Bill Carroll

I went to hear a lecture down the road at St. Charles Seminary the other day. The speaker was Bill Carroll, an Oxford Professor, and the topic was Aquinas, creation and contemporary science (it was titled, "Creation and a Self-Sufficient Universe: Cosmology, Evolution, and Thomas Aquinas"). This was certainly the single most interesting lecture on the topic I'd ever heard. Well, quite possibly the only lecture on this topic I've heard, too. But it was still excellent.

He was arguing that you can know something, although not everything, about creation from metaphysics. Other things about creation are only known through revelation--that "the created universe has a temporal beginning, ... that creation is an act of divine love and that the opening phrase of Genesis, 'in the beginning,' also means in and through the second Person of the Trinity." His lecture, though, explored exactly what can be known about creation solely through reason and argued that the path to reasoning to a Creator is through metaphysics rather than the natural sciences.

He primarily negatively defined creation, which is to say, he explained many misconceptions about creation that emerge from the fact that we think about creation first from how man creates. He argued, however, that God creating is different in kind (not in degree) from man creating. He said a couple of things about creation--it means that things depend upon God as the complete cause; creation is not a change ("To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a change in something"); creation is not a distant event, but "the on-going complete causing of the existence of all that is"; creation is a "metaphysical dependence in the order of being."


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