There is also a Book its called The Schemata of the Stars

http://www.amazon.com/The-Schemata-Stars-Byzantine-Astronomy/dp/9810234899

Its about the progress on Astronomy during the Byzantine Times. Did you know that Greek Orthodox Christians created first the term Astrophysics?

I have hundreds of books about the Technology, the Theater, the Arts in Byzantine Empire which was a Secular State. but they are written in Greek..

John Philoponus said exactly what Galileo said 1000 years before Galileo without trouble from the Church!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philoponus

Thanks for the resources. I'll look into them.

I am Greek, Science continued in Byzantine Times, it didn't stopped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_science

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00033798500200131

I was trying to say that the universe does require something that *has to be necessary* for the universe to exist (and I think it does), otherwise the universe would not exist.

You can say it all you want. That doesn't make it so.

What you are saying is this : we possess self-consciousness — therefore god. Calling the 'objects of self-consciousness' 'transcendentals' is a clever trick — but it 'certainly' doesn't get you any closer to the conclusion you are trying to draw.

How then do you explain a mother giving birth to a still-born?
How then do you explain a mother giving birth to a living child with hydranencephaly?
How then do you explain a mother dying during childbirth?
Are these horrendous things also AUTHORED?

I believe an even greater inducement to give credibility to the existence of God is the very fact of self-consciousness: namely, that the human species can turn inwardly and then back outward to ask the important 'Why' question is just too compelling to dismiss. I can't imagine the neighbor's dog is concerned about more than his food dish. Those who dismiss God as a corollary of a thoroughgoing evolutionism are really not better than the hungry dog.

I'll call the objects of self-consciousness (a property only humans seem only to possess) the 'transcendentals' of thought that ordinary experience reveals but can't (and perhaps never will) fully elucidate. God is certainly one of them.

A sweet, illogical position.

" A mother abandoning her child" is no longer God's 'authorship'.:))

Keviiiin, come on now. I'm not playing your game, I'm just pointing out that

"You are contingent on your beating heart."

is factually incorrect.