This is the first in a series of articles that examine nine “scientific facts” that require a new theological response.

Introduction

At about 8:30 every Sunday morning a horn would honk in front of the house at 114 Gansevoort Blvd on Staten Island, NY, and my mother would make sure my tie was straight and then plunk the fedora on my head. This would have been after a breakfast of eclairs from a bakery at the end of the street where she would stop on the way home from the night shift at Halloran Hospital, where my mother worked as a licensed practical nurse. In the car outside waiting for me was Mr. Frank Monnick and his two children, a boy and a girl, both a little older than I. He was a Sunday school teacher, and off we went to Zion Scandinavian Lutheran Church for Sunday School and then church.

Zion was what we today would call fundamentalist, but then so was everybody else in those days, except for the Unitarians, and we knew enough to stay away from them. Jesus had died on the cross for our sins, and this we knew because the Bible told us so. It was a cozy world, theologically speaking, without doubt, without confusion, without critical thinking. That all changed when I went off to Dartmouth College at the tender age of 16 in 1959 and took my first religion course in New Testament studies. From there it was off to Union Theological Seminary in New York City and the University of Chicago Divinity School, positions in a church here and there, and an Assistant Professorship in the religion department at Thiel College, Greenville, PA.

And now I am 72, no longer tender, a little more confused, and definitely more critical. It’s hard to know where through the years one thought morphed into another, where the boundary line was between thinking this way and then that. It’s all very confusing today. Science continues to cross new frontiers. China is building a huge factory to clone cows. Biologists are splicing genes into the appropriate place to cure disease. Hubble sends pictures of distant galaxies. On and on……

Meanwhile, on the religious turf, fundamentalists who have successfully co-opted the name “Christian”, picket and attack abortion clinics, wail about taking Jesus out of Christmas, proclaim the bible as the infallible word of god, and form the backbone of the Republican party. I fume at how people today identify Christianity with these people. It makes me want to scream.

I pretty much know what I believe when it comes to differentiating myself from those guys. I’ve spent a lifetime at the task. In my mind, Jesus was not born of a virgin, did not walk on water, and did not leave a tomb empty. God did not dictate the bible, does not interfere in nature, is not omnipotent, does not sit on a throne, and will not cure you of your disease. But put that Hubble picture of outer space in front of me, or try to convince me that reality is a probability curve, or that particles on opposite sides of the universe affect one another instantly, and what to believe becomes a bit more uncertain. Sometimes I think it’s easier to believe in a bearded god sitting on a throne that to believe that stuff.

But believe it we must, at least some of it. That’s what I want to do here- look at certain realities that demand our attention, no matter who we are nor what we think. Some of it will be from science, some from the social sciences, but all of it impacts us and asks us to reflect upon it. I will offer some reflections, but rest assured that I am not trying to convince anybody of anything. Perhaps that’s one of the benefits of seniority: I realize that there are certain facts that need to be accepted, but also that there are a variety of ways in which we can react to those facts.

The reflections are theological. I want to look at the facts and understand how they impact my belief in god. The first fact: cosmology.

For all readers- atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, Christians, fundamentalist Christians, Buddhists, and more- here is what sense I can make out of cosmology and god.

Reflection Number 1: What we can Know about the Universe

The universe is incredible, literally. With the help of land-and satellite-based telescopes, mathematics and astro-physics present us with a universe beyond imagination. Start with a star and its planetary system. Add to that a couple of hundred billion comparable systems in a rather limited area of space, and call that a galaxy. Gather a hundred billion or so such galaxies, and call that a cluster. I’m not sure how many clusters or cluster groups there are, but even they are connected by long (!) wispy strings of inter-galactic gas.

When one looks at any object in space, what is seen is the light that has taken a long time to reach us. Sunlight, for example, that warms the earth, actually left the sun about 8 minutes previously. When we look at some galaxy, we can measure the distance to it through light spectrum analysis, and we know that what we are seeing is what was there long, long ago. We are not seeing an object as it now is in our time, but as it was when that light first left it. Back in high school, we all learned that speed x time = distance. Put otherwise, time = distance / speed. We have measured the distance, and we know the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, so it’s simple division to determine the time. And the age of galaxies turns out to be measured in billions of years.

This universe of ours, furthermore, is expanding. Everything is moving further away from everything else. In order to conceptualize this, imagine a blob of raisin muffin dough placed in an oven. As the dough rises, all the raisins become further apart from one another. Just like an expanding universe.

How do we know the universe is expanding? We know the elements that constitute a star. Each of these elements gives off a certain spectrum of light. When the source of any light is moving away from you, the wavelength of that light moves closer to the red light end of the spectrum, a process called red-shifting. And every distant star in the universe is red-shifting, proof that they are moving away, becoming more distant, and that the universe is expanding. Stars have a life; they do not exist forever as a hydrogen to helium fireball. Eventually, their energy becomes manifest as atoms of heavier elements, and the fireball creative process diminishes. A recent scholarly inventory of stars shows that stars are not as bright as they used to be. The universe is expanding and star energy is being transformed into inert elements. The universe is dying.

