Cody Rudisill here for my first short foray into ATP. The guys over at Philocosmology released a draft of Sean Carroll’s paper “Does the Universe Need God?” which is set to appear in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. Click the article title to check it out.
It was a great read; quick, to the point, and informative relative to where cosmological studies are epistemologically, and how Theistic theories of creation (will) fit into what is known (or ever will be known) by cosmology. I’ll let you read it for yourself rather than describe it further. I will point out two minor faults I had with the paper. Both were anachronistic in nature. On page 4 he contrasts Euclidean and Lorentzian geometries calling the former a four-dimensional geometry and the latter a spacetime that makes a time-like and space-like distinction. The problem here is that a Lorentzian geometry technically isn’t a spacetime at all; that’s why Lorentzians distinguish between space and time. He makes a similar mistake on page 12 referring to “Newtonian spacetime.” This could be debated, but by contrasting general relativity with Newtonian physics he appears to be referencing Newtonian space and time (a 3+1 ontology; not a four-dimensional one).
