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Stephen Hawking's Cosmology and Theism

Analysis 54 (4):236-243 (1994)

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The uncaused beginning of the universe.Quentin Smith - 1988 - Philosophy of Science 55 (1):39-57.details There is sufficient evidence at present to justify the belief that the universe began to exist without being caused to do so. This evidence includes the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems that are based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and the recently introduced Quantum Cosmological Models of the early universe. The singularity theorems lead to an explication of the beginning of the universe that involves the notion of a Big Bang singularity, and the Quantum Cosmological Models represent the beginning largely in (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 22 citations
Did the big Bang have a cause?Quentin Smith - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (2):649-668.details where ds is the space-time interval between two events, a the scale factor representing the radius of the universe at a given time, and do is the line element of a space with constant curvature. The application of this metric to the field equations provides us with the Friedmann’s solutions, which are the heart of big bang cosmology. With the cosmological constant omitted, these solutions read. Download Export citation Bookmark 2 citations
A natural explanation of the existence and laws of our universe.Quentin Smith - 1990 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):22 – 43.details The standard view of philosophers is that the existence of particular events within our universe is capable of being explained in terms of initial conditions and natural laws, but that the existence of our universe itself is a 'brute given' that is incapable of naturalistic explanation. A supernatural explanation of the existence of our universe may be alleged to be possible ('God created our universe so that humans may exist and the existence of humans is an intrinsic good'), but an (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 15 citations
A Big Bang Cosmological Argument for God's Nonexistence.Quentin Smith - 1992 - Faith and Philosophy 9 (2):217-237.details The big bang cosmological theory is relevant to Christian theism and other theist perspectives since it represents the universe as beginning to exist ex nihilo about 15 billion years ago. This paper addresses the question of whether it is reasonable to believe that God created the big bang. Some theists answer in the affirmative, but it is argued in this paper that this belief is not reasonable. In the course of this argument, there is a discussion of the metaphysical necessity (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 7 citations

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