Thomas Aquinas's analysis of what it means to create can help to detangle current debates about the beginning of the universe

Developments in contemporary science, especially evolutionary biology and cosmology, have been used to support a kind of “totalizing naturalism” according to which the universe and the processes within it need no explanation beyond the categories of the natural sciences themselves.

Whether one speaks of self-organizing principles in living things or of processes of emergence, the conclusion often reached is that nature is self-sufficient. A creator is irrelevant at best, so the argument goes. Theories in contemporary cosmology have been used both to affirm and to deny the existence of a creator. Both Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design (2010) and Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (2012) propose that contemporary cosmology allows us to account for the coming into existence of the universe “out of nothing” without