Pokkari - Vasudevacharya, M - The five chapters of this book discuss a number of possibilities about the "relation" between the cosmos and God. This may seem abstract, but the way we think about the world has important implications for the way we treat it. Chapter 1 surveys the philosophical world of the ancient Greeks in order to examine the different ways that early Greek philosophers understood the relation between the cosmos and its Divine Source. From among them, I single out Plato's depiction of God as a Divine Artisan who made the world out of pre-existing matter. In chapter 2, I discuss a conception of the relation between the world and God that is different to anything envisaged by the classical Greeks. This is the idea that God created the world from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). This idea has remained part of the Western intellectual background over the course of many centuries and it has provided the dominant creation paradigm for Western civilization. Chapter 3 offers anoth