 Some Christian scientists and philosophers have seen the continual creation of matter, as posited by the steady-state theory, as a manifestation of perpetual divine creation. Thus, the Catholic philosopher Philip Quinn (1993) adopted the old notion of creatio continuans to the case of steady-state cosmology. The argument is essentially that since ex nihilo creation of matter violates energy conservation, there must be an external creative cause that accounts for the violation, and this cause he identifies with perpetual divine creation. This kind of reasoning has been severely criticized by Adolf Grünbaum, who flatly dismisses the claim that underlies the idea of perpetual divine creation, namely that nothingness is the natural state of the universe. This claim has also been argued in detail by Richard Swinburne (1996), who finds it extraordinary that there exists anything at all and from the fact that something exists infers the existence of God. But according to Grünbaum there is no room for divine creation in either big-bang or steady-state cosmology. “Steady-state cosmology,” he concludes, “is indeed logically incompatible with [the] claim that divine creative intervention is causally necessary for the nonconservative popping into existence of new matter in the steady-state universe” (Grünbaum 1996, 529).