One of the great insights of Judaism was the concept of “creatio ex nihilo”, Creation from Nothing, as first mentioned in 2 Maccabees 7:28. Many people misunderstand this to think it merely means creation in a vacuum, but even a vacuum is not “nothing” – it contains space, time, and the laws of physics. Indeed space and time themselves are created; and thus their creation occurs outside of space and time, as the articles below describe.
A Most Strange Debate
- Article (blog post)
- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Chris Graney on The Catholic Astronomer website, featuring a (fictional) discussion on the idea of the multiverse and the nature of the infinite, involving the 17th century philosophers Philips Lansbergen, Johann Georg Locher, Thomas Digges and Giovanni Battista Riccioli, the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, the twentieth-century historian of science Alexandre Koyré, and physicists Brian Greene and Max Tegmark, from today!
Across the Universe: Tending Towards Paganism
- Article (blog post)
- 600 words
- General Audience
A post by Vatican Observatory astronomer Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., on The Catholic Astronomer website. Br. Guy writes that insisting on a universe that needs a direct intervention of God to accomplish some things but not others reduces God to not much more than a functional equivalent of Jupiter, “god of thunder”, or Ceres, “goddess of grain”.
Br. Guy Consolmagno at University of Illinois: The Unfinished Cosmos: Creation, God, and Hawking’s Grand Design
- Video
- 97 minutes
- General Audience
Br. Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory delivered a lecture on “The Unfinished Cosmos: Creation, God, and Hawking’s Grand Design” at the University of Illinois on March 7th, 2013. The event was hosted by the St. John’s Catholic Newman Center at the University of Illinois.
Can Something Come From Nothing? Faith and Science Communication Breakdown
Article (blog post)- 2900 words
- High School level and above
A post by Fr. James Kurzinski on the Catholic Astronomer website. “…creation is not a change from ‘nothing’ into ‘something,’ but rather creation is the fact that things have come into existence, and is a question of metaphysics and not of science.”
Emilie Du Châtelet: Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings
Book- 424 pages
- High school level and above
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet, wrote, among other things, a translation and commentary on Isaac Newton’s Principia (published posthumously in 1759), and a physics textbook for her son, entitled Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics, published in 1740). This collection of her philosophical and scientific writings, edited by Judith P. Zinsser, includes translations of substantial portions of these works and others. Zinsser’s translation of Institutions contains all of the Preface (discussing, among other things, the utility of mathematics and the usefulness of experiments), all of the first chapter (discussing principles of knowledge and reasoning), all of the second chapter (which contains logical arguments for the existence of God and for determining the basics of God’s nature), as well as chapters on time, matter, motion, and force. Emilie Du Châtelet was a complex person—she sought education and access to the world of science at a time when women were largely unwelcome in the field, but she focused on her son’s education in science far more than her daughter’s; she attended mass regularly and wrote on the existence of God, but maintained a long-running affair with Voltaire, and in her unpublished writings wrote detailed and harsh criticism of scripture. Zinnser’s book consists largely of translations of Du Châtelet’s work, but also includes some background information.
From the book’s publisher, the University of Chicago Press:
Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured.
In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.
Click here for a preview, courtesy of Google Books.
Frequently Asked Questions About The Universe
- Book chapter (PDF)
- 4 pages
- General Audience
A short chapter by Vatican Observatory astronomers Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., and Fr. Christopher Corbally, S. J., addressing frequently asked questions about Cosmology and the Universe; from the book The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican.
God is dead; long live the eternal God
Article (blog post)- 1200 words
- General audiences
A post on The Catholic Astronomer blog by Vatican Observatory astronomer Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., commenting on Stephen Hawking’s ideas regarding God:
Hawking does us an important favor by eliminating [a certain] image of God. The “god” that Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe in is one I don’t believe in either. God is not a force to be invoked to swell a progress, start a scene or two, and fill the momentary gaps in our knowledge.
God is the reason why existence itself exists. God is the reason why space and time and the laws of nature can be present for the forces to operate that Stephen Hawking is talking about.
What’s more, I believe in such a God not because of the absence of any other explanation for the origin of the universe, but because of the person of Jesus Christ — in history, in scripture, and in my own personal life of prayer. And even more strongly, I have faith in this God not merely because the universe exists, but because it is beautiful and fun to play in… that play we call science.
God’s Universe
Book- 160 pages
- High school level and above
A short book by Harvard University astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich, published in 2006 by Harvard University Press. Gingerich addresses whether “mediocrity” (the “Copernican Principle”) is a good idea, whether a scientist dare believe in design, and the idea of questions without answers (persuasion vs. proof in science). From the publisher:
We live in a universe with a very long history, a vast cosmos where things are being worked out over unimaginably long ages. Stars and galaxies have formed, and elements come forth from great stellar cauldrons. The necessary elements are present, the environment is fit for life, and slowly life forms have populated the earth. Are the creative forces purposeful, and in fact divine?
Owen Gingerich believes in a universe of intention and purpose. We can at least conjecture that we are part of that purpose and have just enough freedom that conscience and responsibility may be part of the mix. They may even be the reason that pain and suffering are present in the world. The universe might actually be comprehensible.
