666

Aquinas (ST I Q45) talks about this in general terms, but the larger issue is that we have no concept of what an “immaterial thing” is, and it may in fact be a paradox. Theologians seldom characterize God as immaterial per se (some—not all!—say he has no physical body, but that’s not precisely the same thing), and I am not aware of any that characterize God as a literal “thing,” being rather a primordial force of personality, of abstraction, the “absolute ground of being” (to use Tillich’s term, though this has been implicit conceptually throughout the work of much older thinkers).

But the main problem with the question, again, is categorical; we have no concept of what it means for something to both exist and be immaterial, because under our currently prevailing scientific framework only material things exist. So the argument that there can be no creator-God because an immaterial God couldn’t create a material cosmos becomes a form of question-begging, an appeal to the underlying metaphysical monism, while the argument that something cannot be created from nothing has an ancient, and much more interesting, history.

I don’t think it’s correct to say everyone agrees that „only material things exist“. Consciousness exists, and the question is whether it’s strictly material or distinct from matter but convenes on it. It is true that few think immaterial things can exist seperately from matter.