Abstract
Discussions in the Middle Ages about creation and the temporal beginning of the world involved sophisticated analyses in theology, metaphysics, and natural philosophy. Mediaeval insights on this subject, especially Thomas Aquinas' defense of the intelligibility of an eternal, created universe, can help to clarify reflections about the philosophical and theological implications of contemporary cosmological theories: from the “singularity” of the Big Bang, to “quantum tunneling from nothing,” to multiverse scenarios. Thomas’ insights help us to see the value of Georges Lemaître’s insistence that his cosmological reflections must be kept separate from an analysis of creation. This essay will look at different senses of “beginning” and examine the claim that creation, in its fundamental meaning, tells us nothing about whether there is a temporal beginning to the universe. Multiverse models, like that recently proposed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, may challenge certain views of a Grand Designer, but not of a Creator.
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Notes
- 1.
Lambert has documented this early interest in letters (1916–17) between Lemaître and his friend, Joris Van Severen. “Pendant environ un an (from 1917), Lemaître va déployer pour lui-même cette intuition fondamentale qui debouche sur un exégèse particuliére des premiers versets de la Genèse et qui constitue l’une des sources lointaines, cachées mais authentiques, de son hypothèse cosmogonique.” Dominique Lambert, L'itinéraire spirituel de Georges Lemaître (Bruxelles: Éditions Lessius, 2007), p. 27.
- 2.
“[I]t would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial ‘Fiat lux’ uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation …. Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, it has confirmed the contingency of the universe and the well-founded deductions as to the epoch when the cosmos came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence creation took place in time. Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!” Pope Pius XII, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 22 November 1951.
- 3.
ibid., p. 57.
- 4.
It was to be published in the Japanese Catholic Encyclopedia, but never appeared in print. The full manuscript appeared as “The Expanding Universe” in Michael Heller’s Lemaître, Big Bang, and Quantum Universe (Tucson, AZ: Pachart Publishing House, 1996).
- 5.
This was Hawking’s answer to a query about theology in a television interview in the United States [The Larry King Show on CNN], 10 September 2010.
- 6.
Hawking and Mlodinow, 165. “Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can. Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Hawking and Mlodinow, p. 180. “The ultimate theory must be consistent and must predict finite results for quantities that we can measure. We’ve seen that there must be a law like gravity, and for a theory of gravity to predict finite quantities, the theory must have what is called supersymmetry between the forces of nature and the matter on which they act. M-theory is the most general supersymmetric theory of gravity. For these reasons M-theory is the only complete theory of the Universe. If it is finite – and this has yet to be proved – it will be a model of a universe that creates itself.” pp. 180–181.
- 7.
Quoted in Dennis Overbye, “Before the Big Bang, There Was … What?” The New York Times, 22 May 2001. Overbye offers an excellent tour d’horizon of the then current cosmological speculations: from quantum tunneling from nothing, to eternal inflation, to string theory and multiple universes, to Neil Turok’s “ekpyrotic” universe [from “ekpyrosis,” which denotes the fiery death and rebirth of the world in Stoic philosophy], to Linde’s modification, called the “pyrotechnic universe.”
- 8.
Quoted in an interview in Dennis Overbye, “The Cosmos According to Darwin,” The New York Times Magazine, 13 July 1997, 26 and 27.
- 9.
Science (26 April 2002).
- 10.
The Endless Universe (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 8. “Although the cyclical model does not require a beginning of time, it is compatible with having one. One could imagine the sudden creation from nothing of two infinitesimal spherical branes arranged like two concentric soap bubbles, both of which undergo continuous expansion as well as regular collisions with each other under the influence of an interbrane force. Both brane bubbles would grow enormously with every new cosmic cycle. After several cycles of expansion, the pair of branes would appear very flat and very parallel to any observer like us, with access to only a limited region of space. For such an observer, there would be little difference between this universe with a beginning, and a universe in which two flat, parallel branes had been colliding forever into the past.” pp. 165–166. Note that Turok and Steinhardt identify “creation from nothing” with a beginning of time – and they admit this as theoretically possible, even though they prefer their model. Thus, they would have to admit that cosmology itself could not determine whether or not there was a beginning of time. As with so many others, on all sides of the debate, they treat creation and having a temporal beginning as necessarily linked.
- 11.
Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2010), especially chapter 5 (pp. 177–215). Spitzer argues that developments in relativity theory and quantum mechanics have led to an ontological understanding of time quite different from that found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (for whom time is viewed as the measure of motion). Combining what he terms this new conception of time with arguments about infinity informed by the German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943), Spitzer thinks that he can show the impossibility of the “past infinity of time,” thus proving that time must have a beginning, and hence must have a Creator. With respect to this topic, Spitzer notes the importance of William Lane Craig’s The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979).
- 12.
Thomas Aquinas, On Separated Substances, c.9.
- 13.
al-Shifa’: al-Ilahiyyat, translated in Georges Anawati, La Métaphysique du Shifa’ (Paris: J. Vrin, 1978), VI.1.
- 14.
