Is Big Bang Cosmology In Conflict With Divine Creation?

  • Book chapter (PDF)
  • 8 pages
  • Level: university

A chapter by Fr. William R. Stoeger, S. J., a physicist with the Vatican Observatory, written for the book The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican: “By considering the recent educated scientific speculation on what may have led to the Big Bang and the Planck era, we shall find that quantum cosmology – and the physics upon which it relies – promises to reveal a great deal, but cannot provide an alternative to the traditional philosophical notion of divine creation, creation from nothing, in accounting for the universes’s ultimate origin.”  Topics include What Is the Big Bang?; The Planck Era and “the Beginning” of the Universe; Insights from Quantum Cosmology; The Basic Insight of Creatio ex Nihilo; Conclusion.

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