359-389...

359-389; Juan José Sanguineti, El Origen del Universo: La cosmología en busca de la filosofía (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad Catolica Argentina, 1994) and “La creazione nella cosmologia contemporanea,” Acta Philosophica 4, no. 2 (1995), pp. 285-313; Joseph Zycinski, “Metaphysics and Epistemology in Stephen Hawking’s Theory of the Creation of the Universe,” Zygon , vol. 31, no. 2 (June 1996), pp.

269-[^284]: 6 As a historian of science I am not competent to judge the specific scientific claims in these various speculations. I do wish to examine the philosophical and theological claims so frequently associated with these speculations and to show how the history of mediaeval philosophy, theology, and science is especially useful in such an examination. 7 One of the early proponents of this view was Edward Tryon of the City University of New York.

He argued that the Big Bang could be understood as “quantum tunneling from nothing.” Nature 246, no. 14 (14 December 1973), p. [^396]: 8 “Birth of Inflationary Universes,” in Physical Review D , 27:12 (1983), p. [^2851]: Other essays by Vilenkin: “Quantum Cosmology and the Initial State of the Universe, “ in Physical Review D 37 (1988), pp. 888-897, and “Approaches to Quantum Cosmology,” in Physical Review D 50 (1994), pp. 2581-2594.

9 Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time (London: Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1985), pp. 349 and [^17]: 10 God and the New Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. [^215]: When Davies speaks of a “causeless quantum transition,” he is using the term “cause” to refer to a temporal succession of predictable events.

There is a great deal of confusion in the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics, especially with respect to the meaning of Heisenberg’s “relation of uncertainty.” It is one thing to affirm that we are not able to provide a precise mathematical measure of both the velocity and the position of a sub-atomic particle; it is quite another to deny the objective reality of the particle or to contend that there is a realm of “causeless” effects. We might not be able to predict certain events.

This does mean that these events have no cause. 11 ibid. , p. viii. 12 William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, op. cit ., p. [^109]: 13 ibid ., p. [^135]: A particularly good example of the persisting confusion about the roles of science, metaphysics, and theology in understanding the universe and its origins is an essay by P.W.