Okay,

you also write in the article about the rise and you say fall of some of the traditional arguments for God's existence. And you separate those arguments into cosmological arguments and design arguments. What's the difference? The

cosmological argument is the argument from the first cause or the need for a first cause to explain the first effect. And there are a couple different forms of cosmological argument, but one of the popular ones in the Middle Ages was known as the Kalam cosmological argument. And it went like this, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe must have a cause separate from itself. We call that cause God said the medieval philosophers. That argument fell into some, not so much disrepute, but just disrepair in the period of the Enlightenment. As many people said, well, we'll grant you the first premise that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. But how do we really know the universe had a beginning? And there wasn't really a scientific way to settle that question. There were some philosophical arguments against what were called actual infinites. But there was no decided scientific evidence for a beginning to the universe. And it became more and more the default view during the 19th century and into the early 20th century, that the universe was eternal and self-existent. It was infinite in time and space. It didn't have a beginning so that in a sense matter was a thing from which everything else came. Matter and energy. Is that related what they used to call the steady state theory? Right. The steady state was actually an attempt in the 1940s and 50s to resuscitate that kind of default view coming into the beginning of the century that was challenged by the discovery that the universe did have a beginning, what we now call

the Big Bang Theory. And you write about the impact of both the Big Bang Theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity on the traditional arguments against the existence of God.

Right. If that second premise is the key premise, does the universe have a beginning or not? It's just an absolutely fascinating episode in the history of science that during the last century, scientists were effectively able to answer that question. It's an ancient question that goes all the way back to the Greeks. Is the universe finite or infinite? Is it eternal and self-existent? Or did it perhaps require a creator beyond itself? Well, the evidence that the universe had a beginning was startling and shocking, and it upset a lot of philosophical sensibilities, but it started in the 19 teens with Einstein's formulation of the theory of general relativity, his field equations implied that there had been a beginning. And then in the 1920s and 30s, the observational astronomers, in particular Edwin Hubble, found evidence of an expanding universe that suggested that if the universe was expanding in the forward direction of time, if you went backwards in time, that eventually all the galaxies that were moving away from us now would have been clumping closer and closer together, eventually getting back to a place where they would have all congealed marking the beginning of the universe itself. So it was a striking kind of two-fold discovery in theoretical physics, and then separately in astronomy, a scientist came to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning from two separate lines of evidence.

Okay.