Product Description

The Christian church has historically believed that God created the universe out of nothing. But some theologians and non-Christian groups believe that the universe has always existed along with God. Who is correct? Does it matter? In Creation out of Nothing, authors Paul Copan and William Lane Craig examine the biblical, philosophical, and scientific case for creation out of nothing. Furthermore, they make it clear that nothing less than the uniqueness and sovereignty of God are at stake. This book will challenge all thoughtful Christians to understand why it is important to believe in the doctrine of creation out of nothing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #448027 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-01
• Released on: 2004-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Paul Copan (Ph.D., Marquette University) is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of various books, including The Rationality of Theism. William Lane Craig (Ph.D., University of Birmingham; D.Theol., University of Munich) is research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and author or editor of several books, including Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.

Customer Reviews

A life-changing book
Two learned philosophers within the Evangelical Christian tradition have produced here a thoughtful and readable book with potentially life-changing consequences. The question: "Why is there something and not nothing?" has fascinated both scholars and ordinary folk for centuries; and the answer 'Because God willed it so' would have satisfied most people until the Enlightenment. The arguments of Hume and Kant that such an answer is unsatisfactory have held sway among Western intellectuals for some two hundred years [even though Kant, on dismissing the traditional 'proofs' as formulated by Aquinas, remained impressed by the witness of "the starry heavens above and the moral law within"].
Bertrand Russell felt so uneasy about the question that he asked Fr. Copleston if they could quickly move on during their famous radio debate.

Recent discoveries in cosmology have increasingly rendered naturalistic alternatives untenable. Edwin Hubble calculated that the universe must have had a beginning, and Penzias and Wilson's Nobel-Prize-winning work confirmed it. It is now universally accepted, on the best available evidence, that the Universe began some 14 billion years ago as a 'singularity', popularly known as the 'Big Bang', which also brought space and time into being. Saint Augustine would doubtless be gratified that his teaching in the 5th century had been so spectacularly confimed by the latest scientific discoveries!

If everything that is has its origins in that 'singularity', what brought about the singularity? If nothing can come from nothing, how come the Universe? It is fairly clear that if it is to have an explanation, it must lie 'outside' itself [metaphysically, not spatio temporally outside].
How can that be? Modern science is still dominated by what Karl Popper called 'promissory materialism' - an instruction to bet your shirt on all answers to all possible questions, both present and future, being materialistic. But this paradigm is overdue for a change, and one can already hear the ice breaking up - the roar in increasing exponentially.

This, then, is a good time to review and explore the scientific, philosophical and theological implications of modern cosmology, particularly in relation to the idea of creatio ex nihilo. It is difficult to find adequate words to praise this work by Copan and Craig, who explore not only the traditional understanding, but also various alternatives that have been proposed [steady-state, multiverses, vacuum fluctuation, inflationary and oscillating models, quantum gravity, etc.], showing that these are all unsatisfactory for various reasons.

I particularly enjoyed their demolition of Peter Atkins' 'Creation Revisited', and their quote from an incredulous John Leslie a propos a bizarre paragraph from that book: "How could such nonsense have been churned out by the author of 'Physical Chemistry', a superb text-book?"

It is surely gratifying to the authors that an increasing number of cosmologists [John Barrow, Paul Davies, Owen Gingrich - to name but three] are - like Disraeli - on the 'side of the angels'. I doubt that there is a better book than this to explain why for the general reader.

Creation "ex-nihilo"
This book is a tour-de-force by Drs. William Lane Craig and Paul Copan. They present very convicing evidence that backs up the Biblical claim that God created the world out of nothing. Any physicist or philosopher wishing to peddle some alternative theory of how the universe came into being must engage this masterpiece first.

Creatio Ex Aquis, Ex Hydatos
The book insists on being a "scientific" exploration. However, it is obvious that the authors never read "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Eric Lerner (not to mention that creatio ex nihilio defies the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

Even if there is an absolute beginning to matter (a postulate I could endorse -- Read "Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets" by Tom Van Flandern; Chapter 5: The Composition of Matter), this does not suggest an absolute beginning to energy--one being merely a change or "beginning" to the other. In fact, Van Flandern suggests an explanation to the partical-wave duality of quantum mechanics that would imply an absolute beginning to matter but not to energy. As energy, light, or intelligence (whatever, one wishes to call it) passes from wave to particle existence, it is changing from energy to matter. So even, according to Van Flandern and others in the scientific community, an absolute beginning to the Physical Universe is not the same thing as an absolute beginning to the "Spiritual" Universe.

This last point seems to be consistent with what William Lane Craig suggests as actual creation; "that what is seen was not brought into being from anything that can be seen." This seems to be consistent with LDS teaching (Joseph Smith) on the elements of which intelligence consists, that which cannot be seen. And is also consistent with Van Flandern's suggestion that matter is infinitely divisible, amounting to that which cannot be seen.

But Copan points to Basil of Caesarea in his Hexaemeron, "If matter were uncreated, then it would from the very first be of a rank equal to that of God and would deserve the same veneration." Since God created rocks before He created man, does this mean that rocks are of a "rank equal to that of man," deserving "the same veneration?" Let's speak the truth. The truth of the matter according to Copan is that the dual existence of God and matter somehow infringes upon the sovereignty of God. Yet in Craig's "The Only Wise God," man having agency somehow does not.

As LDS Scholar Stephen Robinson writes, "I would not be comfortable with saying that God cannot bring eternal matter into being nor destroy it." Rather, "God creates matter out of chaos and can return it to chaos, and that chaos is not matter as we know it, but a level of existence that human beings cannot comprehend. For me chaos is not matter, but neither is it non-existence." Else how could "the sons of God shout for joy" (Job 38:1-7) upon completion of the Earth's creation if man did not exist pre-mortally (Heb. 12:9,10; Acts 17:28,29; Romans 8:14-18)?

Nope. Such an idea as a non-static universe does not have its origination in anything earlier than the second to third century Hellenized Christianity (Copan admits this in his article "Creatio Ex Nihilo or Creatio Ex Materia?") Nor can it be found any earlier in Judaism. In his Presidential address to the British Association for Jewish Studies in 1990, Peter Hayman said:

"Nearly all recent studies on the origin of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo have come to the conclusion that this doctrine is not native to Judaism, is nowhere attested in the Hebrew Bible, and probably arose in Christianity in the second century C.E. in the course of its fierce battle with Gnosticism. The one scholar who continues to maintain that the doctrine is native to Judaism, namely Jonathan Goldstein, thinks that it first appears at the end of the first century C.E., but has recently conceded the weakness of his position in the course of debate with David Winston."

See the article of Peter Hayman, "Monotheism - A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?", Journal of Jewish Studies 42 (1991), 1-15. See also Jonathan Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo", Journal of Jewish Studies 35 (1984), 127-135; Jonathan Goldstein, "Creation Ex Nihilo: Recantations and Restatements", Journal of Jewish Studies 38 (1987), 187-194; David Winston, "Creation Ex Nihilo Revisited: A Reply to Jonathan Goldstein", Journal of Jewish Studies 37 (1986), 88-91.