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Stephen Hawking is a public intellectual and the best-selling author of A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with George Ellis, Stephen Hawking’s Universe: The Cosmos Explained, and many other books. Hawking is a cosmologist who is well known for his courageous battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He first published his no-boundary proposal in 1970, concerning the expansion of the universe and the big bang, and he introduced his rather technical ideas at the Vatican in 1981, where he also was able to meet and speak with Pope John Paul II. Hawking dislikes the label “atheist”, for his views on God are quite mysterious, and he has written of his quest to “know the mind of God”.

If we consider the laws of motion and energy, we can conclude that the universe was born under a very low stage of entropy, one that most theologians, especially cosmologists, have trouble accepting. The chapter argues that the universe started with a smooth and harmonious flow, even if there was such a force as gravity, which tends to move objects into clumps. It was of great importance that this smooth flow existed. It was said that it made the creation of the galaxies and planets possible. Most would question however, how this was possible. The chapter attempts to provide some observations as to how this may have happened, and how this particular feature caused the orchestration of the vast world we live in, and beyond.

This chapter examines the plausibility of infinite thinking. Realizing God's existence suggests the theological Problem of Evil, and this will be viewed here in a pantheistic approach. Cosmologists of today who believe that there is an infinite number of universes, and how this affirms pantheistic's thoughts, will be presented. The idea that changes to the divine mind could only be changes for the worse, but that in point of fact no changes are ever absolute and that divine thinking, though infinitely rich, may not extend to many truths, is also argued.

This chapter discusses the particle physicists' considerations of nonbaryonic matter. It takes into account the condition that if this nonbaryonic matter were produced in the hot early stages of expansion of the universe, then its remnant mass density must not exceed that allowed by the relativistic big bang cosmological model (again, assuming the relativistic theory). But it is notable that cosmologists took over the notion of nonbaryonic dark matter before the particle physics community had taken much interest in the astronomers' evidence of the presence of subluminal matter. The nonbaryonic dark matter most broadly discussed in the 1980s came in two varieties, cold and hot. The latter would be one of the known class of neutrinos with rest mass of a few tens of electron volts. The initially hot (meaning rapidly streaming) neutrinos in the early universe would have smoothed the mass distribution, and that smoothing would have tended to cause the first generation of structure to be massive systems that must have fragmented to form galaxies.

This chapter examines why in the early 1980s cosmologists co-opted the astronomers' subluminal mass and the particle physicists' nonbaryonic matter in what became known as the standard cold dark matter, or sCDM, cosmological model. The letter “s” might be taken to mean that the model was designed to be simple (as it was) but it instead signified “standard,” not because it was established but because it came first. A large part of the cosmology community soon adopted variants of the sCDM model as bases for exploration of how galaxies might have formed in the observed patterns of their space distribution and motions, and for analyses of the effect of galaxy formation on the angular distribution of the sea of thermal radiation. This widespread adoption was arguably overenthusiastic, because it was easy to devise other models, less simple to be sure, that fit what we knew at the time. And it was complicated by the nonempirical feeling that space sections surely are flat.