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The first one to address the problem of an infinite number of stars and the resulting heat in the Cosmos was Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th-century Greek monk from Alexandria, who states in his Topographia Christiana: "The crystal-made sky sustains the heat of the Sun, the moon, and the infinite number of stars; otherwise, it would have been full of fire, and it could melt or set on fire."
The later puranic view also asserts that the universe is created, destroyed, and re-created in an eternally repetitive series of cycles. In Hindu cosmology, the age of the Earth is about 4.32 billion years (the duration of a kalpa or one day of Brahma) [77] and is then destroyed by fire or water elements. At this point, Brahma rests for one ...
Debates on the thickness of the firmament also impacted debates on the path of the sun in its journey as it passes through the firmament through passageways called the "doors" or "windows" of heaven. [40] The number of heavens or firmaments was often given as more than one: sometimes two, but much more commonly, seven.
The origins of the cosmological argument can be traced to classical antiquity, rooted in the concept of the prime mover, introduced by Aristotle.In the 6th century, Syriac Christian theologian John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570) proposed the first known version of the argument based on the impossibility of an infinite temporal regress, postulating that time itself must have had a beginning.
The Indians [who?] believed in a cyclic universe related to three other beliefs: (i), time is endless and space has infinite extension; (ii), earth is not the center of the universe; and (iii), laws govern all development, including the creation and destruction of the universe. The Indians believed that there were three types of space ...
The Universe is a system made up of heaven and Earth and the elements which are contained in them. There are "five elements, situated in spheres in five regions, the less being in each case surrounded by the greater – namely, earth surrounded by water, water by air, air by fire, and fire by ether – make up the whole Universe." [35] Stoic ...
The argument fails in the case that the universe might be shaped like the surface of a hypersphere or torus. (Consider a similar fallacious argument that the Earth's surface must be infinite in area: because otherwise one could go to the Earth's edge and throw a javelin, proving that the Earth's surface continued wherever the javelin hit the ...
One thing that would not count as evidence for the anthropic principle is evidence that the Earth or the Solar System occupied a privileged position in the universe, in violation of the Copernican principle (for possible counterevidence to this principle, see Copernican principle), unless there was some reason to think that that position was a ...