Does the Universe Need God?

Sean Carroll, California Institute of Technology The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. James B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett, forthcoming. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” In many religious traditions, one of the standard roles of the deity has been to create the universe. The first line of the Bible, Genesis 1:1, is a plain statement of this role.[1] Much has happened, both in our scientific understanding of the universe and in the development of...