondary (several). This would disspell any contradiction between science and God: when He makes a miracle, it is His cause acting. Including that would have helped.
The material would stand equal to God. He is saying in effect, the universe is identical to god not existing outside of it. 🙂 If god didn't create the world in the sense we use creation, ergo, he didn't created it. 🙂
Not really the topic of the video, and quite a nitpick, but the pool ball analogy doesn’t work to explain a chaotic view of the universe as an altercation to the deterministic view as in the watch example. The cue ball’s force, angle, and shape will determine the force and angle of the first ball it hits in the break, and that ball will determine the same for all it hits afterward etc. So it’s still a deterministic view, just one that allows the limited perspective of humans to be considered “random”
So Creation is an ongoing process that continues even to this day. I never thought of it like that before. Thank you for opening my mind to different views :)
@@wms72 Didn't he discarded that creation part? his new 'creation' only meant hold in existence, not created in the sense that has a beginning. So everything was already there, he is just holding it in place so they wouldn't go astray from how they themselves inherently intended to move, or did he just contradicted himself there? 🙂
@@wms72 Why use the word creation if god is doing something else? 🙂 Holding against what? I think it's better to say the universe is a self-contained entity that has it's own internal rules than positing a non-existent to which the universe has a tendency to recede, if nothing is holding it. No god needed there. 🙂
Ok, this way to explain things by analogy makes everything more incomprehensible to me. If every explanation that leads to the conclusion that God exists and how God acts or do things are given as analogies, how not to conclude that God himself is an analogy of something else?
Nothing is created without knowledge wisdom and understanding..... Father and son are one, the same as one. No father, no son. No son can create without a father to create it as one. This world we live was created by the son, whom the father acknowledged as one... this is physical reality created by the son who was like the father as one, yet the father is not physical nor needed to be.
The difficulty of imagining a supreme spiritual Being creating matter; which is radically different from it made me think recently about Berkeley solution of this problem.
I really like the fact that theists say that their scripture is absolute but in reality the interpretation of their scripture changes in almost every generation. Like in the beginning of this video ( pun intended ) the father mentions the big bang Cosmology when in fact the big bang Cosmology is incompatible with the genesis account of creation allegedly written by the same god who created the universe that we live in Genesis:1 1 In the beginning, God[a] created the heavens and the earth 14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs to mark seasons, days, and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16 God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the earth, 18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good.
No it doesn't change "every generation". They've been saying this stuff for like 1000 years. Why not watch their video on Genesis? It was a Catholic priest who first proposed and supported mathematically the Big Bang Theory (Georges Lemaitre) who Einstein and almost all other physicists at the time derided as a "stupid" hypothesis. Good try, I guess...
@@godfreydebouillon8807 oh what a horrible response. Lemaitre was indeed a priest but he didn't made his model by reading the Bible. What the hell kind of logic is this. And no Einstein never said that the big bang is a stupid hypothesis. In fact the big bang fixed a bug in Einstein's equations. Stop blabbering about things that you have no idea about
@@celestialsatheist1535 No, literally he got his hypothesis from reading the Bible, and it's clear you do not understand the Thomists view of the first half of Genesis. The Catholic Church promoted the hypothesis before Lemaitre, because of the overarching view of Genesis that the universe was created "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", and had a beginning. Pope John XXIII literally thought that this would prove to the world that God exists, but Lemaitre warned him that it would not, and atheist naturalists weren't going to give up being atheist naturalists just because they proved the universe wasn't static and eternal (as every physicist at the time thought). Einstein absolutely thought the hypothesis was stupid, and he didn't stop there. He opposed Lemaitres hypothesis for YEARS, wrote about it openly and developed a competing hypothesis that was known as "The Einstein Universe", and claimed that Lemaitre knew how to do math, but his physics was "abominable" (exact quote from Einstein). You can look up every word I'm saying. Go look up"Einstein Universe", and in his mind there was no singularity and no beginning. The universe "just was" and had always pretty much been the same, but just superficial changes. You literally have no idea what you're talking about and yet you're trying to hold these opinions, and it's very strange to say the least.
@@celestialsatheist1535 I mean seriously, just Google "Thomistic Institute Big Bang Theory" instead of just arguing against your delusional charicature.
@@godfreydebouillon8807 First the Big bang theory absolutely destroys the genesis account. Pretending that this someone enrages ' naturalistic atheist ' is beyond stupid. No. Einstein died in 1955, well before any mention of a Big Bang. Correction: Before the evidence of cosmic inflation had become compelling; before the Big Bang was generally taken seriously. His early draft of general relativity predicted cosmic inflation. At that time no evidence had been discovered for cosmic inflation, so in 1917 he added a constant to his equation to fit a stable universe. There is no evidence or reason to suppose that a bias against religion had anything to do with that decision. He was simply trying to build a model that matched all that was known at the time. When inflation was discovered in 1931, Einstein called the constant his greatest mistake, and removed it. That is the exact opposite of "rejecting the Big Bang". (The constant has since been restored, but with a new value to fit the later, more precise data.) There is nothing to suggest that Einstein was blinded by a bias against religion. Given his position and credentials,
Related Videos:
Five Ways to Prove God Exists: ua-cam.com/video/42Eg6UUBqqo/v-deo.html
Yes, There is A Theory of Everything: ua-cam.com/video/rnzqm09adgM/v-deo.html
Catholics believe God is "a unity of three [persons]," which is what the word "trinity" means. So, does the Bible prove that the trinity exists? Not a chance! The God of the Bible has a personal name, which is Yahweh. As he said to Moses: "You are to tell the Israelites, "Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you." This is my name for all time." (Ex. 3:15)
Now, is the God of the Bible a trinity? Not according to Catholic theologian Edmund Fortman, who said in his book, "The Triune God": "[The Old Testamemt] tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we take the New Testament writers together they tell us there is only one God, the creator and lord of the universe, who is the Father of Jesus."
