 Concerning contrast 5, Alston takes creation ex nihilo to be fundamental to theism because it has deep roots in religious experience. He thinks that to say that God has unrealized potentialities and contingent properties is not to say that God must be in relation with some world of entities other than God. Alston admits that Hartshorne legitimately points out some of the internal contradictions contained in the classical theistic version of creation ex nihilo, but he claims that there is no connection drawn by Hartshorne between divine creation and metaphysical principles regarding relativity, contingency, and potentiality. Alston’s belief seems to be that those who accept creation ex nihilo are not saying that there is absolutely nothing at any stage: there is God. Rather, creation ex nihilo only means that there is nothing out of which God creates the universe. Here Alston seems to agree with Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, and most other theists who are analytic philosophers.