If God does exist, He must be eternal, active, necessary.
Eternal? He is so by definition. It is His reason for being. He cannot be conceived enclosed within limit of time; He cannot be imagined as having a beginning and an ending, as an appearing and disappearing being. He exists with time.
Active? Why, yes. He cannot be otherwise since His activity — so the believers say — has been confirmed by the most colossal majestic act: the Creation of the Worlds.
Necessary? Since without Him there would be nought; since He is the author of everything, the initial fire whence everything gushed, the unique and first source from which all has been derived; since He, alone and self-sufficient, had it dependent on His will that either nought or everything should be; He is so and cannot be otherwise.
He is, therefore, eternal, active and necessary.
I then assume, and shall also show, that if He is eternal, active and necessary, He must be eternally active and eternally necessary. Consequently, He could not have been at any moment inactive or unnecessary. This shows, finally, that He has never created.
To say that God is not eternally active is to admit that He has not always been active, that He became so, that He began to be active, that before being so lie was not. Since His activity was manifested through His act of creation, it is the same as admitting that during the billions of years possibly preceding creation God was inactive.
To say that God is not eternally necessary is to admit that He has not been always necessary, that He became so, that He began to be so, that before being necessary He was not so. Since the Creation proclaims and testifies to the necessity of God, we must also admit that during the billions of years possibly preceding creation God was useless.
God was useless!
God idle and lazy!
God superfluous and useless!
What a bad situation for the Being essentially active and essentially necessary! We must admit, then, that at all times God has been active and necessary. But, then, He could not have created because the idea of creation absolutely implies the idea of a beginning. Something that begins could not have existed all the time. There necessarily must have been a time when before coming into being the thing was not at all. No matter how long or short the time preceding the creatcd thing may be, it cannot be ignored.
The results are:
Either God is not eternally active and eternally necessary, and in this case He became so with Creation. If it is so, God, before Creation, did not possess the two attributes of activity and necessity. Such a God was incomplete; it was a fragment of God, nothing more. And to become active and necessary, to complete Himself, He needed to create.
Or God is eternally active and eternally necessary, and in this case He has been creating eternally; the creation has always been going on. The Universe has never begun; it existed all the time; it is eternal like God; it is God Himself, and He is lost in it.
If it is so, the Universe never had any beginning; it has not been created.
Therefore, in the first case, God, before Creation, was neither active nor necessary; He was incomplete, that is, imperfect — and, then, He does not exist. In the second case, God, beipg eternally active and eternally necessary, has not become so and, therefore, He has not created.
It is impossible to conclude otherwise.
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