Clearly, the God of the Bible is Jesus' Father. As Jesus himself said to his apostles through Mary: "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' (John 20:17)
So, can Catholics prove from the Bible that a triune deity exists? Absolutely not!!
@@salomonkalou9002 You seem not to have read the Bible at all if you disagree with what I have already said. That explains why you would leave a short comment and then run away. Come back when you have something meaningful to say.
@@salomonkalou9002 As I said before, come back when you have something meaningful to say. I have already proved from the Bible that God is not a trinity. If you disagree, then, prove me wrong. Don't say something silly like, "You seem to have not read Ps. 110:1 and Matt. 28:19," neither of which says or even implies that God is "a unity of three [persons]," which is what the word "trinity" means.
@@salomonkalou9002 Where at Matt. 28:19 does it say or even imply that God is "a unity of three persons," which is what the word "trinity" means? Do you even know what the trinity doctrine says? Apparently not.
BTW, you're a pretty ignorant person who makes claims he can't prove. I've asked you multiple times where Matt. 28:19 says or implies that God is a trinity. Instead of answering the question, all you say is, 'Read it again."
@@salomonkalou9002 What do Matt. 28:19 and Ps. 110:1 say about God's being tri-personal?
This is exactly why I love the Church. It is backed by highly sophisticated philosophical and logical grounds, which are rarely seen in some fundamentalist denominations. I am lucky enough to know this channel. Keep up the good work!
I really like the fact that theists say that their scripture is absolute but in reality the interpretation of their scripture changes in almost every generation. Like in the beginning of this video ( pun intended ) the father mentions the big bang Cosmology when in fact the big bang Cosmology is incompatible with the genesis account of creation allegedly written by the same god who created the universe that we live in
Genesis:1
1 In the beginning, God[a] created the heavens and the earth
14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs to mark seasons, days, and years;
15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the earth”; and it was so.
16 God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars.
17 God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the earth,
18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good.
@@celestialsatheist1535i think i saw this comment before
Interpretation cannot change in Catholicism. It's irrevocable. That alone would disprove your post lol.
But for what it's worth, the Church has made no infallible interpretation on it, except on the person of Adam being historical, and the narration referring to an actual event.
@@celestialsatheist1535 here you go. ua-cam.com/video/d2Ik1ea8yUI/v-deo.html
I am not sure if you have heard, but the bible was written in a time before the scientific method even came about. I'm sure no one told you that for that reason, it was not written with the intent to be a science text book. In other words how you believe the world was initially made is irrelevant to the salvation of our soul and the truth of God's existence. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't know that catholics don't read or interpret everything in the bible literally. The Truths and wisdoms expressed in the bible are told in ways that people of the times it written in would understand. They are read and interpreted within that context as much as we have available to know and universal human nature truths. Since our human nature doesn't really change (our tendencies) it can still teach some lessons today. The bigger context as a whole is read and viewed as salvation history. Hope you are willing to look into what that actually means. I would encourage you to maybe check out a bible study called From Genesis to Jesus made by Scott Hahn and St. paul center. It may help. Maybe not. Also, feel free to call in to Catholic Answers and ask questions and even debate them if you want they are much more well formed than most of us here. Best Wishes to you in your search for truth.
Studying theology for a few thousand years has its benefits ... :-)
@@celestialsatheist1535except... It's not true. Even the Church Fathers such as Augustine - a long time before modern cosmology - knew that the Genesis week of Creation wasn't necessarily meant to be taken literally.
If you want to go for a more literalistic approach where six days can be compatible with modern science, maybe you can try the writings of Jewish physicist Gerald L. Schroeder, where he applies General Relativity to the Six Days of Creation, saying that God created over six literal 24-hour days that count as 14 billion years in our timeframe. Just some food for thought.
God bless you, father. I don't get tired of listening to this video about creation.
Aquinas 101 production team, the video and lighting of Fr. Legge looks excellent!! Looks like you learned a couple of new tricks in the animation as well. Keep up the good work.
Thanks so much! God bless you!
@@ThomisticInstitute
Are you VEGAN? 🌱
I groan when a profound topic, dealing with the nature of God, creation, time, and ontology receives the most superficial comment imaginable: father looks good, great lighting.
@@marbonifacde it’s important as well. No point in trying to educate people if they can’t hear you for poor audio quality or not understand you for bad illustrations.
he is cute asf
Absolutely astonishing work! In trying to meditate and think about God’s creation, I had forgotten that Time itself is a creation. Thank you for your channel and sharing the wisdom of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who in my mind might very well be the smartest man to ever put pen to paper. May God bless you and the Virgin Mary protect you!
