Читать книгу Catholicism For Dummies - Rev. Kenneth Brighenti - Страница 45

Before you were conceived in your mother’s womb, you were merely a potential being. You didn’t become real, or actual, until the occurrence of the act that created a new human life. Likewise, at one time, everything now in existence was merely potential, because everything has a beginning. In other words, to get to the actual here and now, you first must have an actual beginning — a start. So, at some point, all human beings — and all things — never were.

Some force had to start the motion from potential existence to actual existence. And that force could never have been potential itself; it always was, is, and shall be. Otherwise, that force would’ve had to be started by some other force, which would’ve had to be started by some other force, and so on. This chain of forces means that an actual beginning would never have been. And, again, the here and now must have an actual beginning.

Before the Big Bang, when the universe was only potential, what force started the motion for it to become actual and real? St. Thomas said that the force is God, the Prime Mover — moving the potential universe into becoming the actual one.