Cover -- Title page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Part I Top-Down Causality and Complexity -- George F.R. Ellis Why Are the Laws of Nature as They Are? What Underlies Their Existence? -- George F.R. Ellis Top-Down Causation as the Key to the Emergence of Complexity -- Jean-Philippe Uzan Models of the Cosmos and the Emergence of Complexity -- Derek Raine Causality and Complexity -- Part II Causality and the Structure of the Universe -- Marek Kuś The Uncertain Future and the Ambiguous Past in Classical, Quantum and General Non-signaling Settings -- Julian Barbour Reductionist Doubts -- Andrzej M. Sołtan X-ray Background and Cosmology -- Andrzej Sitarz Causality and Noncommutativity -- Michael Heller Bottom-Up Causality in a New Setting -- Mariusz P. Dąbrowski Varying Physical Constant Cosmologies and the Anthropic Principle -- Part II Ultimate Causality -- Bogdan Dembiński Causality Issues in Ancient Greek Philosophy -- William R. Stoeger S.J. Cosmology, Evolution, Causality and Creation: the Limits, Compatibility and Cooperation of Scientific and Philosophical Methodologies -- Thomas Tracy God and the Causal Structures of Nature: Some Puzzles -- Willem B. Drees God as Ground? Cosmology and Non-Causal Conceptions of the Divine -- Index of Names.
Written by philosophers, cosmologists, and physicists, this collection of essays deals with causality, which is a core issue for both science and philosophy. Readers will learn about different types of causality in complex systems and about new perspectives on this issue based on physical and cosmological considerations. In addition, the book includes essays pertaining to the problem of causality in ancient Greek philosophy, and to the problem of God's relation to the causal structures of nature viewed in the light of contemporary physics and cosmology.