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Contents
PREFACE 1
1 .INTRODUCTION
Science and Religion 3
The Evolution of Creation Theories 5
Four Classes of Creation Theories 8
The Scientific Method 10
2. ANCIENT CREATION MYTHS
Egyptian Myth of Nut and Shu 13
Babylonian Myth of Marduk and Tiamat 14
Greek Myths in Hesiod's Theogony 16
The Hebrew Genesis 17
Chinese Myth of Phan Ku 18
Norse Creation Myths 20
Other Creation Myths 20
3. EARLY CREATION THEORIES
Heraclitus 22
Parmenides 24
Plato 26
Aristotle 28
Lucretius 32
Monotheism Ascendant 34
Ptolemy 35
St.Augustine of Hippo 38
St.Thomas Aquinas 41
Rabbi Isaac Luria 43
4. THE GOD HYPOTHESES
God and His Withdrawal 46
Revelation and Reason 48
Theism, Deism, and Pantheism
The Existence of God 49
The Cosmological Arguments 49
The Moral Argument 51
The Teleological Argument 51
The Ontological Argument 52
The Principle of Sufficient Reason 52
A Natural God 53
God and the Anthropic Principle 54
Contents
5. CRITIQUE OF THE GOD HYPOTHESIS
Atheism, Agnosticism and Skepticism 56
David Hume and the Saints 57
Refutation of the Cosmological Arguments 57
Refutation of the Moral Argument 58
Refutation of the Teleological Argument 59
Immanuel Kant 60
Refutation of the Ontological Argument 61
The Infinite Regression Argument 62
Oher Popular Arguments 63
6. THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
AND THE NEWTONIAN SYNTHESIS
Copernicus 65
Galileo Galilei 69
Bruno, Digges and Kepler 72
Isaac Newton 75
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 79
Thomas Wright 82
Immanuel Kant 83
7. SOME BASIC CONCEPTS
The Conservation of Energy 88
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle 91
Energy of the Vacuum 96
Forces and Messengers 100
8. MORE BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Astronomical Distances 105
Astronomical Velocities 111
Quantum Tunneling 114
From Dark Stars to Black Holes 117
The Evolution of Protostars 119
White Dwarfs 120
Neutron Stars 121
Pulsars 122
Supernovae 123
Black Holes 125
Quasars 128
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9. STATIC AND EXPANDING UNIVERSES
Albert Einstein's Universe 131
Special Relativity 132
General Relativity 135
Einstein's Cosmology 138
The Cosmological Constant 142
Edwin Hubble's Universe 143
Steady State Cosmology 148
10 THE BIG BANG-BEFORE AND AFTER
The Age of the Universe 153
The Fate of the Universe 157
The Cyclic Universe 161
11. THE STANDARD MODEL
Big Bang Cosmology 164
Unresolved Problems 168
Inflation Cosmology (The First 10-30 Seconds) 171
Unresolved Problems 177
12. QUANTUM COSMOLOGY
Tryon's Vacuum Fluctuation Theory 179
Quantum Tunneling in Imaginary Time 184
Singularities and Quantum Fuzz 186
Black Holes, Singularities and Baby Universes 190
Participatory and Parallel Universes 194
13. BEYOND THE BEGINNING
Linde's Eternal, Chaotic, Self-Reproducing 200
Fractal, Inflationary Multiverse
Darwinian Universes 207
The Most Probable Universe 208
Spacetime - Relational and Infinite 210
A New Anthropic Principle 212
God and Cosmological Natural Selection 213
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14. NATURAL LAW
Causality, Chance and Chaos 216
Determinism and Chance 219
From Natural Law and Order to Chaos 222
Chaos Control and the "New Order" 226
Chance and Indeterminacy in the Microworld 228
The Linde Question 233
15. REALITY
The Search for Reality 234
The Structure of Reality 236
Reality and the Energy Hypothesis 238
The Spacetime Concept 239
Reality or Illusion 242
Summary 246
16. CREATION
The God Hypothesis 248
The Zero Hypothesis 252
The Energy Hypothesis 254
The Withdrawal Hypothesis 256
Conclusions 258
Why? 261
17. SOURCES AND FOOTNOTES 264
18. CREDITS 275
19. INDEX 277
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