The Error of Beginnings and the Beginning of Errors: Creation and the Origin of the Universe | Prof. William Carroll

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on August 29th, 2024, at Brown University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Professor William E. Carroll has recently retired from research and teaching at the Aquinas Institute of Blackfriars in the University of Oxford. For the past two years he has been a Visiting Professor at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (Wuhan, China), and at the Hongyi Honor College of Wuhan University. He is a European intellectual historian and historian of science whose research and teaching concern: 1) the reception of Aristotelian science in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and the development of the doctrine of creation, and 2) the encounter between Galileo and the Inquisition. He has also written extensively on the ways in which mediaeval discussions of the relationship among the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology can be useful in contemporary questions arising from developments in biology and cosmology.

He is the author of four books: Aquinas on Creation; La Creación y las Ciencias Naturales: Actualidad de Santo Tomás de Aquino; Galileo: Science and Faith; and Creation and Science (with translations in Slovak, Spanish, and Chinese). His published work has appeared in 12 languages.

Over many years he has written more than 25 op-ed pieces for Public Discourse, the web site of the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Did you know the Timistic Institute offers two full-ride scholarships for the
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0:26.5	2026 academic year by January 28th, 2025, the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.
0:32.5	That's to mystic institute.org slash MA dash scholarships.
0:39.4	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:42.3	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church,
0:46.8	and the wider public square.
0:48.6	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute
0:53.1	chapters around the world. To learn more
0:55.6	and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org. What is the beginning? It's a simple
1:04.1	work, but difficult to define, in part because it admits of many applications.
1:13.6	Beginning is a relative term. It always points to something beyond itself.
1:16.6	Thus, to speak of a beginning,
1:19.6	necessarily includes a reference to some thing or things that follow from it.
1:25.6	Looking back to a beginning already involves some recognition
1:32.0	of what has come after. And there are as many beginnings as there are stories we tell about
1:38.6	ourselves, our lives, our origins, and ultimately of the origin of all things, of the universe itself.
1:46.2	Obviously, one thinks here of the opening words of the Bible in the beginning.
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