Prospectus for the Future Dialogue

Perhaps the most important result to emerge from the shifts in cosmology over the past decades is the emergence of the hot Big Bang as a ‘permanent’ description of our universe from the Planck time some 12-15 billion years ago to the present. Gone is the time when Hoyle’s steady state model posed a serious challenge to the Big Bang, with its picture of a single, ever-expanding universe whose fundamental features were time-independent. Instead the ‘domain of debate’ has shifted to the pre-Planck era and what might lie endlessly ‘before’ the Big Bang in quantum superspace. We have witnessed what Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams call an ‘encompassing’ revolution as distinguished from the kind of Kuhnian ‘replacing revolution’ one usually thinks of when scientific paradigms change. In such an encompassing revolution, the new paradigm, e.g., quantum cosmology, contains the old one, e.g., Big Bang cosmology as a limit case, e.g., when quantum effects can be ignored. Said another way, we can have complete confidence in relying on the Big Bang scenario, since we know just where it fails: prior to the Planck time. In this sense the Big Bang is ‘here to stay.’

Given this perspective, the time is ripe for a renewed theological focus on the universe in which we have evolved, and a setting aside of what were interesting issues surrounding t=0 but which are now becoming rapidly outmoded. Surely we would commit the ‘genetic fallacy’ if we assumed that the most important clue to the universe we live in is found in its ancient origins. Instead we are poised, as never before, to focus research in theology and science on its 15 billion year history and the evolution of life, at least on planet Earth and perhaps throughout countless galaxies.

Such a focus will lift up fundamental questions about the meaning of life and its relation to the universe in which it has evolved. If life is rare, does it reduce life to a meaningless surd? In my view, even if it turns out to be extremely scarce, it only renders it all the more precious. But life may actually be abundant in the universe. If so, we may one day be able to decide on some deeply held questions about our own humanity. For example, does the evolution of intelligent life always include not only rationality but moral capacity as well, as it did on Earth? If so, will all such creatures experience moral failure, or is that tragedy limited to homo sapiens? When life does experience moral failure, will they, like we, claim to have an experience of transcendence and the offer of healing power? Will they speak in terms of God? The answer to these questions might serve both to illuminate the purposes of God in creating life in the universe and the question of our own meaning and purpose in the world. Hopefully the more interactive methodology between science and theology suggested in this chapter will enable scholars to form a more rigorous response to these fundamental questions.

Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell