by John Byl
2024 / 267 pages
From the author’s website:
“Cosmology is the most important subject in the world.
“Why? Because it is the story of the entire world: its origin, structure, purpose, and destiny. As people in that world, its story necessarily forms the background for our own personal story. It concerns our deepest beliefs, values, and hopes.
“Our cosmology forms the basis for our response to the most fundamental questions about our existence. Our cosmological beliefs shape our morality, religion, and culture. They largely influence our worldview.
“Our prime aim is to examine and develop cosmology from a Christian perspective. Very briefly, Christianity holds that God created, from nothing, a two-realm universe consisting of both a visible and a heavenly part, whose history follows God’s glorious plan. The original creation was good. It culminated in the creation of Adam, created in the image of God, to serve him and glorify Him. Unhappily, Adam’s fall into sin corrupted man, along with the entire physical world. Happily, man can be redeemed through the gracious work of Christ. After the Day of Judgment, believers will be transformed to rule with Christ on a renewed Earth cleansed from sin and corruption.
“The main challenger to Christian cosmology is Big Bang cosmology, the mainstream secular cosmology currently embraced by most Western scientists and scholars.
“This book aims to probe beyond the usual questions of origins and to dig deeper into various underlying philosophical and theological issues. The emphasis will be on the philosophical presuppositions and theological implications of modern cosmology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the significance of the Bible for cosmology.
“To be accessible to the general reader, I assume no prior technical knowledge of cosmology. Although specific cosmological models tend to be highly mathematical, this book has only a few simple equations.”
