In earlier writings, I argued that neither of the two major physical cosmologies of the twentieth 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 thatthe-world-should-exist-at-t supposedly brings about its actual existence at t.In an effort to establish the current viability of this doctrine of perpetual divine conservation. Philip Quinn I argued that it is entirely compatible with physical energy-conservation in the Big Rang 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. Resides, 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. (shrink)

According to some cosmologists, the big bang cosmogony and even the (now largely defunct) steady-state theory pose a scientifically insoluble problem of matter-energy creation. But I argue that the genuine problem of the origin of matter-energy or of the universe has been fallaciously transmuted into the pseudo-problem of creation by an external cause. A fortiori, it emerges that the initial "true" and "false" vacuum states of quantum cosmology do not vindicate biblical divine creation ex nihilo at all.

The paper is inspired by the arguments raised recently by Grunbaum criticizing the current approaches of many cosmologists to the problem of spacetime singularity, matter creation and the origin of the universe. While agreeing with him that the currently favored cosmological ideas do not indicate the biblical notion of divine creation ex nihilo, I present my viewpoint on the same issues, which differs considerably from Grunbaum's. First I show that the symmetry principle which leads to the conservation law of energy (...) is violated when the time axis is terminated at t = 0. Next I discuss why this epoch (t = 0) is more a mathematical artifact whose supposed significance may disappear when one goes beyond the classical relativistic cosmology. This is illustrated by the example of quantum cosmology. (shrink)