Which Eternity Do You Believe In?

As I was waiting for the bus today a thought occurred to me. No matter what your beliefs, you are believing in some kind of eternity. Logically eternity must either be eternal nothingness, an eternity of causes and events, or an eternal god.

If you believe the Universe had a beginning then what happened before that beginning? Was it God, a series of events or was it nothing? If you believe that nothing existed before the universe began, then what caused it to begin? Was there a big explosion? Then what exploded and what caused the explosion? And if the cause and the object that exploded existed before the explosion, then there wouldn't have been nothing. So when did they exist and where did they come from? Nothingness doesn't have an intelligence or actions to cause it, so nothingness couldn't have been what preceeded the Universe.

So do you believe that eternity is a series of events? Then what are those events? How do things change? What caused those events? What caused the changes? Since events also don't have intelligence and cannot be self-starting, they couldn't cause their own Universe without some outside effect acting on them and they themselves couldn't have come to be without more than one effect. Also, most people who don't believe in God don't think they believe in eternity. So we are back to eternal nothingness before these series of events started.

So the only eternity which makes sense to me is an eternal God. God DOES have intelligence and CAN self-start. He CAN cause things to happen by Himself. He CAN design things. He CAN use intelligence to make things happen. To me, that is the only logical eternity. Think it through to the end!