Doubtless few will wish to know,
but this is a good place to put this stuff!
This is my abridgement of Stanley Jaki's 1974 book
of the same
name. It is a full-scale historical demonstration of the opinion
that is now widespread amoung historians of science, that
Christian belief underpins the scientific method. Scientists
believe that the world ("the Universe") is not unintelligible in
principle, and moreover that we are capable of understanding
it. This corresponds to the Christian beliefs that God is not
capricious, and that we are made "in the image of God",
that is, able to appreciate God's handiwork. Putting it
another way, God is rational, and people matter.
In particular, Jaki is interested in the
philosophical attitudes
to
time in
the
various civilizations he considers, and the enormous
philosophical importance of the Christian insistence on
finite time.
(He
considers Islam at length, from a philosophical point of
view -- the Muslims also believe in Creation and the Day of
Judgement; but he concludes that they never succeeded in shedding
their
Aristotelianism.)
I think that this is an important basic book,
but that Jaki's
expression was rather obscure (and also presupposed rather a lot of
knowledge of the reader). I have tried to clarify and simplify it
and hope that some may find this abridgement useful.
Como
gony is
an account of the creation of the universe, where cosmo
geny is an account of the evolution
of the universe. This is a wide-ranging essay considering how to
read the Creation accounts in Genesis. I think that a correct
reading is one that the original author(s) would have recognised and
is, rather surprisingly, completely consistent with modern
cosmology.
Curiously, although many assert that religious
beliefs are not
falsifiable
in a Popperian sense, it turns out that a central
assertion of the monotheistic faiths (Judaism,
Christianity, Islam), the Creation, is now
conventional wisdom in physics. The Big Bang theory is supported
by the standard theory of the Cosmic Microwave Background with the
resulting observed H/He ratio in the universe, and the observed
abundance of isotopes explained by stellar nucleosynthesis. The
singular nature of the Big Bang is emphasised theoretically by the
Penrose/Hawking gravitational collapse theorem of 1970.
Thus, the Christian assertion of Creation can reasonably be said
to be proved!
Page last updated by Chris Jeynes 9th
February 2011
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