Why? To begin with, only 4% of the stuff of the universe is what is called ordinary matter. How do we know this? Certain gravitational effects on stars and galaxies can be measured, and the ordinary matter is insufficient to produce the observed effects. The conclusion is that there is more than ordinary matter at play here, and even though we cannot see it, it’s real, and it comes in two forms, matter and energy. So-called dark energy makes up 76% of our universe, dark matter 20%, and we don’t know anything about them other than that they exist.

Why, you might ask, does not all this matter and energy gradually begin to slow expansion and pull the universe back together? The answer is that this unknowable energy is the very force driving the expansion: it is a gravity that is repulsive rather than attractive, an alternative allowed by Einstein’s general theory of gravity. Repulsive gravity!

And what of the beginning, the Big Bang? Here again we use that old formula relating speed, time, and distance. We know how fast the universe is expanding. Suppose then that we put it all in reverse and assume that the universe is contracting. How long would it take for everything to return to the original point from which it all sprang? Answer: 13.8 billion years. The Big Bang happened that long ago.

There are problems that lead to other questions, of course, and that is where, some would argue, it really gets interesting. Inflation of the universe, acceleration of the expansion, more than one universe, multiverses, string theory, a process that led to the Big Bang, Hawking’s belief in self creation out of nothing. Wow!

Commentary

The god that I thought about as a kid was the proverbial old man in the sky. It’s really a difficult image to erase. How could it be otherwise? Prayers at meals or at bedtime were always directed toward somebody that could do something, be it bless the food or have Santa bring me a new bike for Christmas. If god can’t DO something, what good is she?I suspect that many of us think of god this way even though we won’t admit it. The god that atheists reject is usually this guy.That’s why when the first Russian cosmonaut circled the earth he reported that he found no god up there. The situation is even more dramatic today. Pictures from outer, outer space, that show us the immensity and beauty of the far corners of our universe, do not capture an image of god. The three tiered universe of biblical times, where heaven was up, sheol was down, and we walked in between, is no longer a tenable option.

There are other options, of course. One is deism, which basically says that god created the universe, got it started, and then disappeared to somewhere else, having nothing more to do with us. Not clear here what difference this god might make. Pantheism, in its most basic iteration, asserts that everything is god. One might ask of pantheism how god differs from matter. The same question can be put to a third option called panentheism, which asserts that god is everywhere, in everything, but also different. God is said to transcend the universe. Just how god “transcends” (differs from) the universe is a bit difficult to figure out. Paul Tillich, one of the great theologians of the last century, tried to describe this transcendent god as the Ground of Being or Being-Itself. I always found it a strain to bridge the gap between Being-Itself and a god who supposedly is active in history.

Another tack is to identify god as the consciousness or mind of the universe. I suppose that there is a certain attraction to this model. After all, we as humans like to believe that we have a mind, a self-consciousness that inhabits our body, a spirit, a soul, so shouldn’t god be the soul of the universe? An offshoot of this approach places god’s consciousness in the evolution of ours. That is, in the history of the universe, the universe has become self conscious, and that self consciousness is manifest in homo sapiens. I suppose that a corollary of this option is that when we die off, so does god.

Another and rather inventive theology comes out of string theory. String theory postulates that everything is made up of vibrating strings, so infinitesimally tiny that, by definition, they can never be observed, only theorized. To make the math “work” (not being a mathematician, I never know exactly what that phrase means), there have to be eleven dimensions. Not just the three that we’ve all come to know and love, plus time- the fourth-, but eleven, hiding right next to us, totally unseen. God, one might say, is hiding in one of these dimensions. There is a certain attraction to this model as well: it literally makes a place for god that surrounds us but transcends us at the same time in the same place. As a bonus, it can never be proven or disproven. No cosmonaut will ever give us a report.

The easiest way to react to the apparent infinity of space, is probably just to accept it and wash the dishes. But where did it all come from??? I’m one of those people that postpones the dishes and asks that question. It’s all very confusing, and I need a simple answer.

So instead of beginning with the infinite universe, I, as a Christian theologian, begin with history, and ask a simple question. Where did Christianity begin? and what was it all about? Those are questions that have a historical answer.

Some evangelicals might answer by saying: Christianity began when Jesus was born in a manger, or when god decided to become a man, or when the crucified Jesus came back to life. But the answer is: none of the above. There is a fact that everyone knows but pays little or no attention to. When Jesus was walking around talking to people, (yes, he was a real person) some responded with an enthusiasm that went way beyond the ordinary. We call them the disciples. The male dominated church of later decades and centuries limited those disciples to twelve men, but the record tells us about an equal number of women who also were incredibly taken with Jesus and followed him in his travels. There were about 25 disciples, men and women who discovered something rather special in Jesus, and if they had never discovered that, no one would have paid any attention to him. He would have gone on to lead the life of a first century Galilean, and that would have been the end it.

