Cosmology, History, and Theology

It is difficult to doubt that we suffer at present from the manifold aspects of an economic crisis which affects all walks of life. Well, men in almost every epoch in history have maintained that they were going through a crisis which was sup posed to be always more grave than any preceding critical phase. Very often those crises were not of an economic nature, but concerned either health, the political structure, the opportunity of acquiring knowledge, and so on. I think that we would consider today that some of those claims that were made in various historical epochs were often exaggerated if viewed from a historical point of view. However, it seems undeniable that we at present are in the middle of a universal economic crisis which has affected almost every facet of our daily life. And yet, the fact that despite these adverse conditions it is still possible to gather scholars from all corners of the world to deal with often sheer theo retical and sometimes abstract pursuits is a refutation of any facile pessimism it is reassuring to all who wonder where political and social events are taking us. Our salvation may well come from those acts of the mind so character istic of the pure scientist and scholar.

Springer Book Archives

I. Cosmology: Myth or Science?.- II. Elementary Particles, Universes, and Singularity Surfaces.- III. General Relativity and our View of the Physical Universe.- IV. Quantum Relativity and the Cosmic Observer.- V. The Expansion of the Universe in the Frame of Conventional General Relativity.- VI. Models, Laws, and the Universe.- VII. Cosmology and Theology.- VIII. An Observational View of the Cosmos.- IX. The Generation of Matter and the Conservation of Energy.- X. On a Chaotic Early Universe.- XI. Cosmological Implications of Non-Velocity Redshifts-A Tired-Light Mechanism.- XII. The Role of Time in Cosmology.- XIII. On Some Cosmological Theories and Constants.- XIV. John Wyclyf on Time.- XV. The English Background to the Cosmology of Wright and Herschel.- XVI. The History of Science and the Idea of an Oscillating Universe.- XVII. Heaven and Earth-The Relation of the Nebular Hypothesis to Geology.- XVIII. Laplace as a Cosmologist.- XIX. Cosmology in the Wake of Tycho Brahe's Astronomy.- XX. Chronology and the Age of the World.- XXI. Cosmic Order and Human Disorder.- XXII. Basic Christian Assumptions about the Cosmos.- XXIII. Cosmos and Creation.- XXIV. Creation and Redemption.- Index of Proper Names.