Article one traces creation from nothing through Theophilus, Irenaeus, Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali. One medieval argument from that dispute has had a second career in contemporary philosophy of science, argued now partly on the strength of physical cosmology rather than only on scriptural or metaphysical grounds.
Al-Kindi and al-Ghazali argued that an infinite regress of past events is impossible, and concluded that the universe must have had a beginning and therefore a cause outside itself, a version of what is now generally called the kalam cosmological argument. William Lane Craig revived the argument from the 1970s onward, adding to the medieval reasoning the empirical claim that Big Bang cosmology independently supports a universe with an actual temporal beginning, which he presents as physical confirmation of a conclusion the medieval theologians reached by argument alone.
The physics is more contested than that presentation suggests. Stephen Hawking and James Hartle's "no-boundary proposal," and separately Alexander Vilenkin's models of quantum tunnelling from nothing, are both offered as accounts of the universe's earliest state that avoid a sharp, singular first moment of the kind the kalam argument requires, and cosmologists disagree about whether current physics settles the question of an absolute beginning at all. The dispute is now one of the more active points of contact between philosophy of religion and physics, and it inherits directly from the medieval argument: whether the universe's dependence on God, which the Abrahamic traditions hold on theological grounds regardless of the science, also requires a datable first instant, a considerably narrower and more contestable claim than the theological doctrine itself.