Articles

Did the World Have a Beginning?

Mark Goldblatt on a medieval debate with modern echoes.

The signature cosmological debate of the last century concerned the origin of the universe. Two principal views contended for the hearts and minds of professionals and amateurs alike: the Big Bang Theory and the Steady State Theory. The former, triumphant nowadays, holds that the world began at a single moment with a cataclysmic blast of matter and space; the latter, now largely abandoned, holds that the world had no beginning in time, that it always has and always will exist.

Curiously enough, the Big Bang-Steady State controversy had a philosophical corollary in a medieval Scholastic debate between Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Well, sort of.

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