Chapter I Socrates and Plato
	Chapter II Corpus Aristotelicum
	Chapter III Weeping and Laughing Philosophers
	Chapter IV Stoicism and Skepticism
	Chapter V Scholastic Epistemology
	Chapter VI Roger and Francis Bacons
	Chapter VII Cosmology and Epistemology
	Chapter VIII Classic Protagonists of Epistemology
	Chapter IX The Sociologists
	Chapter X Galactic Stage of Cosmological Argument
	Chapter XI Logical Positivism and Beyond ...
	Chapter XII Visual Statistics in Search of Meaning

Galactic Stage of

Cosmological Argument   

The second stage of the cosmological proof of God's existence revolves around the questions of how the Universe came into being and how it will end.

In India, epic poem, "Rig-Veda," the primordial state was one of neither existence nor nonexistence, and no one, not even the Gods, knows who produced the universe.

In Egypt, the God Khepri claimed that before him, there was only non-being. When he came into being, being itself came into being, and all of the other beings were then produced from the fact of his existence.

In Judea, God Yahweh created Heaven and Earth ex nihilo and then shaped the Earth in seven days by giving verbal orders.

In 1902, Kapteyn who catalogued positions and brightness of almost a half-million stars and, using statistical methods, described their motions, observed that these motions were not random, but streamed in two opposite direction.

In 1927, Jan Oort, suggested that the two crossing streams of stars could be explained if our galaxy was spiral and rotating. This observation of galaxies also suggested that by looking at the Milky Way, we are looking toward the galactic center of where the stars are the densest.

The Big-Bang Theory   Abbe Lemaitre suggested, also in 1927, that our expanding Universe likely began with the 'big-bang,' i.e., with the explosive expansion of extremely condensed matter. The big bang theory was readily embraced since it tacitly implied that the universe could have been created.

Outside Universe   If the Universe is expanding, i.e., is "winning space,", then there must be some space beyond the Universe. Islam postulates that "Allah is above the seven heavens" and some Muslims place the God's abode is in this outside universe.

Curvature of the Universe   Albert Einstein maintained that the space-time universe is distorted due to gravitational effects. If this curvature is positive, then the Universe has a finite, closed volume, and properties analogous to that of a spheroid. Its expansion will eventually stop and the red shifts of stars, marking the expanding Universe will become the blue shifts, characteristics of the contracting Universe. After a long but finite time interval, the universe will return to the state of again being a singularity of infinite density. At this moment, it will vanish, and, possibly, again be created during the next big bang.

If this curvature is negative, then the Universe has an infinite, open volume, and properties analogous to that of a hyperboloid. Its expansion will go on and, eventually, all the energy of the stars will be used up and the universe will vanish in the total darkness. There are so far, no definite answers with respect to the curvature of the universe and its final destiny.

 The Hand and the Eye of God  Recently, the galactic argument was complemented, by some, by pictures of God's Hand and God's Eye nebulae, transmitted to Earth by Hubble telescope.