In my study of climatology decades ago, I understood that all weather was a product of energy – energy deficits and surpluses and that ultimately all energy came from the sun. In fact, everything on this earth is dependent on an energy source of some form or another for it to move. This is, in fact, the First Law of Thermodynamics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form, meaning that you can't get something from nothing.
Imagine my surprise, then, when my well-educated, non-christian friend told me that he believed that the world exploded into being, from NOTHING!
What he wasn’t prepared to address was where did the energy come from to explode? Surely there had to be an energy source that had to have eternality for energy to be present to be expended. He was as baffled trying to answer that as I was trying to understand how he could possibly think what he did.
The Bible tells us very clearly that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1). That’s telling us that the universe came into being from the input of an eternal Being who has aseity -- the “quality or state of being self-derived or self-originated, specifically the absolute self-sufficiency, independence, and autonomy of God.” [i]
The very fact that we exist, or even, that energy exists, is proof that God was derived from nothing, He is from everlasting to everlasting and He’s a self-existent being. There is no becoming in God. There is no not being. No learning curve. There is nothing new for God to learn. God is not evolving.
We are human 'becomings' –becoming older and weaker. There was a time when we were not but there never was a time when God was not. His being is eternally necessary. If anything exists it must have the power of being in it because somewhere along the way the power of being gave it life.
This logic is exactly what the apostle Paul said when he noticed an altar to the unknown God in Athens.
23 This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I’m telling you about.
24 “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, 25 and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. 26 From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.
27 “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. 28 For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ 29 And since this is true, we shouldn’t think of God as an idol designed by craftsmen from gold or silver or stone.
30 “God overlooked people’s ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him. 31 For he has set a day for judging the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he proved to everyone who this is by raising him from the dead.”(Acts 17:23-31).
If there ever was a time when nothing at all existed, then there would be absolutely nothing today but as Paul shouted to his audience in Athens: we exist because God exists and that makes us responsible to Him.
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