Thanks for watching and for your kind words! May God bless you!
Father Legge, I am so grateful for your work in providing these videos but even more for your stewardship of the Dominican House of Studies. The environment provided for those who study there is so fundamental in the formation of these gifted individuals. Listening to these bright, talented, dedicated men and women uplifts and affirms my faith and trust in God, His Church, and our ability to know Him.
I stumbled across this video about a month ago, and put it on my Watch Later list. I am so glad I finally did watch it. What an amazing explanation! Time to browse the channel for more videos on extremely important topics!
Many claim philosophy has no utility. But everything is based on it. Am glad TI countering the prevalent culture of relativism and liberalism thru this going back to basic videos. Bless you more TI….❤from the Phils
Thank you, Thomistic Institute and thank you Saint Thomas Aquinas!
Thanks for watching! God bless you!
I prefer St. Augustine's famous formulation: "Everlasting God IN WHOM we live and breathe and have our being" [emphasis added]
I believe the universe - Creation, us - exists in the mind of God. Personally, I think this resolves many theological, ethical, philosophical and even scientific dilemmas. God is both Creator and Sustainer. God will be Judge at the end of time.
This is TRULY one of the best explanation/formulation I have ever heard on this topic… thank you so much for sharing this… it is an eye-opener for me… really.
A shame our religion teacher couldn’t explain it so well 40 years ago…😞
I need to dig deeper into this and think/meditate… or just be silent and listen for god.
Good night everyone, wishing you a blessed new day tomorrow, and stay healthy!
Best wishes❤️
Steven
@ Steven Rud: Good night to you,too,Steven! And goodday tomorow.Stay healthy as well.God bless!🙏⚘🦋🌿
I'm glad you exist!
Thank you for this beautiful explanation!
Your videos are so well made, God bless you, I am sure your channel will grow even more
Thanks so much! We're happy you find them helpful. God bless you!
Loved this video. Because I was thinking of this topic today, that we in modern times tend to....anthropromorphis God, if that’s the right term. Not that God isn’t a person in a sense, he’s more of a person then anyone on earth, but we tend to simplify him as an old man in the sky. We seem to have forgotten how complex he truly is.
Very instructive and enlightening, thank you.
I believe to avoid these misleading concepts we must use apophatic theology (negative theology) terms. Positive statements (cataphatic theology) can only be used as analogous, similar but never to be understood at the same level of analysis as that of the created things, due to our inadequacy to grasp divine things we must speak negatively. Positive terms makes us feel like we understand God in a way, but in the end if we lack the proper virtues we may fall into the trap of "caging" God in human concepts, making idols and false gods in the process.
Aprende, if we lack the proper virtues, however we speak of God, we will entrap ourselves. Put another way, properly speaking of God depends more on our growing in love than on our growing in knowledge which is certainly also required. Truth proceeds from love, truth being divine love. Thanks for your provocative insight.
@@PhilMatous This is true, but we can recognize that positively speaking of God leads to more misunderstandings, because we push our finite understanding of things to the unboundedness of God. We only concieve things as finite, terms like "infinite" for example, can never be fully grasp by us. So to speak about the Love of God, saying that "is not" finite helps us more than just saying he "does" loves you, since we may confuse our finite and bounded love with God's love. Positive theology needs a bunch of apophatic premises to work properly; that's why we often find Thomists say things like we are "not to" understand God's. (insert attribute) in order to make it palatable.
Thomsism is only a smidge of what god really is.Aquinas knew this.
@@tryhardf844 Saint Thomas wasn't a Thomist he was a lover and a seeker of God, that's why he became a Saint, not because he wrote the Summa Theologie. If we want to seek God we won't be trapped into one line of seeing and describing him, we will be humble servants open to him in every single way possible.
What do you mean? 🙂 Let me ask then and try to correct me according to your way. As I've understood there are two (2) things here,
1] God is holding the universe in place or keeping it on it's intended course.
2] God is holding the universe against NOTHINGNESS, because if not, NOTHINGNESS would swallow everything.
- as we also know about motion, things at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by force and things in motion will remain motion if acted upon, as well. So what's keeping things in motion is not any invisble hand but because it has always been that way it's just that no force has acted upon it that would change it's course. So, I don't understand what it means by holding them in place. What's holding them in place is the presence of equal opposing forces, or absence of forces. All these natural way to keep things moving or to keep them in their trajectory need no God.
- As he said, absolute nothing can't be thought about, it cannot exist. So when it's said god is holding the universe from NOTHINGNESS tha's a self-reflecting act. When you think of nothing since it does not exist it relfects back to the universe itself. There's no Nothing that would SWALLOW the universe. The Universe is all there is.
The best philosopher ever
Things are created in time and in the nature of our creation we are inside the parameters of time , because matter can’t exist out of time. Since God is not bound to or of time ( the instance of matter-time) he is by potency omnipresent, He is God.
Now this is a whole new view of god. God isn't a thinking person who created stuff and wants worship. It is rather existence itself.
Excellent video. Thank you for taking on time.
