Abstract
In earlier writings, I argued that neither of the two major physical cosmologies of the 20th century support divine creation, so that atheism has nothing to fear from the explanations required by these cosmologies. Yet theists ranging from Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Leibniz to Richard Swinburne and Philip Quinn have maintained that, at every instant anew, the existence of the world requires divine creation ex nihilo as its cause. Indeed, according to some such theists, for any given moment t. God's volition that the-world-should-exist-at-t supposedly brings about its actual existence at t. In an effort to reestablish the current viability of this doctrine of perpetual divine conservation. Philip Quinn argued (1993) that it is entirely compatible with physical energy conservation in the Big Bang cosmology, as well as with the physics of the steady-state theories. But I now contend that instead, there is a logical incompatibility on both counts. Besides, the stated tenet of divine conservation has an additional defect: It speciously purchases plausibility by trading on the multiply disanalogous volitional explanations of human actions.
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An earlier version of this paper entitled “Origin versus Creation in Physical Cosmology” appeared in Lorenz Krüger and Brigitte Falkenburg (eds.),Physik, Philosophie und die Einheit der Wissenschaften, aFestschrift for Erhard Scheibe, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, 1995, pp. 221–254. The present version appears here by permission of the publisher and the coeditor Brigitte Falkenburg. This paper was delivered as an invited address at the international congress on Philosophy and Physical Cosmology, held in September 1995 at the International University Menéndez y Pelayo in Santander, Spain.
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Grünbaum, A. Theological misinterpretations of current physical cosmology. Found Phys 26, 523–543 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02071219
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02071219