Since around 1980 cosmological interest has shifted to the first ten
million, billion, billion, billion, billionth of a second (10-43
second) of the universes history, when the developing universe was so small as
to be significantly affected by <!g>quantum theory. Stephen Hawking records that he
was at a conference at the Vatican in 1981 at the end of which:
the participants were granted an
audience with the Pope (John Paul II). He told us that it was all right to
study the evolution of the universe after the <!g>big bang, but we should not
inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and
therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of
the talk I had just given at the conference - the possibility that space-time
was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment
of Creation.![[FTEXT]](../stdart/fn.gif)
The physicist continues, ironically, I had no wish to share the fate of
<!g>Galileo... However, Hawking has ventured various theological comments much
more extreme than any uttered by Galileo, most famously that:
So long as the universe had a beginning,
we could suppose that it had a creator. But if the universe is really
completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither
beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?![[FTEXT]](../stdart/fn.gif)
To understand Hawkings new idea for a universe with no beginning see the
Hawking-Hartle proposal for the early universe. See also <!g>theological
responses to quantum cosmology.
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Contributed by: <!g>Dr. Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (<!g>T&T Clark, 1999)
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