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Next, we must see what reply can be made to those who agree that God
is the Creator of the world, but have difficulties about the time of
its creation, and what reply, also, they can make to difficulties we
might raise about the place of its creation. For, as they demand why
the world was created then and no sooner, we may ask why it was created
just here where it is, and not elsewhere. For if they imagine
infinite spaces of time before the world, during which God could not
have been idle, in like manner they may conceive outside the world
infinite realms of space, in which, if any one says that the
Omnipotent cannot hold His hand from working, will it not follow that
they must adopt Epicurus' dream of innumerable worlds? with this
difference only, that he asserts that they are formed and destroyed by
the fortuitous movements of atoms, while they will hold that they are
made by God's hand, if they maintain that, throughout the boundless
immensity of space, stretching interminably in every direction round
the world, God cannot rest, and that the worlds which they suppose
Him to make cannot be destroyed. For here the question is with those
who, with ourselves, believe that God is spiritual, and the Creator
of all existences but Himself. As for others, it is a condescension
to dispute with them on a religious ques tion, for they have acquired a
reputation only among men who pay divine honors to a number of gods,
and have become conspicuous among the other philosophers for no other
reason than that, though they are still far from the truth, they are
near it in comparison with the rest. While these, then, neither
confine in any place, nor limit, nor distribute the divine substance,
but, as is worthy of God, own it to be wholly though spiritually
present everywhere, will they perchance say that this substance is
absent from such immense spaces outside the world, and is occupied in
one only, (and that a very little one compared with the infinity
beyond), the one, namely, in which is the world? I think they will
not proceed to this absurdity. Since they maintain that there is but
one world, of vast material bulk, indeed, yet finite, and in its own
determinate position, and that this was made by the working of God,
let them give the same account of God's resting in the infinite times
before the world as they give of His resting in the infinite spaces
outside of it. And as it does not follow that God set the world in
the very spot it occupies and no other by accident rather than by divine
reason, although no human reason can comprehend why it was so set, and
though there was no merit in the spot chosen to give it the precedence
of infinite others, so neither does it follow that we should suppose
that God was guided by chance when He created the world in that and no
earlier time, although previous times had been running by during an
infinite past, and though there was no difference by which one time
could be chosen in preference to another. But if they say that the
thoughts of men are idle when they conceive infinite places, since
there is no place beside the world, we reply that, by the same
showing, it is vain to conceive of the past times of God's rest,
since there is no time before the world.
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