Cosmology

Theological understanding of all that is

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God the Father, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the maker of "the heavens and earth, all that is visible and invisible."

One God created everything that is created. If there are other rational animals on other planets, God created them. If there are many universes, God created them.

Science studies what God created.

There can be no real disagreement between the truths known from science and the truths known from revelation because the very same God is the source of the universe, our reasoning powers, and revelation. Apparent differences stem from misunderstandings of reason or revelation.

Natural theology

Natural theology is a branch of metaphysics, which in turn is a branch of philosophy.

The Church uses Aristotelian realism as refined by Thomas Aquinas to guide its thinking about thinking and to shape is understanding of everything that can be thought.

Rom I & V I

We can recognize that there is one infinite, all-present, all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing being that is the cause of the existence and qualities of everything in the universe.

• Five Ways to Recognize God's Existence

The Big Bang

Physics studies space-time and matter-energy.

Astrophysicists argue that the Big Bang theory is the best explanation for what we observe in the universe today:

• All space-time and matter-energy in the universe were once in a particle smaller than the diameter of an atom.
• That Cosmic Egg, singularity, or God-particle inflated to the size of a grapefruit in virtually no time.
• For three hundred thousand years, the universe was a continually-expanding, hot, dark plasma. There was no room for even the shortest wavelength of light to travel from one form of matter to another.
• When the universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently for particles to form from the plasma, there was a great flash of light that is still observable in the microwave spectrum of light. This light is everywhere in the universe, but it is fading. A billion years from now, scientists will not be able to observe it. They will have to take the word of previous generations of scientists about it.
• The first stars formed by the force of gravity out of hydrogen, helium, and lithium.
• Those stars fused hydrogen, helium, and lithium into all of the elements of the periodic table.
• Second generation stars formed out of the heavy elements.
• Planets formed around those stars from the same clouds of stardust.
• The expansion of the universe will probably continue, it seems, until it reaches thermodynamic equilibrium ("heat death") on the small scale and unbounded isolation between galaxies.

Philosophies of Science

Atheistic