The matter concept has had an extraordinarily complex history, dating back to the earliest days of the sort of reflective thought that came to be called ‘philosophy’. History here, as elsewhere, offers a valuable means of understanding the present, so it is with history that I will be concerned – history necessarily compressed into simplified outline.

This story, like that of Caesar's Gaul, falls readily into three parts. First is the gradual emergence in early Greek thought of a factor indispensable to the discussion of the changing world and the progressive elaboration of that factor (or, more exactly, cluster of factors) as philosophic reflection deepened and divided. Second is the radical shift that occurred in the seventeenth century as the concept of matter took on new meanings, gave its name to the emerging philosophy of materialism and yielded place to a derivative concept, mass, in the fast-developing new science of mechanics. Third is the further transformation of the concept in the twentieth century in the light of the dramatic changes brought about by the three radically new theories in physics: relativity, quantum mechanics, and expanding-universe cosmology, with which that century will always be associated. Matter began to be dematerialized, as it were, as matter and energy were brought into some sort of equivalence, and the imagination-friendly particles of the earlier mechanics yielded way to the ghostly realities of quantum theory that are neither here nor there.

The matter concept has had an extraordinarily complex history, dating back to the earliest days of the sort of reflective thought that came to be called ‘philosophy’. History here, as elsewhere, offers a valuable means of understanding the present, so it is with history that I will be concerned – history necessarily compressed into simplified outline.

This story, like that of Caesar's Gaul, falls readily into three parts. First is the gradual emergence in early Greek thought of a factor indispensable to the discussion of the changing world and the progressive elaboration of that factor (or, more exactly, cluster of factors) as philosophic reflection deepened and divided. Second is the radical shift that occurred in the seventeenth century as the concept of matter took on new meanings, gave its name to the emerging philosophy of materialism and yielded place to a derivative concept, mass, in the fast-developing new science of mechanics. Third is the further transformation of the concept in the twentieth century in the light of the dramatic changes brought about by the three radically new theories in physics: relativity, quantum mechanics, and expanding-universe cosmology, with which that century will always be associated. Matter began to be dematerialized, as it were, as matter and energy were brought into some sort of equivalence, and the imagination-friendly particles of the earlier mechanics yielded way to the ghostly realities of quantum theory that are neither here nor there.

INTRODUCTION

That God created the universe ‘from nothing’ (ex nihilo) has been a distinctive Christian claim almost from the beginning. The phrase is, on the face of it, an odd one: it is as though ‘nothing’ were a sort of ghostly raw material for the divine act of creating. But the ‘ex nihilo’ phrase long ago was accepted as a shorthand way of saying: ‘from no prior materials’. The doctrine itself only gradually took shape over more than a thousand years. In this chapter, I propose to sketch in broad outline some of the main features of that long gestation period. It lends itself readily to a threefold division: creation in the Old Testament; creation ex nihilo in the early Christian Church; creation of ‘all together’ in St Augustine.

CREATION IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

The majestic chapters with which the Bible opens could easily give the impression that cosmogony, the question of cosmic origins, was of major concern from the beginning to the writers of the Old Testament. But this was by no means the case. The two ‘creation’ chapters date from very different periods of Israel's history. Genesis 2, much the older, dates back perhaps as far as the tenth-century-bc Israel of David and Solomon. It deals primarily with the origin of man and woman, and the role of Yahweh in their making. Though Yahweh is said to have already made the heavens and the earth, nothing more is added about cosmic origins.

When the “origin-of-life” issue is debated nowadays, the question most often asked is: How did the first cell originate? What sequence of processes could have given rise to the extraordinary complexity of even the most rudimentary living cell? Once such a cell was in place, the assumption is that metabolism and descent with modification could begin and the Darwinian selection process could get under way, generating over the course of aeons the vast profusion of natural kinds, living and extinct, that we know. But what sort of selection principles, working on what sort of materials, could have sufficed in the first place to build up the kind of intricate structure that even the smallest functioning cell requires? In short, how did the living come from the non-living in the first place?

In earlier centuries, the transition from non-life to life would have seemed unproblematic, indeed entirely commonplace. It would have appeared obvious that living comes from non-living in the world of nature all the time: maggots develop in decaying flesh, tiny worms appear in rotting fruit, and so on. At the lowest levels of living complexity, matter (it seemed) could generate life unaided. Only with the advent of the microscope and finally the experiments of Pasteur was it shown that this kind of spontaneous generation was only apparent: no real transition from non-living to living actually occurred in it. So how did life begin?

The chapters in this volume, written from a wide variety of perspectives, explore the possibility of extending the theme of “fine-tuning” beyond the domain of cosmology, where it first entered into serious discussion in the mid-1970s, to other sciences such as biochemistry and biology. As a prelude to this investigation, it seems worthwhile to explore the theme of fine-tuning itself in some detail, given the ambiguities that still surround it and the vigor of the continuing disagreement as to what its implications are. How did fine-tuning make its way into the cosmological discussion? What precisely did – and does – it amount to? What were – and still are – the responses to it? How is one to evaluate those responses? Achieving a measure of clarity on these issues should make it easier to appreciate the search for fine-tuning or its analogs elsewhere in the sciences.

The infinities of space and time in Newtonian mechanics were not propitious to the formulation of a cosmology, a theory of the cosmic whole, although the notion of gravity gave a hint, at least, as to how material complexity could form. The unification of space and time by Einstein's general theory in a non-Euclidean geometrical framework offered new possibilities, and Hubble's subsequent confirmation of galactic expansion pointed Lemaître to a universe model that would, from a “primeval atom,” expand into the universe we know.