My claim in this blog, is that the particular failures of William Lane Craig’s version of the Kalam Cosmological argument inadvertently point to something like Origen’s picture of the relation between time and eternity as found in Christ. The fact that Origen is wrongly accused of believing in the transmigration of souls may be an indicator of the flatness of the reason by which he was judged and the difficulty of recognizing the orthodoxy he represents.
The standard cosmological arguments (which usually make no reference to Christ) depend upon arguments which confirm, rather than challenge, the standard order of reason. The revolutionary realization of the New Testament pertains to how creation reconceived (as ex nihilo) in light of the resurrection of Jesus, gives rise to an entirely new order of rationality. These two beliefs (creation ex nihilo and resurrection) are at the center of a new identity (resurrection faith) and worldview, which arise together historically. The cosmic order and its material make-up are reconceived in the full recognition and meaning of Jesus is Lord. His Lordship demands a reconceptualization of all things (including time and eternity), and yet the standard arguments making this case tend to betray resurrection rationale, though this failure itself can be enlightening. One of the premiere apologists in the Western world, Craig and his Kalam Cosmological argument, demonstrates the point.
Craig states the argument as a brief syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. This cause is God. Throughout Craig’s argument the contradiction of an actually existing infinite series is indicated (the universe cannot be infinite but must have a beginning). For example, it cannot be rationally conceived that there is an infinite library, because if half the books go missing, there are just as many books (which is a contradictory outcome). By the same token there cannot be an actually existing infinity before creation commenced, as the point of the start would never be reached.
But then Craig, absent any reference to Christ, moves this contradiction, unwittingly, into the mind of God. “His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result” are conceived as two distinct points. The distinction is between, “His causal power in order for the universe to be created” and “God’s timeless intention to create a temporal world.” Causal forces exist in time (this side of the nothing in creation ex nihilo) and exist over and against the eternal (prior to nothing) and so the thought (which is eternal), and “God’s undertaking to create” (which has a definitive beginning), must be differentiated.[1]
Wes Morrison points out that Craig maintains that “’prior’ to the beginning of the universe God was outside of time.” As he writes, “Craig makes it sound as if God ‘used to be’ outside of time, but ‘then’ he created the world and put himself into time. But this can’t be right if there is no time prior to the beginning of the universe.”[2] Craig posits a point prior to creation when God decides to act, but he is dependent upon the sequence of before and after, which do not pertain in eternity. Is God temporal or non-temporal, in time or out of time. Can God cause the universe in time prior to the time of the universe? Can something “begin to exist” without there being a time before it began to exist? The way in which time and eternity are interrelated in Craig’s argument, creates a picture of time and eternity as related consecutively or sequentially. There is a divide between the “before” the beginning and the beginning, as a point in the decision making of God. Morrison’s critique of Craig is as stilted as Craig’s argument but neither of them relates time and eternity, through Christ, in the manner of Origen.
In Origen’s picture, it is the Logos, or Jesus Christ alone, who bridges the gap between time and eternity. Jesus Christ is simultaneously created and divine and in him all things (time and eternity) hold together. The “logoi” or “eternal things” or Wisdom of God or the Body of the Logos, pervade all of creation. All things hold together through the constituent parts of the eternal wisdom which Origen calls “logoi.” As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes, “Since the logoi are the object of creation and make up the Body of Logos, the logoi are the means through which the Logos becomes History. They are incorporeal causes (hence, they stand outside of time and space), and yet it is by means of them that Time is realised; indeed, in a hypothetical absence of logoi, Time would be blind and meaningless, actually, it could not exist at all.”[3] The reality of time continually takes place in and through its beginning. Christ is the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the source of reality.
Christ is not the beginning in a temporal sense, but in the sense of John 1:1 – the source (άρχή) of reality. Christ is the continual resource, the continual beginning, or the wisdom of God applied to the world. In Him there is an intersection between time and eternity: “In this Wisdom, who ever existed with the Father, creation was always present in form and outline and there was never a time when the prefiguration of those things which were to be hereafter did not exist in Wisdom.”[4] The Logos is the ordering matrix of eternity imprinted upon time.
Origen distinguishes between wisdom and Logos in that the Logos is the communication of God enacted. “Speaking either of Wisdom or of Logos one actually refers to the same person, namely the son of God himself. The difference nevertheless is that Wisdom indicates the living incorporeal personal substance in herself, without any allusion to the world or to anything else, while the Logos is the Wisdom conceived in her communication to rational creatures.[5] In Tzamalikos explanation, “Origen’s notion about ‘conceptions’ of the son is exactly what allows him to portray his perception of the correlation of timeless God to the temporal world. This correlation is possible through the assertions of Origen’s about the Logos. For the Logos actually becomes a kind of span, through which this relation is established.”[6]
In Origen’s description:
…it is along those ways that the son of God is moving decorating, taking thought for, making benefaction, favouring, into this [sic. the world] which was made in wisdom. In saying therefore that the Logos was in άρχή it is not implied that the Logos is different from her (sc. the άρχή, that is the wisdom) in terms of substance, but only in terms of conception and relation, so that it is the same being who in named in the scripture and who, in as much as she is conceived in her relation to God himself, is named wisdom, and again, in as much as conceived in her relation to creatures she is called as Logos the creator.[7]
In Origen’s conception, “Creation flows perpetually from the Godhead in the same way that rays of light flow from the sun.”[8] There is an eternal aspect to all of creation, though Origen certainly confirms creation ex nihilo. The corporeal world has a beginning in time, but its true beginning or resource for existence is beyond time in eternity. Origen holds that time arose with creation and did not precede it, so that the picture of a six day creation is simply to accommodate human capacities. He states emphatically that “everything was made at once…. but for the sake of clarity a list of days and their events was given.”[9]
The Logos created the world and sustains it, and is constantly related to it, and yet the world is external to God. “Hence we should conclude that Origen conceives the Logos as being both ‘in’ wisdom, that is to say into timelessness, and into the world, that is ‘out’ of the Trinity.”[10] The Logos is the mediator between the timeless God and the temporal world. The Logos is with God but also in the world, though not identified with the world. (Though He is identified with each rational being created in his image.)
