Temporal concerns

The caption under the picture of St Augustine printed with Sir Patrick Moore's review of Paul Davies's The Goldilocks Enigma (Books, November 2) states the opposite of Augustine's thought, and indeed the opposite of what Moore quotes Davies as saying. It declares that Augustine believed there were "earlier moments" before creation. But he knew that if time is part of the created order, then even if that order is temporally finite, there is no time before it began, and so in a sense it has no beginning.

Gerard Loughlin
Professor of theology and religion Durham University