Degeneration/Progress

I did finally decide on a few books to buy with my gift certificate - The Big Questions in Science and Religion by Keith Ward, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God by Marilyn McCord Adams, and one that won't come until October, The Garden of God: A Theological Cosmology by Alejandro Garcia-Rivera.

I've started the Keith Ward book, and he mentioned something interesting at the beginning of his chapter on evolution and creation - about how religion has tended to see the history of the world as a degeneration from a golden age ....

"For Thomas Aquinas, the best-known medieval Catholic philosopher and theologian, all efficient causes must contain as much reality as their effects: '[A]ny perfection found in an effect must be found also in the cause ... [E]ffects obviously preexist potentially in their causes' (Summa Theologiae, Ia, question 4, article 2). It is the word obviously in this quotation that brings out the difference between the medieval view that the greater cannot cannot come from the less and the modern evolutionary view that it obviously does. For a modern evolutionist, more complex and organized things 'obviously' have developed from simpler and less organized things."

When I finally finish the chapter on evolution I'll post something about it, but meanwhile, the reason I brought up that quote was that I just heard a similar thought expressed elsewhere. Here's 2008 video of British physicist Brian Cox talking about CERN's supercollider which can create conditions similar to those existing when the universe was a billionth of a second old, and about why it's easier to study the past universe than the one existing now .... it was less complex.