Contents
Part I. The Conflict between Religion and Materialism
2. Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology
3. Scientific Materialism and Nature
The Scientific Materialist’s View of Nature
5. How Things Looked One Hundred Years Ago
Attempts to Avoid the Big Bang
7. Was the Big Bang Really the Beginning?
The Universe in the Standard Big Bang Model
The Bouncing Universe Scenario
The Eternal Inflation Scenario
8. What If the Big Bang Was Not the Beginning?
Part III. Is the Universe Designed?
10. The Attack on the Argument from Design
11. The Design Argument and the Laws of Nature
Two Ways to Think about Laws of Nature
In Science, Order Comes from Order
In Science, Order Comes from Greater Order
An Example Taken from Nature: The Growth of Crystals
12. Symmetry and Beauty in the Laws of Nature
13. “What Immortal Hand or Eye?”
Does Darwin Give “Design without Design”?
Part IV. Man’s Place in the Cosmos
15. The Anthropic Coincidences
16. Objections to the Idea of Anthropic Coincidences
17. Alternative Explanations of the Anthropic Coincidences
The Weak Anthropic Principle: Many Domains
The Weak Anthropic Principle: Many Universes
The Weakness of the Weak Anthropic Principle
The Problem with Too Many Universes
18. Why Is the Universe So Big?
If Not the Brain, Then What and How?
22. Is the Human Mind Just a Computer?
The Arguments of Lucas and Penrose
23. What Does the Human Mind Have That Computers Lack?
Is the Materialist View of the Mind Scientific?
24. Quantum Theory and the Mind
The London-Bauer Argument in Brief
Is the Traditional Interpretation Absurd?
25. Alternatives to Traditional Quantum Theory
Reinterpreting Quantum Theory: The “Many-Worlds” Idea
Appendices