Nick:

Change involves time. But there was no time for God to produce a change.

So we wonder firstly what change is without time but.. If it was created, then we changed from a state of no change, to change. So the contradiction follows, unless Change is eternal.

Jimmy:

Look at the end of the middle sentence: “a state of no change, to change.” In what sense was the world in a state of no change? There’s two ways you could read that clause.

You could think it means the world was in a state of no change, plain and simple. Not-changing is the state of the world. You might even say that was a property. But the minute this possible interpretation is laid bare, our objector will have to abandon it for its obvious flaw. Namely, creation wasn’t there to be without change at all!

There’s the second possible meaning. Maybe “a state of no change” means statelessness entirely. Maybe it means “no change” as an extension of “nothing,” because that’s all that existed beside God. But if that’s what’s meant, how would the objection have any bite?

See the objection relies on a subtle reification of nothingness. It relies on treating the world as an object to endure change or possess changelessness in order to then differentiate that state with a later state of change. But no states were there because no world was there. The very concept of change vs unchanging did not exist yet.

The Bible is saying something way more radical when it pictures God speaking the universe into being than a change of affairs. It’s saying there were no affairs. There was not even “nothing,” as some people are tempted to imagine or conceive of a void. There was only God.