ABSTRACT
Systematic attempts to understand the universe taken as a whole have in the past been closely intertwined with religious belief. Only within the last half-century or so has a specialized science of cosmology developed which makes no explicit mention of God, and in which human concerns appear to dwindle to insignificance in the scale of cosmic time and space. This chapter focuses primarily on the religions of the West in which God came to be understood as the Creator of the universe, and the dealings of God with men and women were set down in a sacred book. For the Babylonians, the ancient people who developed the most detailed knowledge of the celestial movements, cosmology and religion were very close. Cosmology and religion in one sense could hardly come closer. Evolutionary theory served to prompt cosmological speculation rather more than did Newtonian physics.
