Dr Paul Allen

Some philosophers are claiming God doesn’t exist because the universe is big and mostly humanity-free.  These academic philosophers look across the vastness of space and say, “God would not have made something so big and yet so sparse in humanity. Therefore God doesn’t exist.” From the  Real Clear Science  article  “Does the Size of the Universe Prove God Doesn’t Exist?”  by philosopher Emily Thomas we learn: Philosophers of religion such as Michael Martin and Nicholas Everitt have asked us to consider the kind of universe we would expect the Christian God to have created, and compare it with the universe we actually live in. They argue there is a mismatch. Everitt focuses on how big the universe is, and argues this gives us reason to believe the God of classical Christianity doesn’t exist. What’s big? Thomas says, Our own planet is 150m kilometres away from the sun. Earth’s nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system , are four light year...

God chose a specific time, place, and culture to inspire people to produce what we read in the Old Testament : the ancient Mediterranean and the ancient Near East of the second and first millennia b.c. Understanding the worldview of this culture can lead to more faithful understandings of Scripture on our part, especially when it comes to understanding how the Israelites viewed God and the universe. Old Testament Cosmology “Cosmology” refers to the way we understand the structure of the universe. The biblical writers’ conception of how the heavens and earth were structured by God represents a particular cosmology. The Israelites believed in a universe that was common among the ancient civilizations of the biblical world. It encompassed three parts: a heavenly realm, an earthly realm for humans, and an underworld for the dead. These three tiers are reflected in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in ...

The metric expansion of space. The inflationary epoch is the expansion of the metric tensor at left. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) This is a challenging day to be a journalist on the science beat, if the goal is to avoid ultimate questions . I am happy to report that  The Washington Post  — to my surprise, quite frankly — didn’t try to avoid the obvious. Here’s the  top of its story  on the Big Bang update that is making global headlines: In the beginning, the universe got very big very fast, transforming itself in a fraction of an instant from something almost infinitesimally small to something imponderably vast, a cosmos so huge that no one will ever be able to see it all. This is the premise of an idea called cosmic inflation — a powerful twist on the big-bang theory — and Monday it received a major boost from an experiment at the South Pole called BICEP2. A team of astronomers led by John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics anno...

Image via Wikipedia Some modern theorists believe that the world was created by nothing. Note the difference between saying that the world was created from nothing and saying that the universe was created  by  nothing.  In this modern view the rabbit comes out of the hat without a rabbit, a hat, or even a magician. The modern view is far more miraculous than the biblical view. It suggests that nothing created something. More than that, it holds that nothing created everything—quite a feat indeed! Biblical creation sounds better than the big bang out of nothing theory Related articles Why Does a Species Keep Perpetuating? (zazenlife.com) Evolve : Speed (milkandcookies.com) In A Data Driven World, Tablet Publishers Have An Evolving Toolset (readwriteweb.com) Evolve : Flight (milkandcookies.com) Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Again: An Interview with Vanessa Carlton (Feature) (popmatters.com) Can we escape from our biology and become more evolved? (ch1me.wo...

Image via Wikipedia I think that it is impossible for something to create itself. (I also think that it is impossible for something to explain itself.) So I disagree with the claim -- attributed to Hawking -- that the universe can create itself from nothing.  This is not to say that I disagree with Hawking's model of the universe (though, given the track record of global cosmology , I'd say the odds are that it is false); what I disagree with is the suggestion that that model involves something that is properly called 'self-creation'.  (In my opinion, Hawking's model either involves absence of cause, or else it involves necessary cause. Most plausibly, absence of cause.)  There are many good things that have been written about cosmological arguments. As on almost any topic in philosophy , a good place to start is with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:   http://plato.stanford.edu/   . Most discussions of cosmological arguments make some comments a...