This was very helpful! I'm guilty of thinking of creation on a timeline and imagined a "time of nothingness". Thank you for your videos!!
I found your channel yesterday... I've probably watched 10 videos by now. Amazing!
That's great to hear! God bless you and welcome aboard!
Arjuna and the Buddhists had this point beautifully nailed 3000 years ago ! All things are dependently arising and are empty of inherent existence.
*_Brilliant!_* And I'm only halfway through the video. God's act of creation is NOT in the past, but perpendicular to the timeline; just as His cause is from the side instead of behind the past. The Buddhists also have a good handle on the separation of "creaturely" vs. the "divine." The Bible was written in the language of spirit; not human languages. Yet, too many people read only the *_ink_* and miss the *_spirit._* (2 Cor. 3:3-8)
Everything exists here and now. Everything really is the same moment. There is only one moment in creation. And what you call diferent moments, is really the same moment from diferent points of view.
My brother once told me he thought God must be something like a 17th dimension or something. (I still don’t know if he was just trying to rile me up or if he really believed that). I knew he was wrong, obviously, but didn’t know how to respond. But now I can see an answer to his idea….His God is too small. Each dimension: length, height, width and time are elements of creation. If there are some higher dimensions that we are unaware of then even those would simply be additional “creatures”, not the Creator.
Now if only I had thought of that thirty years ago when he said that comment…
Thank you Father for this precise and concise video. This clip proves that God is always active
God cannot "windup the universe and let it be" because this would remove his love from the universe. God is love. God created ... loved ... the universe into being. By removing his love, God would deny himself. And God cannot deny himself.
Why would that remove his love from the Universe? I disagree.
So basically the difference between deism and theism. Although it is important to highlight _ex nihilo_ because modern materialists always strawman a counterargument to this by insisting something can come from nothing, when that is not at all possible. Hence, Fr. Dominic explains, yes, even gravity is creatio ex nihilo.
Did the church sit around for 12 centuries saying "I wish Aquinas would show up early because we can't have classical theology without him"?
lol
You have a point!
Well, they're Dominicans. St Thomas is their main guy.
One might start to question a tradition because of how much it leans on one man from the middle ages. I personally prefer the theology of many early church fathers
Would Abraham be able to recognize this God of first causes?
It is a bit more complicated than that. St. Thomas pulled together the work of earlier theologians in his Summa. In that sense, his achievement was like Euclid's in geometry, creating a synthesis of prior works. Most of these books had been written against prevailing heresies at the writer's time. The result was by the 13th century, a student of theology would not know where to begin. The Summa Theologia solved that. In the process, Aquinas introduced some new language and concepts, drawing on Aristotle and others available in his time.
Fr. Legge, you are the coolest Dominican on the internet, yes, even cooler than Fr. Pine 👍
Not all superheroes wear capes ... but some do. 😎
Brillant, as always.
Cheers, and thanks for watching! God bless you!
Wonderful. God is present in all things at all times and His power holds all together. His power is out of this world and incomprehensible, He permeates all things.
He didn't create them in the sense in how we think about creation, ergo, he did not create the world. 🙂
@@terminusadquem6981 Now you're just playing with words.
@@aclark903
It has merit.
@@terminusadquem6981 Merry Christmas.
@@aclark903
Happy Holidays! 🙂
Whenever you make a choice (of thought, primarily) you are displaying the image of God. Be careful, therefore, in your choices.
This is next level... throughout the video, I had to stop it seven to eight times, bcz I had that much ahhaaaa moments.. May God bless Fr Legge n his team... ❤❤❤
Apart from that I loved the new animation tricks which helped to convey the meaning better 😍
I suggest you join the free course. You get extra readings and podcasts that expand each chapter. I'm following it and it is fantastic.
Glad to hear that the videos and supplemental materials are helping! God bless you both!
I need to watch this about five more times.
I like so much thanks
Thanks for watching! May the Lord bless you!
Great video! The editing and production was very well done. A question pertaining to the interpretation of God's creative acts: does God's sustaining of the universe and reality entail that he is continually creating? I pose this question because the video states clearly that creation is an ongoing activity of God. I don't believe that sustaining and creating can be used interchangably here. God created in the beginning in six literal days, rested on the seventh day, then sustains reality and the universe while at times acting in what we perceive as miracles.
I have to look into it more but I hear that the actual word used way back then was "ages" or "era". Makes more sense for him as he perceives time completely different than us.
This is a whole book read in few minutes.....thanks for your work
Cheers, thanks for watching! God bless you!
Then is it an interesting book?
Haha the summa theological with annotations is big. It can be very dull but there is also some incredibly fascinating things packed in.
Thank you, Fr. Legge.
Fantastic, thank you!
This presentation sounds very similar to how John Owen describes and given his training and knowledge he likely read Aquinas thoroughly. Though carefully reading Scripture will clue one in pretty quickly too. I like to point to God’s answer to Job that Creation is an ongoing activity.
This videos and others like it at Aquinas 101 is an amazing work. It brings the hard subject of theology to ordinary people.
Theology is attempting to explain the impossible in terms of the improbable.
