9.5 Creation “from Nothing” (SCG 2,16)
9.5 Creation “from Nothing” (SCG 2,16)
In SCG 2 Aquinas is thinking that for God to create is for him to account for things existing at any time. When we make things, we work on what preexists our actions of making. For us, making is a matter of transforming in some way. In SCG 2,16, however, Aquinas argues that God’s act of making all things exist cannot be a modification of something that precedes this act. So he concludes that, as creator and absolute first cause, God makes, but not out of anything.
In defending this conclusion Aquinas offers a number of arguments, but they are all variations on the thinking I have just noted. They all indicate why, in Aquinas’s view, God cannot make things exist by first getting to work on something and then bringing it into existence. In rounding off SCG 2,16 Aquinas notes that some “ancient philosophers” took matter to have no cause because things seem always to come about from other things and because “from nothing, nothing comes.”20 These philosophers, Aquinas accepts, were right insofar as they were thinking about how things in the world come to be because of the activity of other things in the world. Yet, he adds, they were wrong because they did not reflect on the coming about of everything that exists or has being while not being pure being, as God is. In short, Aquinas holds that, as well as asking what in the world accounts for this or that, we need to ask “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He also claims that God is the only possible answer to this question insofar as the question is construed as seeking an agent cause.