time before the world, nor the infinite realms of space._
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 question,
for they have acquired a reputation only among men who pay divine
honours 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.