If the universe began to exist, what was God doing during the eternity before the world began? St. Augustine confronted this question in the fifth century. His joking response was that for all eternity God was making hell for people who ask questions like that.194 His more serious response was that prior to the creation of the world there was no time. It makes no sense to ask what God was doing prior to the creation of the world, because the creation of the world also included the first moment of time. Time can be a difficult thing to understand, but one common-sense view is to think of time
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