Reply #91: Analogy, schnalogy [View All]

making a watch is completely different than making the universe. Your analogy fails mightily.

Designing a watch is different from designing an aircraft. It doesn't follow that they are not analogous on the dimension of designing.

The analogy is along the dimension of 'appearing to be designed'---watches appear to be designed, and so does the universe.

In every analogy, of course, there are differences between the items being analogously compared. We say things like, driving a car is analogous to riding a horse. But it would be ridiculous to say that it's not analogous because a horse is a living animal and a car isn't.

As for pre-existing materials: one might as well say that the Big Bang couldn't have produced the universe, because according to Big Bang cosmology, there were no materials pre-existing the Big Bang. You might reply, ah, but there was something in existence at the Big Bang. Well, first of all, that's a matter of some considerable speculation--there have been a number of cosmologists who say that the Big Bang emerged as a quantum fluctuation out of 'nothing', though the sense of 'nothing' being invoked isn't always clear. But even if you insist that there was never nothing, and that at the Big Bang, there was something, the theist could say (as Saint Augustine essentially did), I agree with you. At the creation of the universe, there was something, not nothing, and there was no 'before the creation' at which there was nothing. And now Hawking pretty much says the same. As far back in time as we can go, there was something, and never nothing.

So, you are wrong to suppose that there was a time when God had nothing to work with. First, there was never a time when there was physically nothing. Second, there was never a time from God's point of view when there was nothing either, since God's point of view isn't a temporal point of view. One therefore should not imagine that God was looking at no world, and then came a moment in time when out of that no-world state of affairs, God made a world. As I say, Augustine understood this---15 centuries ago.

To create is to cause to be. The watchmaker causes the watch to be and to have the form it does. Analogously, God causes the universe to be and to have the form it does.