Pre-existing Matter Research Articles

Plato’s Timaeus and the Limits of Natural Science

Abstract The relationship between mind and necessity is one of the major points of difficulty for the interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus. At times Timaeus seems to say the demiurge is omnipotent in his creation, and at other times seems to say he is limited by pre-existing matter. Most interpretations take one of the two sides, but this paper proposes a novel approach to interpreting this issue which resolves the difficulty. This paper suggests that in his speech Timaeus presents two hypothetical models of creation, one with an omnipotent demiurge and one where he is limited by matter, so as to investigate their theoretical and empirical validity. Further, he shows that each model is ultimately an inadequate explanation of the first principles of the cosmos. Timaeus’ speech is therefore properly understood to be aporetic: it leaves its listeners aware of the difficulties inherent in the two models of creation, but without a more viable alternative.

How Dark Energy Might Be Produced by Black Holes

If confirmed, the new galactic observations in support of rapidly growing supermassive black holes in association with their production of dark energy may provide for a quantum leap forward in our understanding of black holes, dark energy, and universal expansion. The primary implication of these observations is that growth of black holes may well be coupled with universal expansion (“cosmological coupling”). Study of the Flat Space Cosmology (FSC) model, in conjunction with these new observations, suggests a novel mechanism of “black hole dark energy radiation”. This brief note gives a rationale for how the high gravitational energy density vacuum within or adjacent to a black hole horizon could be sufficiently energetic to pull entangled pairs of positive matter energy particles and negative dark energy “particles” of equal magnitude out of the horizon vacuum and send them off in opposite directions (i.e., gravitationally-attractive matter inward and gravitationally-repelling dark energy outward). One effect would be that a black hole can rapidly grow in mass-energy without mergers or the usual accretion of pre-existing matter. A second effect would be continual production of dark energy within the cosmic vacuum, fueling a continuous and finely-tuned light-speed expansion of the universe.

La materia e la creazione del mondo nel De opificio mundi di Filone di Alessandria

Abstract Following the traces of some references to pre-existing matter in the Septuagint, the article analyses the interpretation of Gen 1, 2a in Philo of Alexandria’s De opificio mundi with a focus on his omission of the ἀκατασκεύαστος character of the earth. Philo’s interpretation is closely linked to his conception of emptiness and to his pioneering defence of a creation ex nihilo. In his cosmology, which is articulated as a dual interpretation of the Genesis and Plato’s Timaeus, the matter plays an essential role. Philo justifies its existence on Aristotelian-Stoic grounds, highlighting the process of gradual refinement whereby matter passes from being a rough ὕλη to being an elaborate type of οὐσία.

A fairytale creation or the beginning of everything: Students’ pre-instructional conceptions about the Big Bang theory

Summary The beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, being an important subdomain in cosmology, marks the very beginning of space and time. Therefore, it has formed the modern scientific worldview. Transferring this to students through science teaching is a frequent request in science literacy discussion (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993 , Schecker et al., 2004 ). However, it is not yet clear in science education if students’ conceptions about the Big Bang vary by nationality, and therefore, if it is possible to apply the same teaching modules to students from different countries, who may have diverse social and cultural backgrounds and different curricula. These conceptions with which students enter the classroom were investigated in our study. We implemented an open-ended questionnaire survey in Germany, with questions based on recent U.S. studies. The results clearly showed, with high interrater reliabilities, widespread misconceptions like the Big Bang being an explosion of preexisting matter into empty space or the universe having a centre. Furthermore, a comparison of results from researchers in the USA, Sweden and Germany allowed us to identify differences in students’ conceptions between the countries. Our findings appear to indicate that German students have slightly better pre-instructional conceptions about the Big Bang theory.

