According to some cosmologists, the big bang cosmogony and even the (now largely defunct) steady-state theory pose a scientifically insoluble problem of matter-energy creation. But I argue that the genuine problem of the origin of matter-energy or of the universe has been fallaciously transmuted into the pseudo-problem of creation by an external cause. A fortiori, it emerges that the initial "true" and "false" vacuum states of quantum cosmology do not vindicate biblical divine creation ex nihilo at all.

Summary Cosmology has always been different from other areas of the natural sciences. Although an observationally supported standard model of the universe emerged in the 1960s, more speculative models and conceptions continued to attract attention. During the last decade, ideas of multiple universes (the ‘multiverse’) based on anthropic reasoning have become very popular among cosmologists and theoretical physicists. This had led to a major debate within the scientific community of the epistemic standards of modern cosmology. Is the multiverse a scientific (...) hypothesis, or is it rather a philosophical speculation disguised as science? This paper offers a review of the recent and still ongoing controversy concerning the multiverse, emphasizing its foundational nature and relation to philosophical issues. It also compares the multiverse controversy to some earlier episodes in the history of twentieth-century cosmology when particular theories and approaches came under attack for betraying the ideals of proper science. (shrink)

One of the most important and most frequently discussed theological problems related to cosmology is the creation problem. Unfortunately, it is usually considered in a context of a rather simplistic understanding of the initial singularity (often referred to as the Big Bang). This review of the initial singularity problem considers its evolution in twentieth‐century cosmology and develops methodological rules of its theological (and philosophical) interpretations. The recent work on the “noncommutative structure of singularities” suggests that on the fundamental level (below (...) the Planck's scale) the concepts of space, time, and localization are meaningless and that there is no distinction between singular and nonsingular states of the universe. In spite of the fact that at this level there is no time, one can meaningfully speak about dynamics, albeit in a generalized sense. Space, time, and singularities appear only in the transition process to the macroscopic physics. This idea, explored here in more detail, clearly favors an atemporal understanding of creation. (shrink)

Contemporary visions of nature have been deeply affected by the ongoing interaction and interpenetration of science, nature, and society. These new visions appear to be more complex than older visions of nature and at the same time they seem to challenge our notions of authenticity. "New Visions of Nature" focuses on the emergence of these new visions of complex nature in three domains. The first selection of essays reflects public visions of nature, that is, nature as it is experienced, encountered, (...) and instrumentalized by diverse publics. The second selection zooms in on micro nature and explores the world of contemporary genomics. The final section returns to the macro world and discusses the ethics of place in present-day landscape philosophy and environmental ethics. The contributions to this volume explore perceptual and conceptual boundaries between the human and the natural, or between an ‘out there’ and ‘in here.’ They attempt to specify how nature has been publicly and genomically constructed, known and described through metaphors and re-envisioned in terms of landscape and place. By parsing out and rendering explicit these divergent views, the volume asks for a re-thinking of our relationship with nature. (shrink)