 According to the Thomistic doctrine of creatio continuans, God causes things to exist in the sense that their existence depends wholly on his power. If they were left to themselves they would turn into, or return into, nothingness. From this point of view creation is basically a metaphysical rather than a physical and temporal concept, and an eternal yet created universe is perfectly possible. Interestingly, the leading steady-state physicist William McCrea was also a devout Christian who argued that cosmology, in whatever form, must necessarily include the postulation of a divine creator. As theologians in the 1950s, both Protestants and Catholics, were quick to point out, Hoyle’s eternal universe was not particularly heretical, for it was still in need of a creator. Not only did they mobilize the old concept of continual divine creation, emphasizing that cosmic creation is primarily about the ontological dependence of the world on God, they also stressed that faith in God has little to do with physical cosmology in whatever of its versions. Erich Mascall, a priest and philosopher of religion, saw no reason why the steady-state model should cause worry among the faithful. As he said in 1956, “The whole question whether the world had a beginning or not is, in the last resort, profoundly unimportant for theology” (Mascall 1956, 155).