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Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration

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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 13.7 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.

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.

As per usual, Craig does an outstanding job with this topic. He is one of the preeminent scholars in this area of apologetics, and it shows. Highly recommended.

I read this book last week and found it very edifying. William lane Craig and Paul Copen have done a great job on this issue. Readers must remember that the book goes through the Bibical, philosophical and scientific evidence (which is noted in the title) for Creation out of nothing.

The Author go through first, the biblcial evidence of the Old Testament and then to the New Testament. They also travel the road of extra biblical evidence and then get into the philosophical arguements and they were quite good. I honestly got lost about the abstarct objects.( but this doesn't mean that this wasn't a well written chapter. It just mean I need more understanding in the world of philosophy, which I thought I had enough but I guess I don't) The scienctific was great. this is a great book but be prepared to be mentally engaged.

Good Job