Creationism

[Belacqua]

If existence is a "something" and not some abstract notion. Can that "thing" exist in an environment without time ("to exist", pun intended...to a certain degree) or space to inhabit? If it can, particularly without the necessity of space or time, what is this thing called existence exactly? Can you give a detailed definition of it (since i do not yet know of things that can ...exist....without time and/or space)? How can it be more than a property all things have? Can existence exist without a thing that has existence as a property?

It's tricky to discuss this stuff because our language tends to mislead. We can say that existence is the first cause, and that makes it sound like it's another in the list of things that exist. But it's not that.

So for example if a tiger and a mountain exist, you don't have three things. There is existence -- we know because the tiger and the mountain exist -- but existence doesn't count as another thing. 

Likewise Aquinas says that God and the universe do not make two. Other theologians, especially in Orthodox countries, are happy to say that the sentence "God exists" is not a good sentence. It is misleading, because the language implies that God exists in the way that tigers and mountains exist. For naive people this can lead to the Bigfoot theory of God, in which we could find him if we just knew where to look. 

But I don't think it's coherent to deny that existence is real. To try to deny it you'd have to exist. Even if we're all in the Matrix and the appearance of reality is all an illusion, the illusion exists, and presumably some reality beyond the illusion.

So tentatively, maybe we can say that existence is the state or condition in which things exist.

Lets go back to the time when there was only the first cause, *existence* (ignoring the problem i mentioned in my previous paragraph). At some point *existence* had to be followed up by a second thing, or property, second only to existence. 

As Grandizer pointed out, the Thomist first cause isn't something that happened at a point in time. It is the ongoing condition that must be the case for all other things to be the case. So Aquinas doesn't address temporal points when there was only a first cause and not yet anything else. 

I suppose a physicist could follow the essential chain back to the first cause, and posit what the last step is before we get to existence. So for the sun to exist there have to be hydrogen atoms (among other things) for the atoms to exist there have to be subatomic particles, for the particles there has to be space/time, for space/time there has to be existence. 

Or maybe for space/time there have to be laws of nature, and for laws of nature to exist you have to have existence. Because in the absence of all existence, there would be no laws either. 

Again, Aquinas isn't discussing Big Bang-like events. But we could still look at such an event from a Thomist perspective. What had to be the case so that the Big Bang could be the case? The thing that had to be the case would be the first cause.

Don't some people speculate that the universe "budded" off from other ones, in a multiverse? That would demand that other universes exist. Or maybe they say that there was a quantum fluctuation, but that means there must have been in existence a quantum something which could fluctuate. Or maybe in the absence of all material things, there are still laws of nature which allow for a Big Bang to happen. So laws of nature existed.