"His considered answer to what God was doing before creating the universe was "the world was made with time and not in time." Augustine's God is a being who transcends time, a being located outside time altogether and responsible for creating time as well as space and matter. ...Plato said much the same thing hundreds of years earlier. ...The history of philosophy is so rich and diverse that it would be astonishing if theories emerging from science hadn't been foreshadowed in some vague way by somebody. The significant thing about Einstein's work is that he showed in a precise, testable way, using detailed mathematical theory, how space and time are part of nature, and not merely a given arena in which the great drama of nature is acted out."