We shouldn’t think of God as literally made out of energy, Mark. For energy is a physical reality. Remember Einstein’s famous equation e = mc2? It tells us that energy and matter are basically interchangeable. Matter can be converted into energy and vice versa. As such, energy and matter are part of the created world. God created all the matter and energy in the universe.
So to say that God needed a tremendous amount of energy in order to create something out of nothing gets things backwards. He created the matter and energy out of nothing, that is to say, He created the matter and energy, period. What you really want to say, I think, is that God must be extraordinarily powerful, if not infinitely powerful, in order to create something from nothing. That claim is literally true. Indeed, the medieval theologian John Duns Scotus argued for divine omnipotence precisely because in order to bridge the chasm between being and non-being God would need to be infinitely powerful. Be that as it may, classical theism does affirm that God is omnipotent or maximally powerful.
Read Full Article »