In the book "The Book: The Realm of Time," Dr Zolb explains that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" can be translated "God chose the universe to order," which He does by the introduction of time more specifically the realm of time which is still being unrolled throughout the cosmos and this is why the universe is still expanding as it slowly succumbs to the realm of time; the prison of us all. Time does not create it is the created as St Augustine points out or as Confucius tells it, "'Time is created, to say you don't have the time to do something is the same as saying you won't do it,' homework procrastinators!"
You should consider making a
pay pal account avaliable so international donnors can contribute a bit with your project
This is very good!
Very well done
I was just reading Philo of Alexandria's writing about Creation. He is a pretty interesting Jewish writer I am learning about, from the same time of the life of Jesus, and was influential on early Christians and maybe even the New Testament. For instance I was really interested to read today the same thing I have said many times about how we are "in the image of God" as primarily having to do with the soul's powers of intellect and will, that I probably learned from St John of the Cross, is present already in Philo's writing, he says the important way we are in the image of God is not our body (God is spirit) but the higher aspect of the soul, the mind.
Read Sain Augustine commemts on the confessions or The Trinity.
The deeper image of God is: "Mens Notitia Sui and Amor Sui".
Ya'll are asking what is creation, but no one ever asks *how* is creation smh.
Creation is the Holy Spirit, for in the beginning of creation the Spirit of God hovered over the waters and God said "Let there be Light" and there was light.
The same Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary and she conceived.
Christ Jesus is The Light of the world.
From the beginning of creation God the Creator spoke this Cosmos -time space and matter into existence. And in Christ Jesus all things hold together.
And "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made_ without Him nothing was made that had been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of people. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it... The True Light that gives light to every Man was coming into the world.
He was in the world and though the world was made by Him - the world did not recognize Him. He even came to that which was His own, but his own did Not receive Him. Yet to all who receive Him, to those who believe in His Name, he gave the right to become children of God, children born not of human decision or of husband's will_but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His Glory, the Glory of the One and Only, Who came from the Father full of grace and truth.
Interesting material. Thank you! I´m an interfaith UU Christian, and calling myself an empirical theist with Multidisciplinary Philosophy as a basis for Multidisciplinary Theology. While the speaker comfortably discuss God as a higher order cause, the original and necessary one, in terms of Aquinas, I see beyond the merely Thomistic to the need to help raise understanding about spiritual-religious experience, personal effort in spiritual practice, and the human mind, along with emergentism.
I´m glad that you Catholics are doing such good work. I look forward to making my own contributions to the dialogue in the spirit of interfaith syncretic Christianity, US-type Civil Rights, UN human rights, and the meaning of Jesus´ legacy in University-based, globalized society in desperate need of sustainability. May Greenpeace type activism inspire us all, as well as Fair Trade and pro-poor Grameen Bank type.
You are truly confused.
@@elinelcrat8272 That´s you talking, and all you´re really showing is who you are. Still, that´s not saying much at all. It also leaves the real world as bad as it ever was.
Bottom line: Creation is an everlasting, continuous act, from moment to moment?
"Creation is not an event in time. Rather, time itself is part of creation i.e. time is (always) being created by God." (Paraphrasing). As someone who got sucked into the New Atheist trend (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.) for a while as an adolescent, it always amazes me to see something like this and reflect on how shallow the New Atheists’ understanding of Christianity really was. I heard a thousand times that "even if God created the universe, it’s still necessary to explain what created God, and thus the existence of God has little explanatory power in relation to the existence of the universe" and even thought this was a good argument. But it’s a total strawman. Christians don’t believe that God CREATED the world (past-tense), rather that He is the ontological ground of Creation itself. But seeing as scientistic currents of thought like New Atheism have basically no concept of ontology, it’s not surprising that such errors were made.
Could you please tell me some of the material that made you realize new age atheism's shallowness? It would be of great help
@@brunonascimentolima5971 ua-cam.com/video/KYXPIy3MzoM/v-deo.html this video of Bishop Robert Barron critiquing Stephen Hawking's own critique of religion comes to mind. Interestingly enough, my own readings of the atheist philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche each greatly contributed to my disillusionment with new atheism. This is because both of them, though atheist, actually take Christianity seriously and understand something of the Christian worldview. Much of Nietzsche's work in particular is focused on understanding the implications of the "Death of God" which is his metaphor for the decreasing relevance of Christian theology to the modern Western understanding of the world. He understood that Christianity had been the theoretical-ideological foundation of Western society's understanding of itself, the wider world and the human condition for over a millennium and explained how the progressive secularization of Western society was leaving a gaping hole in this understanding that would need to be filled by something else. Once you are exposed to ideas like this it's really hard to be satisfied with new atheism, which pretends like Christianity had merely been 50% childish superstition and 50% precursor to modern secular science. Science has not filled the void Christianity left, and New Atheism thinks otherwise only because it fails to grasp what Christianity actually was/is.
This is great!! Thank you for that! SUBSCRIBED!
Wonderful! So glad you've found this helpful. God bless you!
Can I still be a Dominican if I am not that smart and bad at school? Or is that a sign I'm not called to be a Dominican
One wonders how it is that humans could come to know all of these aspects of god.
This is one of the reasons I can't believe any religion. All these people claiming to understand an invisible, intangible, unproveable entity who cannot be proven to have ever interacted with the universe. Hogwash.
