Description
Book Synopsisn this book – an expanded version of his 2014 University of Dallas Aquinas Lecture – Father Robert Spitzer audaciously combines the intellectual legacies of two Catholic priests, St. Thomas Aquinas and Monsignor Georges Lemaître. Living in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas ardently believed that, as he wrote in the Summa contra gentiles, “truth which human reason is naturally endowed to know cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith.” But human reason has made many advances since Thomas’s days. One of them is the Big Bang theory, which Georges Lemaître, professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain, discovered in 1927. According to this theory, the universe as we know it began billions of years ago with an unimaginably powerful explosion. Is Thomas’s metaphysical vision of the universe, which includes the existence of a Creator who made and ordered the cosmos, compatible with contemporary cosmology? That is the question which Father Spitzer addresses in this book.
Table of ContentsForeword Introduction Section I: Physical and Metaphysical Method: Can Science Indicate Creation? Section II: Georges Lemaître, the Big Bang Theory, and the Modern Universe Section III: Space-Time Geometry Proofs and the Beginning of Physical Reality Section IV: Entropy and the Beginning of our Universe Section V: From Physics to Metaphysics: From the Beginning to Creation Section VI: Fine-Tuning ““for Life”” at the Big Bang: Implications of Supernatural Intelligence Section VII: Richard Dawkins’s Objection and a Thomistic Metaphysical Response 1. Richard Dawkins’s Objection 2. An Eight-Step Thomistic Proof of God 3. A Response to Richard Dawkins 4. A Metaphysics of Restricted Being Conclusion: Combining the Physical and Metaphysical Evidence Endnotes Bibliography