Avicenna argues in his Liber de philosophia prima that the world is an ensemble of possible beings, which of themselves have no existence, but do in fact exist. They exist only because they are the emanated effect of the efficient causality of one necessary being, which is perfect and lacks nothing. Possible beings in this emanated universe are arranged hierarchically, ordered in a causal chain under the one necessary being, first cause of all. From necessary being in its eternal productive act only one effect can come forth, the first immaterial being or intelligence. The rest of the chain of being continues with each intelligence eternally causing the being and nature of each succeeding intelligence, up to the tenth intelligence, the Giver-of-Forms, from which issues immediately the material universe, matter and form. For Avicenna, emanation proceeds through intermediaries.
- 15.
Avicenna recognized the need to affirm both the contingency of the created order and, yet, a necessity in it so that there can be a science of things. As L. Goodman puts it: Avicenna “fused the Aristotelian metaphysics of self-sufficiency with the monotheistic metaphysics of contingency…. The key to [his] synthesis of contingency with the metaphysics of necessity lies in the single phrase: considered in itself. Considered in itself, each effect is radically contingent. It does not contain the conditions of its own existence: and considered in itself, it need not exist…. But considered in relation to its causes, not as something that in the abstract might never have existed, but as something concretely given before us … considered in relation to its causes, this object must exist in the very Aristotelian sense that it does exist, and must have the nature that it has in that its causes gave it that nature.” L. Goodman, Avicenna (London: Routledge, 1994). 63, pp. 66–67.
- 16.
Charles Kahn emphasizes the importance of Islamic philosophy, and especially Avicenna, in the development of a really new notion of radical contingency: “My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in light of the metaphysics of creation: that is to say, under the influence of biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken place in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God, on the one hand, and that of the created world, on the other. The old Platonic contrast between Being and Becoming, between the eternal and the perishable (or, in Aristotelian terms, between the necessary and the contingent), now gets reformulated in such a way that for the contingent being of the created world (which was originally present only as a ‘possibility’ in the divine mind) the property of ‘real existence’ emerges as a new attribute or “accident,’ a kind of added benefit bestowed by God upon possible beings in the act of creation. What is new here is the notion of radical contingency, not simply the old Aristotelian idea that many things might be other than they in fact are—that many events might turn out otherwise—but that the whole world of nature might not have been created at all: that it might not have existed.” Charles Kahn, “Why Existence Does not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,” in Parviz Morewedge (ed.), Philosophies of Existence, Ancient and Medieval (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 7–17, at pp. 7–8.
- 17.
Aquinas develops the notion of radical dependency in such a way that creaturely existence is understood not as something which happens to essence (as it does for Avicenna) but as a fundamental relation to the Creator as origin. “In one fell swoop, Aquinas has succeeded in restoring the primacy Aristotle intended for individual existing things, by linking them directly to their creator and by granting Avicenna’s ‘distinction’ an unequivocal ontological status. Yet as should be clear, this is more than a development of Avicenna; it is a fresh start requiring a conception of existing that could no longer be confused with an accident, and which has the capacity to link each creature to the gratuitous activity of a free creator. Only in such a way can the radical newness of the created universe find coherent expression, for the existing ‘received from God’ will be the source of all perfections and need not presume anything at all—be it matter or ‘possibles.’” David Burrell, “Aquinas and Islamic and Jewish Thinkers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump. (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 60–84, at pp. 69–70.
- 18.
“That the world had a beginning … is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science. And we do well to keep this in mind; otherwise, if we presumptuously undertake to demonstrate what is of faith, we may introduce arguments that are not strictly conclusive; and this would furnish infidels with an occasion for scoffing, as they would think that we assent to truths of faith on such grounds.” Summa theologiae I, q. 46, a. 2. [Unde mundum incoepisse est credibile, non autem demonstrabile vel scibile. Et hoc utile est ut consideretur, ne forte aliquis, quod fidei est demonstrare praesumens, rationes non necessarias inducat, quae praebeant materiam irridendi infidelibus, existimantibus nos propter huiusmodi rationes credere quae fidei sunt.] Resp: Dicendum quod mundum non semper fuisse, sola fide tenetur, et desmonstrative probari non potest….
- 19.
The argument involves a recognition that the difference between what things are (their essences) and that they are (their existence) must ultimately be resolved in a reality (God) in whom essence and existence are identical. Thus, what it means to be God is to be, and God is the uncaused cause of all beings. One need not accept the validity of Thomas’ claim to demonstrate that the universe is created in order to understand his distinction between creation and science and that “to create” is not to produce a change.
- 20.
“quod creationem esse non tantum fides tenet, sed etiam ratio demonstrat.” In II Sent., dist. 1, q. 1., a. 2. An English translation and commentary of this discussion of creation can be found in Steven E. Baldner and William E. Carroll, Aquinas on Creation (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 1997).
- 21.
See his essay: “The Myth of the Beginning of Time,” Scientific American, April 2004.
- 22.
In II Sent., dist. 12, q. 1, a. 2.
- 23.
See my essay, “At the Mercy of Chance? Evolution and the Catholic Tradition,” Revue des Questions Scientifiques 177:2 (2006), pp. 179–204.
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Carroll, W.E. (2012). Aquinas and Contemporary Cosmology: Creation and Beginnings. In: Holder, R., Mitton, S. (eds) Georges Lemaître: Life, Science and Legacy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 395. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32254-9_7
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