Similarly to how we come to know aspects of each other by voluntarily divulging personal information to one another. It is better explained by the Apostle Paul:
"When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
"Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom-but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God, which He destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Rather, as it is written:
'No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no heart has imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love Him.'
But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit.
"The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.
"The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. 'For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ."--1 Corinthians 2
@@matthewgordon3281 , you have God's own personal Witness in the presence of your conscience...
@@thomasdykstra100 these are all claims you make.
I have reason to believe that you exist, because I see what you have written. If godcis speaking to me, it is not nearly as evident.
@@thomasdykstra100 you can't prove your delusion.
A very nice video. I use many TI videos in CCD as they are relatively short, theologically correct, and are enjoyable to watch.
Can I ask what age group? I was thinking about using some but I was worried about it going over the kids head
@@paulceffalio4763 Paul. Seventh and Eight Grade. I also like the fact that it exposes them to religious.
All you need to do is explain how anything exists outside of space and time -- whatever THAT means -- and you're all set!
This is why the question where did God come from is redundant.
Excellent thank you so much
Aquinas was a genius IMO. Created causality is nothing but another property of creation, it's not the cause of creation. Even if Darwinian evolution were true, it would still be just a descriptive mechanism of how creation looks from left to right, not from inside out.
It took quantum physics for us to learn that not only space but time also is quantized and that every moment in time is created from here to the next one. Time doesn't just exist. It is being summoned into existence. If spacetime is a grid, then pure nothingness is the transition from one sector in the grid to its neighbour. Every object that moves through this grid necessarily goes through multiple nothingness-es only to reemerge existing within the neighboring sector. This process requires recreation every time it happens and it happens all the time, as nothing stays still.
This is where Science and Theology will always break up. There are several theories in Science to account for time creation itself (from prior steady state universe) and also energy (as long as there is vacuum there can be potential energy at the Planck Scale)
Sort of. Yes, there is science relating to nothingness only being an average of nothing and not pure nothingness, ( an absolutely amazing scientific discovery! ), but all that means in this context is that there is always matter in existence within space-time. Theories surrounding the dimension of time always involve some prior state, and so just offset the ultimate question by one degree.
Where Science and Theology definitely will always break up is where there is no proof or substantial, measurable evidence, because then it is no longer science by definition but is, again by definition, mysticism.
In my own view, Theology is highly over rated and pretty much futile as it attempts to describe the ineffable. Science, on the other hand, can only know the knowable and can only describe what is measurable, and so is just as inept as theology when it comes to speaking of God.
Philosophy and mysticism seem a better approach, in that they speak generally in metaphor and are constantly flexible in that they remain always in the business of pondering mystery and what ultimately cannot be fully understood.
I wish creation wasn't what I think it is. Certainly not the best of all possible worlds.
Beautifully said and shot. Thank you. May God bless your ministry.
This is exactly why I ended up as a Catholic and not a Protestant (although I knew that after 2 weeks when I came to faith in Christ), I was also fascinated by Orthodoxy, but I did not find the clarity and unity I found in Catholicism (not the Novus Ordo Church) with Sola Scriptura you simply discard all the philosophical treasures of Historical Christianity. The faith goes beyond scripture, The Logos is also logic and philosophy, it's the full incarnated wisdom of God.
You would do best to set all else beneath the instruction of the Holy Spirit:
"When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
"Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom-but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God, which He destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Rather, as it is written:
'No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no heart has imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love Him.'
But God has revealed it to us by the Spirit.
"The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. And this is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.
"The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. 'For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?' But we have the mind of Christ."
Thank you.
Subscribed. Excellent content. Thankyou.
Wonderful video! I hope you add Spanish subtitles soon!
Absolutely brilliant. This friar is awesome intelligent.
Excellent explanation. A being within time and space trying to conceive of the reality of a being outside of time and space is like the 2 dimensional beings of Flatland thinking they "see" a 3-D object, when in actuality they are only grasping the smallest fragment of it that can enter their sensory perception.
When you reflect on Biblical excerpts like "how high are my ways above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts", "tell them that I AM has sent you" or the magnum opus which is the beginning of the Gospel of John, you get a sense how the authors, while inspired by the Holy Spirit and trying to put the truth in intelligible human words, still worked with the restrictions of human comprehension while at the same time illustrated how the manifest reality of God must be what it is for anything else to be. You end up talking in circles if you try too hard to put it into words, because what you're talking about is what is allowing you to talk about it.
Thus, we continually bump up against the limitations of our mental and spiritual autonomy (10-12% brain usage) that God himself bestowed upon us. I wonder whether our next Tower of Babel will be Elon Musk's NeuralLink. What happens when you unlock the power of the other 90% of your brain? Do we all become gods, or even Gods? The prospect both frightens and fascinates me.
I appreciate this video although I’m not a believer in the supernatural. The assertion made at 5:48 that God exists necessarily is one that requires support, it does not stand firmly absent some support. It is no different than suggesting that the universe itself is uncaused. We have evidence of neither, therefore unfortunately the best we can say is “I don’t know” and leave it there.
i am reading a book on the history/philosophy of science, which notes that all the sciences currently point to a creator, no exception. this was a timely video to watch
Which science relies on a creator?
