Augustine Confessions Analysis

In his “Confessions,” Augustine says that there are people who try to deny the existence of God by asking what God was doing before he created heaven and earth. People claim that Creation happening and how it happened is impossible because they believe that God have to have done something before he created the world. He is trying to answer their philosophical beliefs that led them to ask such a question. How Augustine reply to this question is he use the concept of time and he says that God is eternal time because for God there is no time. I think that Augustine’s reply is convincing. The people that are trying to deny the existence of God by asking what God was doing before he created heaven and earth are called the Porphyry. They claim that it was impossible for the

God did not create the universe at a specific time because for God there is no time he is eternal time. His thought process when trying to answer this question, “They do not yet understand how those things are made which are made which are made through you and in you. They attempt to grasp eternal things, but their heart flutters among the changing things of past and future, and it is still vain. Who will catch hold of it, and make it fast, so that it stands firm for a little while, and for a little while seize the splendor of that ever stable eternity, and compare it with times that never stand fast, and see that it is incomparable to them, and see that a long time cannot become long except out of many passing movements, which cannot be extended together, that in the eternal nothing can pass away but the whole is present, that no time is wholly present? Who will see that all past time is driven back by the future, that all the future is consequent on the past, and all past and future are created and take their course from that which is ever present?