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An Alternative to Creatio ex Nihilo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Lewis S. Ford
Lewis S. Ford
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, Old Dominion University, Norfolk
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Extract

For many philosophical thinkers down through the centuries, the notion of a creation out of sheer nothing has been found to be quite unintelligible. Nevertheless the idea of creation preserves an important insight and needs to be freed from the difficulties of this traditional formulation. Alfred North Whitehead has offered an alternative theory of creation worth exploring: each individual actuality creates itself out of prior creative acts. God then serves to direct this creative process.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1983 , pp. 205 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

page 205 note 1 Citations from the pre-Socratic philosophers in this first section are taken from Robinson, John Mansley, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).Google Scholar

page 206 note 1 Boyd, James W. and Crosby, Donald A. ‘Is Zoroastrianism Dualistic or Monotheistic?’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLVU, 4 (December 1979), 557–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 208 note 1 This is Whitehead's well-known ontological principle ‘that every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence’. Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 36.Google Scholar

page 208 note 2 Systematic Theology, I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 256.Google Scholar

page 209 note 1 Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 303.Google Scholar