ABSTRACT
Throughout history every system of belief has subscribed to a cosmology in which spirit created matter, commonly acknowledged in the phrase that ‘in the beginning God made heaven and earth’. This universal assumption, unquestioned for millennia, began to change in the seventeenth century with the evolution of the scientific method. This involved the basic assumptions that every event is produced by an antecedent cause, that the greater is explained by the smaller, and that what is mental and spiritual is derived from the material.
