t = 0

I was pleased to learn this morning that my dear friend, Dr. Thomas Jay Oord, put a link to an essay on this blog in his newsletter.  (c4ort.com) The essay highlighted some areas where Tom and I agree, and where we disagree, about the idea of creatio ex nihilo, the idea that God created the universe out of nothing, instead of out of some preexistent matter.  One of the things I admire so much about Tom Oord is how he "leans in" to things, and how he shows respect to people even when he does not share their views.  The piece he linked can be found here.

In that article, I said:

The reasoning behind rejecting creatio ex nihilo, as I understand it, is that a God who created out of nothing could have created any kind of world God wanted, and we could have had a world free of suffering, pain, and evil.  I do not think any of us can claim that we know what God made the world out of, whether it was from already existent matter or out of nothing.  None of us were there.  I want to approach this issue with the acknowledgment that I am by no means certain I am right here.  But I do want to offer a couple of reasons why I think it is at least plausible that creatio ex nihilo is true, and God is still not omnipotent.

I want to emphasize the point about how none of us knows for sure.  I think Tom would agree, simply because none of us were there.

I am reading an interesting book right now, God and the Brain, by Kelly James Clark.  Dr. Clark is a philosopher at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  He is involved in interfaith issues.  As far as I know, Dr. Clark is not a process philosopher.

Something Dr. Clark says on page 172 of the book caught my attention.  In a discussion of the evolution of the brain and how it processes information.

Physicists have projected back in time to more than 13.7 billion years ago and have a reasonably good sense of the beginnings of our cosmos from 10 to the -43 power seconds. However, we have no idea what happened between t = 0 and 10 to the -43 power seconds. Moreover, we don’t know what happened before t = 0 or what that even means.

This is an important point, which he articulates clearly, and which my friend Tom Oord models splendidly, in a display of philosophical humility, when people all along the spectrum of the issue of how the universe came to be can fall prey to hubris.

My mentor, D. Elton Trueblood, taught me to do philosophy by the method of comparative difficulties.  Trueblood said we will never have options which have no difficulties or unanswered questions associated with them.  The goal is to land upon the option which, for the time being, has the fewest difficulties and leaves the least amount of unanswered questions.  That is why nothing is ever final for a good philosopher (or scientist for that matter.)  There is always the possibility of the emergence of some new information which will cast what we know in an entirely different light.  People during the COVID pandemic ridiculed the scientific community because it kept modifying what it was saying about the disease.  That is the very nature of science.

t = 0

I have tried to imagine what it was like at that moment, t = 0.  The reality is none of us can.  That is what makes speculating about it so much fun, and so fraught with difficulty.