So the distinction which Craig would attribute to God’s intention and God’s acting on that intention can be directly attributed to Christ. There is no “before” creation any more than there is a before Christ. According to Tzamalikos, “There are no turning points nor moments nor succession nor temporal flux in timelessness. Subsequently, any question pertaining to timelessness and involving notions of this sort is groundless and misleading.” [11] Succession, change, before or after, may be necessary to human thought, but are not proper to timelessness or eternity. It is not that the world is eternal, or that Origen thought as much, but God acts directly in the world through his Son who is divine and human.
The person of Jesus Christ explains how there is a beginning coming out of a timeless corporeal nothing. Science, and big bang cosmology do not presume to describe the big bang (in scientific terms as science breaks down). There is no actual, knowable, “infinite density” (describing what existed before the big bang) anymore than there is an actually existing nihilo. In this Origen accords with the Einsteinian notion that time and space are singular. As Gerald Bostock states, “Origen . . . would be quite happy with the concept of a ‘Big Bang’. He would also, to judge from his writings, be happy with modern scientific theories about the nature of matter.”[12] As modern theories indicate, and Origen would concur, matter is not fully knowable: “By the intellect alone the substance which underlies bodies is discerned to be matter . . . when our mind by a purely intellectual act sets aside every quality and gazes at the mere point, if I may so call it, of the underlying substance in itself, then by this artificial mode of thought it will apparently behold matter.”[13] But this is a theoretical exercise, on the order of modern physics. Matter can take on every possible form but it is the nonmaterial which makes its imprint. God can transform matter “into whatever forms and species he desires, as the merits of things demand. The prophet points to this when he refers to God making and changing the form of all things (Amos 5:8).”[14] As Bostock notes, “It is through the interplay of subatomic randomness and of transcendent causes that all the potentialities of life are actualized and the wonders of creation emerge. Whether we are looking at the indeterminacy of the electron and the stability of crystal or the interaction between genetic mutations and the ordered structure of a biological organism we are seeing the polarities of chaos and cosmos.”[15]
Just as God imposed order on the chaos of the primal waters, Origen sees God as continually bringing order into the cosmos. The order of the universe is God’s transcendent cause continually at work. “A cause is not the physical antecedent of a physical process but an active force impinging on a passive subject and, because reality is ultimately spiritual, such a force must be of a spiritual character. It is given expression in Origen’s concept of transcendent λόγοι or intelligible forms, which determine both the nature and the meaning of created things.”[16] As Origen writes: “the works of divine providence and the plan of this universe are as it were rays of God’s nature. . . . our mind understands the parent of the universe from the beauty of his works and the attractiveness of his creatures.”[17]
There is not a divide between time and eternity, in the manner conceived by Craig, but creation relies upon eternity in Christ. In turn, the world is comprehensible (Einstein called the world’s being comprehensible the most incomprehensible thing about it). It is comprehensible through the Logos bridging the creation and Creator in all who are made in His image. In Origen’s description, “The life added to us, when the logos in us is brought to fulfilment through our participation in the primary Logos, . . . becomes the light of knowledge . . . with some a potential light and with others an actual light.”[18] The light of Christ is available potentially to all, as this is the eternal image in whom all are made, and He is the eternal rationale undergirding the world.
[1] Wes Morrison “Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder,” forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy, 151. accessed at https://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.pdf
[2]Ibid.
[3] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 248.
[4] Origen, De Principiis 1,4,4. Cited in Gerald Bostock, “Origen’s Doctrine of Creation” THE EXPOSITORY TIMES February 2007. Vol.118, No.5, 2.
[5] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Concept of Time in Origen (University of Glasgow, PhD Thesis, 1986) 142.
[6] Time in Origen, 143.
[7] Origen, Commentary on John John, 1. Cited in Time in Origen, 143-144.
[8] Bostock, 5.
[9] Origen, FrGn 2,2. Cited in Bostock, 3.
[10] The Concept of Time, 144.
[11] The Concept of Time in Origen, 142.
[12] Bostock, 3.
[13] Origen, De Principiis 4,4,7. Cited in Bostock, 3.
[14] Origen, De Principiis 3,6,7. Cited in Bostock, 4.
[15] Bostock, 4.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Origen, De Principiis 1,1,6. Cited in Bostock, 7.
[18] Origen, CIo 2,24. Cited in Bostock, 7.