God is outside and inside of all things. God is before the begining of all things we know. God is truely Holy and Great Always.
Put Spanish subtitles on this vidéo, please, God bless you and a hug from the Dominican Repúblic 🇩🇴
@Joseph Paez 😂🤗
Thank you.
Speculation vs. Science: A Double-Edged Sword
1. Methodology of Metaphysics
From a linguistic perspective “speculation” and “science” are mere abstract nouns but did Aquinas see fundamental differences and difficulties among assumptions, speculations, hypothesising, verification, falsification, statistics, induction? (Reference A).
2. Methodology of Physics
A Physicist, for example, Julius Mayer, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Joule, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), Clausius, Rankine, Maxwell and, later, Boltzmann (Reference B ), Einstein, Hawking, et al, would state: It is the case that the law of conservation of mass-energy and symmetries hold and in a given isolated and controlled system its total mass-energy is constant and if that total mass-energy is “something greater than zero,” then it neither can turn into “nothing” nor emerge from “nothing” into that “something.”
A Neothomist would claim: The mentioned by the Physicist isolated and controlled system with its greater than zero mass-energy content, i.e., its total mass-energy is sustained or upheld in existence by God.
A Physicist would likely ask the Neothomist then: How do you know that? And a series of nightmares and cold sweat would likely have burdened the Neothomist upon this question.
As a result the Neothomist would usually take his or her
“antique-medieval (language) toys” and retaliate with something like this: I do not play with you and your “scientific toys,” including your speculative mathematical models at extreme micro and macro scales. By this retaliation the Neothomist would effectively revert to an undercover of another metaphysical language game of their (e.g., Dominican Order) choosing.
The Neothomist question: How do you know that your mathematical speculations at the extreme micro or macro levels describe reality? would likely lead to a series of nightmares or at least cold sweats burdening the quality of Physicist’s life.
3. References
A. “Creation isn’t what you think it is! (Aquinas 101),” ua-cam.com/video/4o8mGHN9t10/v-deo.html, accessed on 17 December 2021
B. IOP Institute of Physics, “The law of conservation of energy,” spark.iop.org/law-conservation-energy#gref, accessed on 17 December 2021
© 2021 Witold Piotr Nowak
A differentiation between analogical being and univocal being would have made it clearer.
Genesis 1:1
This is mind blowing
Here's a question though, if God created the universe out of nothing, is He STILL creating things in our universe in the same way? Are black holes literally God's boom-tube/colider or a path for molecules from Him to us in an act of creation?
Causality imposes a time arrow in the subject of the timelessness of God's relationship to "creation". Creation itself implicates God of existing with time. I would argue, God is time, for time is what predicates all other things. This is why we have a hard time defining both time and God. Time is not a simple part of God's creation, it is God acting.
This is why the concept of simulation fits perfectly with the existence of God and the creation of our universe. Obviously a simulation outside our knowledge and control. In this way, it removes the point that people make: if God created us, then who created God. Who created God doesn't matter since we are a simulation/creation of his outside our universe. Let our Creator to describe his own theology.
God needs to be outside the universe to create it. God is not bound by the physics and time of our universe. The space he used to create it might have been empty or not, but from our point of view, inside, we can't tell what is outside our space.
In that sense, acting through the physics of this universe he creates things. He knows the finality of His creation at all times. He knows its finality already and he told us how this ends to make sure that His greatest creation, us, is not lost when it is turned off. Obviously He doesn't want to carry own the bugs in the program to the next creation.
In the light of science, philosophy, and critical Biblical exegesis I have found that the fundamentalist/literalist take on creation to be possible only if one does one of the following 1. Simply refuse to think about it at all. 2. Try to explain it away by distorting or cherry picking your facts. 3. Put it all down to some kind of conspiracy.
I prefer a debate instead of a monologue regarding the subjects.
After watching this, i still don't get how creatio ex nihilo makes any sense at all. I get that he tries to address it, but saying that creation is a relation of god and everything is ambiguous. Am i missing something on the video?
I love Edward Feser's 2017 book!
Great assertions
So, is it accurate to say that, when we procreate, we are participating in the goodness of God by creating life? (Sex, between a man and woman married, for the purpose of creating life is "good")
I struggled with the relationship between primary (God) and secondary (natural) causes. I believe the underlying assumption is that effects have logically concommittant efficient causes: primary (one) and secondary (several). This would disspell any contradiction between science and God: when He makes a miracle, it is His cause acting.
Including that would have helped.
The material would stand equal to God. He is saying in effect, the universe is identical to god not existing outside of it. 🙂 If god didn't create the world in the sense we use creation, ergo, he didn't created it. 🙂
@@terminusadquem6981 brilliant, thank you.
Thank you so much 🙏🏻
Thank you, so simply yet so profound... whish agnostics could see it this way
Man I would settle for Christians to see it
@@papercut7141 lol soo true
Not really the topic of the video, and quite a nitpick, but the pool ball analogy doesn’t work to explain a chaotic view of the universe as an altercation to the deterministic view as in the watch example. The cue ball’s force, angle, and shape will determine the force and angle of the first ball it hits in the break, and that ball will determine the same for all it hits afterward etc. So it’s still a deterministic view, just one that allows the limited perspective of humans to be considered “random”
Excellent explanation of God and creation! God is truly ALL that exists. God IS infinity.