LES AXES DE LA CRÉATION ET LA NAISSANCE DE LʹIMAGINAIRE COMME LANGAGE MYTHIQUE

The axes of the creation and birth of the imaginary as a mythical language. Our research follows the relationships of the concepts that are taking into account creation on the double axis of verticality and horizontality. We highlight those symbolic elements which would later constitute the mythical language about the sacred space-temporality. Inside this space-temporality a rich spectrum of mythical images develops; images capable of explaining the relationships of the creation plans. Without a religious perception of the temporality, the conceptualization of the axis would remain a philosophical approach. Through our point of view, the two are born simultaneously. Thanks to them, creation can be imagined. The first “frozen” formula of the mystical human spirit can be thought, brought to a palpable reality, expressed in an oral and then a written form. Studied together, temporality (sacred or not) and space are permanently imagined together. For example, a loss of mundane temporality in the secret ecstasy that offers to the soul an ascending direction does not mean getting out of universal temporality, but of its mundane section. In the sacred space the soul relates to time. Even the gods are submitted by the sacred, Aeon sometimes being synonymous to destiny. The universal creator seems to evade every touch, but not consistently, only when he avoids the descent into its created worlds. In sacredness, time and space seem or become confused, both expressing the same reality, by the immediate swing from thinking to deed. The mythical imagery conceives the displacement in the primary space-temporality by the spoken word. So, for something to appear and live, the spoken word is required. Even the divine dream appears as a pre-word of a creator’s thought. The thought follows the spoken word, the spoken word follows the gestures which finally indicate the meanings of the creative act, controlling the rhythm of the creation days. These three will later be adapted through imitation in rite. We are now situated at the limit of the physical world, a real challenge for the mythical imagery. The general feature of the mythical expression on the creation of the material world is the state of the divinity’s exhaustion, most often conceptualized by sacrifice or divine fatigue. The world geography identifies with the anatomy of a self-gutted god. Practically, material creation is most likely the complete revelation of God’s body autopsy. As each body decomposes, everything in it is an illusion. An axial approach of the phenomenon exists in all religious systems. The created element’s origin is exterior, with or without a pre-existing matter, by a god’s sacrifice or only because it has to be that way. This is the starting point of the discussion on the symbolism of axiality as a reason for the constitution of the language of creation, capable of retelling the imaginary construction of myth in an oral and then written form.

Aspects of Patristic Cosmology

GIVEN THE WEALTH of cosmological and metaphysical insights emanating classical Hellenic philosophy, notably with the PreSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists, it was inevitable (and, one might add, providential) that the early Christian theologians (known generically in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions as the Church Fathers), working to a large extent within the intellectual ambit of Hellenism, would employ aspects of that philosophical legacy in their exposition of Christian doctrine. This conceptual appropriation was further necessitated by the relative lack of cosmological content in the Christian scriptures, with the notable exception of the first chapter of Genesis. The most fundamental distinction in Patristic cosmology is that between the uncreated (Greek aktistou), which refers to God alone, and the created (Greek ktistou). In its turn the created universe consists of spiritual and material spheres, the former including the heavenly beings usually called angels. A major implication of the distinction between the uncreated and the created is that the human being, who is created, cannot by nature know God, the uncreated. (1) In the patristic understanding, God is the only source of the entire created order: visible and invisible, intelligible and sensible, rational and irrational, and formed and formless. Thus all things to a greater or lesser extent reflect an aspect of the Godhead. (2) I will proceed to sketch salient aspects of the patristic cosmology in both the Greek and Latin traditions. Creation Nothing An axiomatic concept in Christian theology is the doctrine of God's creation nothing (Latin creatio ex nihilo), although this is not explicitly taught in the Judaic and Christian scriptures. Instead, in the Genesis account God is depicted as commanding chaos to develop into order. (3) However, the Platonist teaching that God creates the world of formless (ex amorphou hyles) is echoed in the apocryphal book, Wisdom of Solomon (II : 17). The first scriptural intimation concerning creation out of nothing is found in the apocryphal book Second Maccabees (7:28), as interpreted by Origen in his Commentary on John. Referring to the heaven and the earth and all things therein, the text affirms that God made them from nonexistent things--(ex ouk onton). (4) According to the Hebrew scriptures, nothing can creation or God, for time and space are presupposed by the creation. This implies that before creation or outside God there is only the nothingness out of which he creates. (5) The New Testament is relatively silent on cosmology, except to declare that Christ is the Logos through whom God creates and sustains the cosmos (e.g., John 1:3, 10; Colossians 1:16-17). Paul does mention in his Letter to the Romans (4:17) that God calls into existence the things that do not exist (kalountos ta me onta os onta). Here the Apostle to the Gentiles indicates that the cause of the world is outside the world, with only the will of God making the world's being possible. (6) Or, stated in ontological terms, creation entails a movement non-being to being. Among the second-century Christian thinkers known as the Apologists, the Platonist notion that God creates out of formless matter was held by Justin Martyr. He found scriptural support for this in Genesis 1:1-2, in a reading that conforms to the Septuagint text. (7) Justin's younger contemporary Theophilus of Antioch moved closer to an affirmation of creatio ex nihilo. He taught that God made all things out of nothing and rejected the notion of uncreated, preexistent matter as in Hellenic philosophy. Instead, God first created (formless) matter and then fashioned the world it. (8) Similarly, in the Latin tradition both Tatian and Augustine subscribed to the notion of pre-existent matter, which was itself created by God. (9) Towards the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria argued that according to both Genesis and Plato's dialogue Timaeus God creates the world out of formless matter, which is initially in a state of relative non-being (me on) until God grants being to it. …

Hermogene

Known primarily through the heresiological writings, Hermogenes goes down in history as a dualist, almost a ditheist, who claimed the doctrine of two coexisting and ingenerated principles : God and the matter. Cleared up the commonplaces and the heresiological strategies of our sources, the analysis of the fragments and of the testimonies about Hermogenes shows that his doctrine was the expression of a specific ontological dualism : far from being an innovative thinker, Hermogenes refused the emerging doctrine of the “creatio ex nihilo” and affirmed the traditional view of the creation as the result of the demiurgic act of God who fashioned and ordered the preexistent matter. According Hermogenes, this dualism did not undermine monotheism, because God and the matter are unequal regarding their essence. It was on the basis of this axiom that he elaborated a theological system characterized by a sophisticate interlacement of anthropological, Christological and soteriological implications.

