SOURCE: Feldman, Seymour. “Gersonides's Proofs for the Creation of the Universe.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 35 (1967): 113-37.

In the following essay, Feldman analyzes Gersonides's ideas regarding time, motion, and the creation of the universe.

One of the more lively speculative issues in medieval thought was the question of the creation of the universe. Once Aristotle's physics had become part of the intellectual heritage of the medieval world, a philosopher committed to a Biblical conception of the universe had to cope with Aristotle's claim that the universe is eternal. Although the majority of medieval philosophers rejected this claim, there were several different ways in which the creation theory was defended. Prior to Maimonides it was widely believed that the creation theory was philosophically provable. The Kalam, for example, developed several different arguments in behalf of this thesis.¹ Maimonides, however, put a damper on this enterprise, for...