Aristotle and the Eternity of the World
In Aristotle’s philosophy, the world is eternal. His reasoning flows from his understanding of motion, causality, and the principle that nothing comes from nothing. For Aristotle, every change requires a prior cause, and if we trace causes back, we cannot arrive at an absolute beginning without undermining the very principle of causality itself. Thus, the universe has always existed, with no first moment of time. The world and motion are eternal, dependent on an eternal Unmoved Mover who gives actuality to all things but does not create them out of nothing.
This view preserves the orderliness and intelligibility of the cosmos, but it clashes with the idea of a Creator who freely brings the universe into existence. Aristotle’s God sustains motion and order, but does not create the universe ex nihilo.
Catholic Teaching on Creation
Catholic doctrine, however, following the witness of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, insists that the world was created ex nihilo—out of nothing. The Book of Genesis declares, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1), and Christian theology has always read this as meaning that God, by His free and sovereign will, called the universe into existence from nothing. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Church’s magisterial teaching confirm that the world is contingent, dependent entirely on God’s creative act, and not necessary or eternal in itself.
For Catholic theology, this is crucial. If the world were eternal in Aristotle’s sense, it might appear to exist necessarily, without radical dependence on God. Creation ex nihilo affirms that every being other than God is contingent, radically dependent, and receives existence as a gift. Moreover, it shows that God is not only the sustaining principle of order but also the free Creator, transcendent over all being.
Avicenna’s Third Way
The Persian philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037) sought to reconcile the Aristotelian doctrine of eternity with the revealed teaching of creation. His solution has been called a “third way.”
Avicenna argued that the universe was indeed created ex nihilo, but not in a temporal sense. Creation for him did not mean a beginning in time, as though God at one moment had nothing before Him and then at the next moment produced something. Rather, creation is an eternal relation of dependence: the world depends on God as its necessary cause at every instant, and this dependence is itself creation.
In this sense, Avicenna could say that the world is eternal and yet created. It is eternal not because it exists by its own necessity, but because God eternally wills and sustains it. It is created because it does not exist of itself but only through God’s necessary act of emanation. Thus, “created” does not mean “made after not existing,” but “deriving existence wholly and at every moment from another.”
WCM
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