Creatio ex nihiloin Palestinian Judaism and Early Christianity

AbstractRecent decades have witnessed a near-consensus of critical opinion (1) that the idea of God's creation of matter ‘out of nothing’ is not affirmed in scripture, but instead (2) originated in a second-century Christian reaction against Gnosticism's convictions about matter as evil and creation as the work of an inferior Demiurge. (3) Judaism's interest, by contrast, was generally deemed late and philosophically derivative or epiphenomenal upon Christian ideas. This essay re-examines all three convictions with particular reference to the biblical creation accounts in Palestinian Jewish reception. After highlighting certain interpretative features in the ancient versions of Genesis 1, this study explores the reception of such ideas in texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. It is clear that the typically cited proof texts from biblical or deutero-canonical books indeed do not yield clear confirmation of the doctrine they have sometimes been said to prove. Genesis was understood even in antiquity to be somewhat ambiguous on this point, and merely to say that creation gave shape to formlessness need not entail anycreatio ex nihilo. This much seems uncontroversial. Nevertheless, closer examination also shows that the Scrolls and the rabbis do consistently affirm Israel's God as the creator ofallthings, explicitly including matter itself. Graeco-Roman antiquity axiomatically accepted that ‘nothing comes from nothing’, which also meant the pre-existence of matter. To be sure, the conceptual terminology of ‘nothingness’ came relatively late to Christians, and even later to Jews. Yet the substantive concern for God's free creation of the world without recourse to pre-existing matter is repeatedly affirmed in pre-Christian Jewish texts, and constitutes perhaps the single most important building block for the emergence of an explicit doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’. In its Jewish and Christian origins, therefore, the idea ofcreatio ex nihiloaffirms creation's comprehensive contingency on the Creator's sovereignty and freedom. This in fact is a point which has been rightly and repeatedly accented in both historic and modern Christian theology on this subject (e.g. by K. Barth and E. Brunner, J. Moltmann and C. Gunton). Well before its explicit articulation in dialogue with Hellenistic philosophy, the doctrine of God's creation of all matter was rooted in biblical texts and their Jewish interpretation, which in turn came to be refined and enriched through Christian–Jewish dialogue and controversy.

Senses of Dunamis and the Structure of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ1

AbstractThis essay aims to analyze the structure of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ by explicating various senses of the term δύναµις at issue in the treatise. It is argued that Aristotle’s central innovation, the sense of δύναµις most useful to his project in the treatise, is the kind of capacity characteristic of the pre-existent matter for substance. It is neither potentiality as a mode of being, as recent studies maintain, nor capacity for ‘complete’ activity. It is argued further that, in starting with the κύρι&ogr;ς sense of δύναµις as capacity for change, Aristotle begins with the most familiar and acknowledged kind of capacity, in order to move to the less familiar but ultimately more useful notion of capacity for substance, and to bring these two kinds together through an analogical relation.

Maimonides on the Origin of the World. By Kenneth Seeskin

In this bold and engaging book, Kenneth Seeskin provides a careful and thorough argument for the unfashionable view that Maimonides is to be “taken at his word” when he insists in his Guide of the Perplexed (trans. S. Pines, 1963) that the world was created ex nihilo and de novo, that is, not from pre-existent matter and together with the creation of time. The God who created the world is for Maimonides, according to Seeskin's reading, a God of purpose and free and benevolent will—though not of caprice—whose will and wisdom alone can account for the world's particularities and peculiarities, that is, for why things in the world that surely could have been otherwise are as they are, and for celestial phenomena that do not conform to discernibly regular patterns. It is perhaps ironic that taking Maimonides at his word represents a courageous move on Seeskin's part, but the dominance of the age-old and still flourishing “esotericist” approach to reading Maimonides's Guide makes Seeskin's project a daring one. In the face of Maimonides's expressly issued notice in the introduction to this monumental work that its contradictions are deliberate and that his method is one of “revealing and concealing” the truths it contains, scholars have not felt at liberty to take Maimonides's professions of orthodox views at face value. Some have regarded him, on the matter of creation versus eternity, as a Platonist (as he understood Plato); others are convinced that he is a strict Aristotelian (as he understood Aristotle). To contend, then, that in fact Maimonides hews to the Torah's belief that the world was created ex nihilo and de novo is in fact to swim against the scholarly tide.