Taking Johannes Kepler as his guide, Gingerich argues that an individual can be both a creative scientist and a believer in divine design—that indeed the very motivation for scientific research can derive from a desire to trace God’s handiwork. The scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems much the same as does his atheistic colleague across the hall. Both are likely to view the astonishing adaptations in nature with a sense of surprise, wonder, and mystery.
In God’s Universe Gingerich carves out “a theistic space” from which it is possible to contemplate a universe where God plays an interactive role, unnoticed yet not excluded by science.
Click here for additional information from the publisher, Harvard University Press.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.
Frequently Asked Questions About The Universe
- Book chapter (PDF)
- 4 pages
- General Audience
A short chapter by Vatican Observatory astronomers Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., and Fr. Christopher Corbally, S. J., addressing frequently asked questions about Cosmology and the Universe; from the book The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican.
The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure On Creation – Étienne Gilson
Article (book excerpt)- 2800 words
- University level and above
The twentieth-century French philosopher Étienne Gilson writes on St. Bonaventure and Aristotle:
All order, in fact, starts from a beginning, passes through a middle point and reaches an end. If then there is no first term there is no order; now if the duration of the world and therefore the revolutions of the stars had no beginning, their series would have had no first term and they would possess no order, which amounts to saying that in reality they do not in fact form a series and they do not precede or follow one another. But this the order of the days and seasons plainly proves to be false…. In St. Bonaventure’s Christian universe there is, in reality, no place for Aristotelian accident; his thought shrinks from supposing a series of causes accidentally ordered, that is to say, without order, without law and with its terms following one another at random.
Click here for an excerpt selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti. The excerpt is from Gilson’s The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure.
Understanding the Interplay Between Creatio Ex Nihilo and Creatio Continua
Article (blog post)- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Fr. James Kurzynski on The Catholic Astronomer website. “A key difference between modern physics and Augustine is that Augustine’s understanding of change also implies the change of our spiritual lives and our relationship with God. Therefore, what we find in the early Church is a tantalizing exploration into how and why things come into existence (from a philosophical and theological standpoint). This change does not happen in a moment, but is an ongoing process of continual creation by God. “
A Most Strange Debate
- Article (blog post)
- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Chris Graney on The Catholic Astronomer website, featuring a (fictional) discussion on the idea of the multiverse and the nature of the infinite, involving the 17th century philosophers Philips Lansbergen, Johann Georg Locher, Thomas Digges and Giovanni Battista Riccioli, the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, the twentieth-century historian of science Alexandre Koyré, and physicists Brian Greene and Max Tegmark, from today!
Thomas Aquinas – On Creation and Time
- Book excerpt
- 1600 words
- University level
This discussion on creation and time, from the Summa contra Gentiles of Thomas Aquinas, contrasts and compares in interesting ways with the modern understanding of the origin of the universe as described in the “Big Bang” theory (in which neither matter, nor time, nor space exist prior to the “bang”). For example, St. Thomas argues that the act of creation is not a change of one thing that exists into another thing. Rather, appealing to both reason and to St. Basil, St. Thomas argues that both material things and time itself were formed when God created the universe, a process which St. Thomas argues was instantaneous. He says, “And so it is that holy Scripture proclaims the creation of things to have been effected in an indivisible instant; for it is written: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ (Gen. 1:1). And Basil explains that this beginning is ‘the beginning of time’.”
This excerpt has been selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti.
Click here for Thomas’s discussion, from Inters.org.
What Was In The Beginning? Chardin, Pickstock, and the Song of Creation.
Article (blog post)- 1000 words
- General Audience
A post by Fr. James Kurzynski on The Catholic Astronomer website. “What is amazing is that whether it is through the music of gravitational waves or the divine utterances of the Word made flesh, our consciousness points us to not only the things of the tangible world, but also the transcendent.”
Across the Universe: Tending Towards Paganism
- Article (blog post)
- 600 words
- General Audience
A post by Vatican Observatory astronomer Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., on The Catholic Astronomer website. Br. Guy writes that insisting on a universe that needs a direct intervention of God to accomplish some things but not others reduces God to not much more than a functional equivalent of Jupiter, “god of thunder”, or Ceres, “goddess of grain”.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – The Ultimate Origin of Things
Article (book excerpt)- 3800 words
- High school level and above
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is credited with the invention of the mathematics of Calculus. Isaac Newton is also so credited, but it is the notation and language of Leibniz that is used in modern calculus. Here Leibniz argues that reason points to the existence of a being outside the universe who governs it and built it:
In addition to the world or aggregate of finite things, there is some unique Being who governs, not only like the soul in me, or rather like the Ego itself in my body, but in a much higher relation. For one Being dominating the universe not only rules the world but he creates and fashions it, is superior to the world, and, so to speak, extra mundane, and by this very fact is the ultimate reason of things. For the sufficient reason of existence can be found neither in any particular thing nor in the whole aggregate or series.
