God and Cosmos: A Christian View of Time, Space, and the Universe

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best young-earth creationist book ever
Review: Byl has written a fascinating and sure-footed work on the subject of Christianity and astronomy. Even deciding what criteria measure success in this subject is no small task, but Byl, being theologically and philosophically astute, does a very credible job. Anyone interested in science and religion from a conservative religious theistic perspective should read the book, which should be the definitive work on astronomy from a young-earth perspective for decades. Byl knows astronomy well, and so avoids positing overly simple models that try to reconcile science and the Bible; indeed he usefully lists and critiques a number of such efforts. He adopts an instrumentalist view of science, in which scientific theories are held to be useful, but not necessarily true. Byl's Reformed flavor of Christianity plays a role in his case.

Rating:
Summary: On what basis do we believe any scientific theory?
Review: It seems that everyone with a primary education has a cosmological "position" to defend, but many who do so are not really able to properly defend it. Byl addresses that by presenting a framework for how we know anything, and challenging concepts that have been taken in common culture as "scientific truth". This includes two main areas:
(a) beliefs that were once "the established truth" of the scientific world, and which remain accepted as such in the popular world even though they have subsequently been shown irrelevant by science, e.g. the debate over the heliocentric vs. earth-centric universes (where in fact, it is scientifically irrelevant to consider the anything "centric" in a real way).
(b) beliefs that are based on assumptions that by their very nature can never be scientifically tested, but that are commonly accepted as fact anyway.

This book is written in accessible English, but deals with concepts in a way that assumes some knowledge in the philosophy of science. Byl surveys cosmology that in a way that presents concepts in an English paragraph that take hundreds of pages of maths to explain exhaustively; this is great for the arm-chair philosopher, but carries the risk that the survey may seem too simple and therefore less credible to the less educated. The book is written clearly for people reasonably up-to-date with scientific thought, but true-believers in Newtonian mechanics (as is still taught in primary school!) may think he's off the wall.

I include this book on my small "must-read" list for Christians, "Essentials for a balanced Christian faith & world view" for two reasons:
(a) Dr. Byl presents a valid framework for how we know what we know -- a framework that has unfortunately fallen from common use during the last century. He addresses our unquestioned use of assumptions about the "real truth" of theories extrapolated by science, and our tendency to arbitrarily pick and choose criteria for what parts of scripture we will accept as valid. This framework is sorely missing; too often professing Christians base their thought on explicitly non-Christian assumptions.
(b) Cosmology has taken a place of exaggerated importance in "pop science". Because of that, rather than to further exaggerate its importance, this book is very useful to help build a framework to assess the "scientific" beliefs preached by their proponents. In the countless variations on the common English-language debate over origins, Christians and non-Christians alike build their arguments on a non-Christian epistemology; anyone who understands this work by Byl should be free from this.

This was obviously written from a Christian perspective; but apart from simplifications that this introduces (Byl can say "Adam would have known such and such"), the book's reasoning is completely valid for a non-Christian as well.

I hesitated to include this on a must-read list because
(a) Cosmology really should be a concern of the specialist rather than something that everyone considers him- or herself an expert in.
(b) This is written at a level that will not be immediately accessible to people without some background in the philosophy of science.

If you find the epistemological concepts too briefly presented in Byl's book, let me recommend to you "The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory" by Pierre Duhem (malheureusement j'ai été incapable de trouver l'original, "La Théorie Physique: Son Object, Sa Structure", mais la traduction anglaise est disponible chez Amazon) This expounds at greater length on an instrumentalist philosophy of science. ...

Rating:
Summary: Useful Introduction, questionable conclusion
Review: John Byl has written an interesting book on cosmology here. This is a book that I would consider to be introductory in nature, and I would recommend it for readers who are interested in cosmology but have not been extensively exposed to the topic. Cosmology is an area of thought ripe with complex theories, abstractions, concepts, and assorted disciplines. This is a book that does a good job of getting a person's feet wet in this area without being overwhelming.

As best I can tell, Byl is basically trying to arrive at two conclusions. First, that scientific theorizing about the existence of the universe is not the same as scientific fact. He attempts to argue that much of cosmology is based on unverifiable speculations that are based more on the philosophical and/or religious presuppositions of the cosmologist than on verifiable scientific fact. Secondly, that much of both medieval and present age cosmology is problematic in terms of adequately explaining the origins of the universe or what the future of the universe may look like. In many ways, I found this book to be an anti-cosmology book, which makes it unique relative to other works on the subject.

But when I say that the book struck me as being anti-cosmology, that doesn't mean that the book is anti-intellectual. Byl spends a large amount of time in this book critiquing big bang cosmology and in the process, takes on the views of a number of heavy hitters both in theistic and non-theistic thought. I thought he did a pretty good job of pointing out a number of problems in big bang cosmology which at the very least, cast doubt on the ability of current big bang cosmology to accurately and COMPLETELY explain the creation of the universe. This is clearly a counter-cultural position to take in current cosmological circles, with prominent thinkers in both the theistic and non-theistic camps assuming the veracity of big bang cosmology in drawing wider conclusions. In the process, Byl also critiques a number of cosmologies alternative to big bang cosmology, and then attempts to argue from a theistic perspective that the cosmological argument is problematic to conclusively prove the existence of God, much less the existence of the Christian God. Lastly, he attempts to formulate what he believes is a Biblically supported cosmology that assumes the inerrancy of the Bible as the starting point for his cosmology, and further assuming that where the Bible and current scientific thought conflict, that the scientific thought rather than the Bible is in error.

Relative to big bang cosmology, Byl draws the rather radical conclusion that current big bang cosmology is incompatible with Scripture, and thus, theistic thinkers who adopt big bang cosmology as part of arguing in favor of the existence of God are making a very big mistake.

It is here that I question Byl's conclusion. First, I don't agree with Byl that the cosmological argument is not a good proof for the existence of God. The universe exists as opposed to not existing. As a result, it deserves to be explained. Further, since the God of the Bible is clearly portrayed as a God who created all there is, it is both logical and reasonable to attempt to erect a sound cosmology that demonstrates the truth of the Bible by showing that the universe could only have been created by an omnipotent God like the One described in Scripture. Unfortunately, when I read Byl's book, the conclusion I got was that all cosmologies that have been attempted to date are not only flawed, but equivalently flawed, and I think this does a disservice to some of the more sound cosmologies. I think that some cosmological structures are more sound than others and hold promise of leading us to even better cosmological structures. Secondly, Byl is clearly a young earth creationist, and while this is certainly okay, as even he says in the book, a person who does not believe in Biblical errancy will not subscribe to a young universe cosmology, presumably because of the alleged conflicts between science and Scripture. Byl did nothing to attempt to reconcile these supposed conflicts, other than to dismiss such conflicts as cases of presuppositionally based scientific thought that leaves the realm of fact and enters the realm of theory and ideology. While there is certainly truth to this claim, I don't think this claim in and of itself is a sufficient and compelling criticism.

So, the book is a good introduction that makes a number of very good points and conducts good critiques. I consider it to be a solid introduction into the world of cosmology and would recommend it on that basis. But I thought that Byl's conclusions were too pessimistic on the role of cosmology in theology and also did not properly distinguish between plausible cosmologies that are incomplete, versus other cosmologies that are based more on fantasy than plausibility.