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
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