system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is creation not a form of change?

Aquinas' prime mover argument argues for the existence of a first mover, an unactualized actualizer, which actualises the potential of other objects without being actualised or moved itself. Aquinas concluded this being to be God.

This God is pure act. It does not have any dormant potentials awaiting actualisation. And yet, this God also created the universe. **It had the potential to create the universe, and then it actually created the universe.**  Surely, this counts as a form of change. And if this is a form of change, then God would require a changer of its own - contradiction.

How do you avoid this contradiction. Why is it sufficient to conclude that creation is not a form of change? Isn't God's potential to create being actualised here?
gpt
When Aquinas says that God is purely actual, he does not mean that God lacks active potency (the potency to act on something else). Aquinas very explicitly says that there is active potency in God (ST I, Q. 25, A. 1, ad. 1). Rather, Aquinas means that God lacks passive potency (the potency to be acted on by something else).

>It had the potential to create the universe, and then it actually created the universe.

Yes.

>Surely, this counts as a form of change. And if this is a form of change, then God would require a changer of its own - contradiction. How do you avoid this contradiction.

Again, "the potential to create the universe" is an active potency, not a passive potency. So, God does not change by creating the world.

>Why is it sufficient to conclude that creation is not a form of change?

Creation is a change on the part of the thing that is created. Creation is not a form a change on the part of the one creating.

>Isn't God's potential to create being actualised here?

No. The things in the world are being actualized by God.