This work was originally written in Latin under the title De Rerum Originatione (click here for the original Latin). Translations of this work vary somewhat, so three are listed here:
Click here for an excerpt selected by the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science (Inters.org), which is edited by the Advanced School for Interdisciplinary Research, operating at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, and directed by Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti.
Click here for a translation from The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings (1898).
Click here for a translation from The Philosophical Works of Leibnitz (1890).
The New Physics and the Old Metaphysics (The Nash Lecture at Campion College, University of Regina)
- Video
- 55 minutes
- University level
The 2012 Nash Lecture at Campion College, University of Regina. A presentation by Br Guy Consomagno on how advances in modern physics work with traditional metaphysics. God is not one force among many, to be invoked to explain evolution or the big bang, but the author of the universe that allows evolution or the big bang to occur.
Br. Guy Consolmagno at University of Illinois: The Unfinished Cosmos: Creation, God, and Hawking’s Grand Design
- Video
- 97 minutes
- General Audience
Br. Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory delivered a lecture on “The Unfinished Cosmos: Creation, God, and Hawking’s Grand Design” at the University of Illinois on March 7th, 2013. The event was hosted by the St. John’s Catholic Newman Center at the University of Illinois.
Is Big Bang Cosmology In Conflict With Divine Creation?
- Book chapter (PDF)
- 8 pages
- University Level
A chapter by Fr. William R. Stoeger, S. J., a physicist with the Vatican Observatory, written for the book The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican: “By considering the recent educated scientific speculation on what may have led to the Big Bang and the Planck era, we shall find that quantum cosmology – and the physics upon which it relies – promises to reveal a great deal, but cannot provide an alternative to the traditional philosophical notion of divine creation, creation from nothing, in accounting for the universes’s ultimate origin.” Topics include What Is the Big Bang?; The Planck Era and “the Beginning” of the Universe; Insights from Quantum Cosmology; The Basic Insight of Creatio ex Nihilo; Conclusion.
[Download PDF]
Stoeger-HP-Chapter
Quantum Cosmology and Creation
- Article (PDF)
- 11 pages
- Secondary / University and higher level
Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, writes: “Any attempt to simply identify the nothing (nihilo) of the theologians with the quantum fluctuations of one of the preexisting states or with the unbounded regime of quantum cosmology would only create confusion. But the one concept may illuminate the other.”
Click here for a shorter variant of this paper.
[Download PDF]
Gustavus_A_paper
Emilie Du Châtelet: Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings
- Book
- 424 pages
- High school level and above
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet, wrote, among other things, a translation and commentary on Isaac Newton’s Principia (published posthumously in 1759), and a physics textbook for her son, entitled Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics, published in 1740). This collection of her philosophical and scientific writings, edited by Judith P. Zinsser, includes translations of substantial portions of these works and others. Zinsser’s translation of Institutions contains all of the Preface (discussing, among other things, the utility of mathematics and the usefulness of experiments), all of the first chapter (discussing principles of knowledge and reasoning), all of the second chapter (which contains logical arguments for the existence of God and for determining the basics of God’s nature), as well as chapters on time, matter, motion, and force. Emilie Du Châtelet was a complex person—she sought education and access to the world of science at a time when women were largely unwelcome in the field, but she focused on her son’s education in science far more than her daughter’s; she attended mass regularly and wrote on the existence of God, but maintained a long-running affair with Voltaire, and in her unpublished writings wrote detailed and harsh criticism of scripture. Zinnser’s book consists largely of translations of Du Châtelet’s work, but also includes some background information.
From the book’s publisher, the University of Chicago Press:
Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured.
In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.
Click here for a preview, courtesy of Google Books.
God’s Universe
- Book
- 160 pages
- High school level and above
A short book by Harvard University astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich, published in 2006 by Harvard University Press. Gingerich addresses whether “mediocrity” (the “Copernican Principle”) is a good idea, whether a scientist dare believe in design, and the idea of questions without answers (persuasion vs. proof in science). From the publisher:
We live in a universe with a very long history, a vast cosmos where things are being worked out over unimaginably long ages. Stars and galaxies have formed, and elements come forth from great stellar cauldrons. The necessary elements are present, the environment is fit for life, and slowly life forms have populated the earth. Are the creative forces purposeful, and in fact divine?
Owen Gingerich believes in a universe of intention and purpose. We can at least conjecture that we are part of that purpose and have just enough freedom that conscience and responsibility may be part of the mix. They may even be the reason that pain and suffering are present in the world. The universe might actually be comprehensible.
Taking Johannes Kepler as his guide, Gingerich argues that an individual can be both a creative scientist and a believer in divine design—that indeed the very motivation for scientific research can derive from a desire to trace God’s handiwork. The scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems much the same as does his atheistic colleague across the hall. Both are likely to view the astonishing adaptations in nature with a sense of surprise, wonder, and mystery.
In God’s Universe Gingerich carves out “a theistic space” from which it is possible to contemplate a universe where God plays an interactive role, unnoticed yet not excluded by science.
Click here for additional information from the publisher, Harvard University Press.
Click here for a preview from Google Books.