Maimonides

Did the world have a beginning?

Introduction by Chip Manekin

Maimonides says: “The opinions of men about the antiquity or newness of the world, among those who believer that there is a god, are three. The first is the opinion of all those who keep the law of Moses. And it is that he made the whole world (that is, all beings besides the creator) to be after true and absolute deprivation, and that the creator himself was an eternal being alone, and that besides him there was no angel, nor heaven itself, nor anything which is below heaven. After this, in turn, he made all beings according to what they are with his own will, and not that of another, and that time in itself comes from the universality of the creator. Since time is something attaching to motion, which is an accident of a mobile thing, the mobile thing itself, to whose motion time attaches, is new and created, and is after it was not. Because he says before that this proposition which says that the creator was before the creation of the world, this signifies that there was time, and similarly whatever follows understanding of the quality of its own essence before the creation of the world, namely an infinite quality.”

Original Latin