  FitzRalph deals with these topics in the Lectura Book II, qu. 1: Whether God at the beginning of time created the world from nothing. One of the more striking features of the text is its predominantly philosophical flavor and its comparative lack of theological material. The principal question is devoted to the general problem of the eternity of the world. FitzRalph begins by putting forward arguments against the beginning of the world in time. One goes as follows: if God’s power is always the same, then it was the same before the world was created; therefore, God could always from eternity have produced the world. Thus, there is no contradiction in stating that the world has always existed. FitzRalph attributes this position to the Commentary on the Sentences of Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, he continues that, even if the world is not from eternity, we can argue that in the future God might make it so, since what he once can do, he can always do. In other words, it remains part of God’s power to make a universe that has always existed, just as it remains possible for God to destroy this universe, or again, to create other universes that have always existed.