II—Anthony Kenny: Seven Concepts of Creation

Professor Broadie identifies for us a number of features of the account of creation in the Timaeus: (1) The cosmos-the ordered universe in which we live is to be accounted for as a whole. (2) The cosmos is supremely beautiful and good. (3) The cause of the cosmos is non-physical, intelligent, good, and divine, i.e. God. (4) God worked on pre-existent matter. (5) God was copying an eternal paradigm. It would, I think, be very widely agreed that these five theses are true of Plato's account and pick out its significant points.

Early Formation and Late Merging of the Giant Galaxies

The most luminous galaxies in the present Universe are found at the centers of the most massive dark matter haloes, rich galaxy clusters. In the LCDM cosmology, such massive halo cores are present at redshift z=6 with a comoving number density (as a function of mass interior to ~10 kpc) that is comparable to today's value. The identity of the matter in these central regions is, however, predicted to change as major mergers bring together stars and dark matter from initially well separated sub-units. We use N-body simulations to investigate how these mergers push pre-existing matter outwards in the dominant galaxy while preserving the inner density profile of collisionless matter. It appears that the central regions of large galaxies end up dominated by stars formed in a number of dense cores, well before the last major mergers. The density profile of collisionless matter (stars and dark matter combined) in these central regions appears to be stable and to have attractor-like behavior under merging. This suggests that the baryon loading associated with dissipative contraction and star formation may be erased as subsequent mergers drive the mass distribution back to a universal profile. Such suppression of the effects of baryon loading, along with the early assembly of mass concentrations, may help resolve some apparent challenges to the CDM model for structure formation.

Hints of a Fundamental Misconception in Cosmology

To explore the frequency and range of student ideas regarding the Big Bang, nearly 1,000 students from middle school, secondary school, and college were surveyed and asked if they had heard of the Big Bang and, if so, to describe it. In analyzing their responses, we uncovered an unexpected result that more than half of the students who stated that they had heard of the Big Bang also provided responses that suggest they believe that the Big Bang was a phenomenon that organized pre-existing matter. To further examine this result, a second group of college students was asked specifically to describe what existed or occurred before, during, and after the Big Bang. Nearly 70% gave responses clearly stating that matter existed prior to the Big Bang. These results are interpreted as strongly suggesting that most students are answering these questions by employing an internally consistent element of knowledge or reasoning (often referred to as a phenomenological primitive, or p-prim), consistent with the idea that you can’t make something from nothing. These results inform the debate about the extent to which college students have pre-existing notions that are poised to interfere with instructional efforts about contemporary physics and astronomy topics.

St. Bonaventure and Arabian Interpretations of Two Aristotelean Problems

The writings of St. Bonaventure contain very strong critiques of the interpretations by Arabian philosophers, notably Avicenna and Averroes, of Aristotle's position on the origin of the world and on the nature of the human intellect. These two Aristotelean problems are handled by St. Bonaventure initially in his Commentary on the Sentences (1254-1256). 1 He takes the stand that the world as a whole was brought into being, and that its intrinsic principles of matter and form were produced from nothing. Regarding the ancient philosophers, he sees as unreasonable the Platonist position that the world was produced from pre-existent matter to which, after some time, the maker of the universe conjoined forms previously existing and separated from matter. The Aristoteleans came closer to the truth in saying that the world was made, but not from pre-existing principles. Bonaventure finds it difficult, nevertheless, to understand whether or not Aristotle held that matter and form were made from nothing. He did not apparently hold such a position, thus failing to reach the truth, though less than the other ancient philosophers.2 Their common failure to see that the world came to-be from nothing gave rise to the opinion of an eternal world, which was sustained seemingly by Aristotle, the more excellent of the philosophers: it was ascribed to him by the

Gore's “Visible Universe“

THE object of this book is “not to propound any new but simply to explain and discuss theories which have been supported by well-known and other men of science” as to “evolution of Solar System,” and to give a popular account of “construction of Universe as we see it, and its probable development from pre-existent matter,” Mr. Gore has alre idy acquired considerable success as a popular writer on astronomical subjects, and scheme of present volume is, as we might expect, a very good one. The Iirst three chipters are devoted to a popular of hypotheses of Kant and Laplace, principtl objections that have been urged against tnem, and modifications and additions suggested by recent research. In S ibsequent chtpters such subjects as fuel ofthe sun, luininiferous ether, constitution ofmatter, celestial chemistry, arid meteoritic hypothesis are dealt with. Mr. Gore then reaches purely descriptive portion of his subject, and gives excellent chapters on Milky Way, and on the latest results respecting distribution of stars and nebuLe and their relative motions. The Visible Universe. By J. Ellard Gore (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1893)