The encounter between Jesus and his disciples was the beginning. Their initial experience is the foundation upon which were built the later gospel stories, the edifice of the Christian church, and all the dogma and doctrine, orthodox and heretical, that has occupied theologians for two millennia. It seems to me that we should pay serious attention to that experience. And we’re still talking history, not faith.

What was it?

That question is not as easy to answer as you might think. No reporters, no video cams, not even any books. Well, that’s not totally true. We do have the books that grew out of oral reports and assumed their final form sometime between 60-120 CE, but there are no direct quotes, only intimations of what probably was going on. A lot of people have dedicated their lives to studying these books and intimations. There are always wing nuts who conclude what they want- we can all only hope that we are not counted among them- but the consensus of scholarship leads us to conclude that the disciples’ experience with Jesus falls into two categories: according to their testimony, they discovered what it meant to be a fulfilled human being, and they discovered who god was.

Limiting ourselves to the absolute bare minimum that can be affirmed historically with near certainty, as homo sapiens of two thousand years ago, the disciples learned:

that the extremely limited individual and parochial world that they had created for themselves could be overcome and their eyes could be opened

 that the extremely limited individual and parochial world that they had created for themselves could be overcome and their eyes could be opened
 that their lives had meaning, as opposed to emptiness
 that the sense of a transcendent something that they experienced in moments of encounter with Jesus was the same transcendent something that encountered them in the special moments experienced every day
 that they needed one another.

That’s quite a bit, and we’ll look at some of it in greater detail later on, but there was something else. After Jesus had been executed, the disciples gathered together and came to a startling conclusion: that the man Jesus who was dead was now alive in their midst as spirit. The idea was not that of a resuscitated corpse. Despite all the hoopla about Jesus walking out of the tomb, that is not at all what those people believed. The disciples, despite the fact that Jesus had been crucified, now believed that he was still alive in their midst, enough so that they were willing to face death themselves in proclaiming this experience as truth.

Not a resuscitated corpse, and not “just” spirit. Jesus, alive as spirit, was, they believed, a new manifestation of reality that had not been experienced before. There were no tools with which to conceptualize. The later books spoke of appearances and an empty tomb, but they were but pointers to the resurrection, not the thing itself.

What did this experience indicate about god? about the universe? What do we learn here? The resurrection, understood in this way, helped the disciples to believe quite simply that the evil manifest at the crucifixion was not the last word. It was the divine affirmation that love is the essence of all that is, and that god does not act through brute force (after all, Jesus was crucified), but acts through the power of this love. These are two huge statements. And they are statements, now not of history, but faith.

Above all, it is not at all obvious that love wins. In fact, the opposite seems more likely true. If thinking of god philosophically is something of a dead end, thinking of a loving god in a world replete with evil seems to be a road with no beginning. We will discuss this more explicitly in the section on evil. For now, I want to put on the table the faith statement that for Christian theology the resurrection of Jesus means that goodness and love are the driving forces of the cosmos. The point is not that there was a resurrection. The point is that goodness and love drive the universe.

Having said that, however, I have to say that any other statements about Jesus and god that go beyond what was just said is speculation. The experience of the disciples does not give us license to talk about all those concepts that Christian theology has loved to talk about, of which there are many. For example, from the gospel of John, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god…and the word became flesh and dwelt among us…” For as wonderful and comforting as this may be, it is pure speculation. Jesus ascended into heaven and became the second person of the trinity. Again, pure speculation. Jesus died for our sins. Pure speculation. The disciples did not experience any of this; it came later as people started to reflect on that original experience.

This is not to say that that which is speculated is necessarily wrong, but we should realize that it is speculative in nature. From the resurrection of Jesus, the early disciples came to believe that it is love that in the final analysis guides all that is. Although I’m willing to bet that many humanists would agree, this is a statement that is unavailable to both cosmology and evolution.

As I indicated earlier, and I don’t want to argue this, for me personally, believing in god and a universe of love is no more difficult than believing in the expanding universe, a multiverse, reality as a probability curve, or the entanglement of particles. What science today sets forth as reality is about as bizarre as an active god sitting on a heavenly throne. Of course, there is proof that the science is true. And is there no proof that god is real. Or is there? One might argue that those moments that we all experience (see below) would lead us to suspect that there is a cosmic Thou behind those experiences. Does not homo sapiens have a sense of the Holy, an intuition that there is more to life and reality than meets the eye? We’ll take a look at that. But first, evolution.
 
Read Second Article: Homo Sapiens, God, and the Evolving Universe
Read Third Article: From the Very Big to the Very Small
Read Fourth Article: Undeserved Suffering
Read Fifth Article: The World We Create
Read Sixth Article: A Zone by Any Other Name
Read Seventh Article: How Other Persons Affect Us
Read Eighth Article: Who am I?