The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before this. According to a number of early cosmologies and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have “First Cause” to explain the existence of the universe. (Within the universe, you always explained one event as being caused by some earlier event, but the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some beginning.) Another argument was put forward by St.Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long.
St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 BC for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (Itis interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC, which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.)Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument about progress described above, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the human race right back to the beginning of civilization.
Genesis 創世紀
Divine 神學
當然，宇宙開端的問題在這之前很久就被討論過。根據一些早先的宇宙論和猶太人／基督教／穆斯林傳統，宇宙開端於有限的、並且不是非常遠的過去的某一時刻。對這樣一個開端，有一種議論是感到必須有“第一原因”來解釋宇宙的存在。（在宇宙中，你總可以將一個事件解釋為由於另一個更早的事件所引起的，但是宇宙本身的存在只有當存在某個開端時才能被解釋。）另一種論證是聖·奧古斯丁在他的《上帝之城》的著作中提出的。他指出，文明在進步，我們將記住創造這些業績和發展技術的人們。這樣人，也許宇宙，不可能已經存在了太長的時間。
聖·奧古斯丁根據《創世紀》一，接受公元前5000年作為宇宙的被創生的時間。（有趣的是，這和上一次的冰河時間的結束，大約公元前100000年相距不遠。考古學家告訴我們，文明實際上是從那時開始的。） 另一方面，亞里士多德和大多數其他希臘哲學家不喜歡創生的思想，因為它帶有太多的神學干涉的味道。所以他們相信，人類及其周圍的世界已經並且將繼續永遠存在。古代的人們已經考慮到上述的文明進步的論點，用週期性洪水或其他災難的重複出現，使人類回到文明的開初，來回答上面的話難。
閱讀更多 讀書看劇記單詞 的文章
