Professor William Carroll explores the philosophical and theological implications of cosmological claims about the beginning of the universe, emphasizing the distinction between creation and scientific explanations and cautioning against the "error of beginnings."

This lecture was given on August 29th, 2024, at Brown University.

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About the Speaker:

Professor William E. Carroll has recently retired from research and teaching at the Aquinas Institute of Blackfriars in the University of Oxford.  For the past two years he has been a Visiting Professor at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (Wuhan, China), and at the Hongyi Honor College of Wuhan University. He is a European intellectual historian and historian of science whose research and teaching concern: 1) the reception of Aristotelian science in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and the development of the doctrine of creation, and 2) the encounter between Galileo and the Inquisition.  He has also written extensively on the ways in which mediaeval discussions of the relationship among the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology can be useful in contemporary questions arising from developments in biology and cosmology. 

He is the author of four books: Aquinas on Creation; La Creación y las Ciencias Naturales: Actualidad de Santo Tomás de Aquino; Galileo: Science and Faith; and Creation and Science (with translations in Slovak, Spanish, and Chinese).  His published work has appeared in 12 languages.

Over many years he has written more than 25 op-ed pieces for Public Discourse, the web site of the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton.

Keywords: Big Bang, Causality, Cosmology, Creation, Ex Nihilo, Hawking, Nothing, Quantum Mechanics, The Grand Design, Vilenkin