So Creation is an ongoing process that continues even to this day. I never thought of it like that before. Thank you for opening my mind to different views :)
No. The Universe is in a natural spiral of decay. It's just going to take an unfathomable amount of time for that to happen.
Father didn't say new Creation continues. Father said God continues to hold His creation in existence. The Bible says God rested on the 7th Day.
@@wms72 Yet there are new souls being created all the time, isn't it?
@@wms72
Didn't he discarded that creation part? his new 'creation' only meant hold in existence, not created in the sense that has a beginning. So everything was already there, he is just holding it in place so they wouldn't go astray from how they themselves inherently intended to move, or did he just contradicted himself there? 🙂
@@wms72
Why use the word creation if god is doing something else? 🙂 Holding against what? I think it's better to say the universe is a self-contained entity that has it's own internal rules than positing a non-existent to which the universe has a tendency to recede, if nothing is holding it. No god needed there. 🙂
Ok, this way to explain things by analogy makes everything more incomprehensible to me. If every explanation that leads to the conclusion that God exists and how God acts or do things are given as analogies, how not to conclude that God himself is an analogy of something else?
Nothing is created without knowledge wisdom and understanding.....
Father and son are one, the same as one. No father, no son. No son can create without a father to create it as one.
This world we live was created by the son, whom the father acknowledged as one... this is physical reality created by the son who was like the father as one, yet the father is not physical nor needed to be.
The difficulty of imagining a supreme spiritual Being creating matter; which is radically different from it made me think recently about Berkeley solution of this problem.
What's his solution?
Oh, okay. I remember.
Good day father
Empty of the empty is poure nothing
It's last point of the empty
I really like the fact that theists say that their scripture is absolute but in reality the interpretation of their scripture changes in almost every generation. Like in the beginning of this video ( pun intended ) the father mentions the big bang Cosmology when in fact the big bang Cosmology is incompatible with the genesis account of creation allegedly written by the same god who created the universe that we live in
Genesis:1
1 In the beginning, God[a] created the heavens and the earth
14 God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs to mark seasons, days, and years;
15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the earth”; and it was so.
16 God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He also made the stars.
17 God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the earth,
18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good.
No it doesn't change "every generation". They've been saying this stuff for like 1000 years. Why not watch their video on Genesis?
It was a Catholic priest who first proposed and supported mathematically the Big Bang Theory (Georges Lemaitre) who Einstein and almost all other physicists at the time derided as a "stupid" hypothesis.
Good try, I guess...
@@godfreydebouillon8807 oh what a horrible response. Lemaitre was indeed a priest but he didn't made his model by reading the Bible. What the hell kind of logic is this. And no Einstein never said that the big bang is a stupid hypothesis. In fact the big bang fixed a bug in Einstein's equations. Stop blabbering about things that you have no idea about
@@celestialsatheist1535 No, literally he got his hypothesis from reading the Bible, and it's clear you do not understand the Thomists view of the first half of Genesis.
The Catholic Church promoted the hypothesis before Lemaitre, because of the overarching view of Genesis that the universe was created "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", and had a beginning. Pope John XXIII literally thought that this would prove to the world that God exists, but Lemaitre warned him that it would not, and atheist naturalists weren't going to give up being atheist naturalists just because they proved the universe wasn't static and eternal (as every physicist at the time thought).
Einstein absolutely thought the hypothesis was stupid, and he didn't stop there. He opposed Lemaitres hypothesis for YEARS, wrote about it openly and developed a competing hypothesis that was known as "The Einstein Universe", and claimed that Lemaitre knew how to do math, but his physics was "abominable" (exact quote from Einstein). You can look up every word I'm saying. Go look up"Einstein Universe", and in his mind there was no singularity and no beginning. The universe "just was" and had always pretty much been the same, but just superficial changes.
You literally have no idea what you're talking about and yet you're trying to hold these opinions, and it's very strange to say the least.
@@celestialsatheist1535 I mean seriously, just Google "Thomistic Institute Big Bang Theory" instead of just arguing against your delusional charicature.
@@godfreydebouillon8807 First the Big bang theory absolutely destroys the genesis account. Pretending that this someone enrages ' naturalistic atheist ' is beyond stupid.
No.
Einstein died in 1955, well before any mention of a Big Bang. Correction: Before the evidence of cosmic inflation had become compelling; before the Big Bang was generally taken seriously.
His early draft of general relativity predicted cosmic inflation. At that time no evidence had been discovered for cosmic inflation, so in 1917 he added a constant to his equation to fit a stable universe. There is no evidence or reason to suppose that a bias against religion had anything to do with that decision. He was simply trying to build a model that matched all that was known at the time.
When inflation was discovered in 1931, Einstein called the constant his greatest mistake, and removed it. That is the exact opposite of "rejecting the Big Bang". (The constant has since been restored, but with a new value to fit the later, more precise data.)
There is nothing to suggest that Einstein was blinded by a bias against religion. Given his position and credentials,