The topic of CChristinan Cosmology continues to fascinate me because in presenting the demands of the gospel, a I hope to tomorrow, THW Baia on qhixxh we presen these demands to everyone is hat Christianity is 'cosmological'. Thua:
The creation of the Universe is not just a one-off action after which God went off, as it were, to
bide God's time and see how it turned out out (deism, I rhink), but an ongoing act. We exist right now, from moment to passing moment, because
God wills that we exist (theism, no?).
But this notion has interesting theological implications, for it means that God wills to exist
things which we would rather did not. When I am falling off my bike into a roadside patch of
stinging nettles (as I once did) Christ, by his will, upheld the existence of myself, the force of
gravity that pulled me to the ground and the chemical interaction of the secretions of the nettles
with my skin which caused me a reasonable amount of pain.
This ‘interlacing’ of God and the material world is also implied by the Christian doctrine of the
incarnation — that God took on human form. As the Thirty-nine Articles in the Anglican Book
of Common Prayer put it,
The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father,
the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man's nature
in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect
Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one
Person (Article II: II. Of the Word or Son of God, which was made very Man)
In other words, God’s nature peculiarly and specifically occupied a space determined by the
location of a particular body — the body of the man Jesus.
Now extend that principle to the entire Universe. There is nowhere where God is not ‘present’.
As the Psalmist put it,
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the
heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. (Psalm 139:7–8,
NIV84)
Nevertheless, Christians are not pantheists. We do not believe that everything is divine. The
permeation of the world by God is because each part of the world derives its ongoing existence
from God himself.
Morality Matters to Matter
But why would God ‘uphold’ such a world, where undesirable states and circumstances occur so
often? (This is the old ‘Why would a good God create a world of suffering?’ in another guise.)
It would be foolish to think we could answer such questions completely. Nevertheless, the points
about the Universe we have considered already may give us some hints.
1. The Universe has a personal origin, being created by a personal deity for himself.
2. At the heart of God’s purposes in creation is the relationship between himself and human
beings whom he has created in his image. The world exists ‘for them’ as well as for God.
3. The relationship between God and human beings, however, is flawed and distorted by their
inclination to disobey him. Out of this flows sin and evil.
4. The Universe nevertheless continues in its existence moment by moment because it is ‘upheld’
by the personal creator, and yet the creatures who matter most in his creation are separated from
him and mired in sin.
We venture to suggest, therefore, that this distorted relationship between God and his creatures
impacts his ‘upholding’ of the Universe. What he ‘upholds’ is a Universe inhabited by and, as
regards this planet specifically, presided over by creatures who reject him. There is a broken
relationship between God and his ‘imaging-creatures’ at the heart of creation. We should not be
surprised at the suggestion that this impacts the creation God upholds, so long as that situation
persists. As the Apostle Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans:
19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For
the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of
the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from
its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
(Romans 8:19–21, NIV84)
The picture the Bible gives is that the created world is the way it is because of human sinfulness
— in other words, that morality matters to matter. We have a clear indication of this early on
when God is recorded speaking to Adam after the latter has disobeyed him:
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about
which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because
of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” (Genesis
3:17, NIV84)
It might seem odd that it is the ground which is cursed rather than Adam because of what the
latter has done. Yet if we can posit a relationship between human moral actions and the fabric of
creation uphold by the God against whom humanity rebels, this perhaps makes more sense. In
any case, the curse on the ground rebounds against Adam and becomes a form of judgement on
him as it makes his life more difficult.
Thus we suggest that the physical nature and behaviour of the Universe is affected by human
behaviour because human behaviour affects our relationship with the God who upholds that
physical universe.
All Will be Redeemed
A Christian cosmology, however, also contains the fundamental principle that all is not lost.
Certainly there are profound problems, but they are not without resolution. On the contrary, God
has always intended that the problem of sin would be resolved. And as we have seen above in the
words of St Paul, this will have cosmological implications: ‘the creation itself will be liberated
from its bondage to decay’.
The key to this act of rescue is, in Christian theology, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Thus Paul again writes,
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to
reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by
making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19–20, NIV84)
We may wonder why the death of this particular individual should have such massive
implications, but the claim of this passage, and of Christian theology in general, is that the being
of God interpenetrated the physicality of this person: ‘all his fullness [dwelt] in him’. Thus what
happened to this person happened, in a sense, to the creator and upholder of the universe.
Moreover, it brought about reconciliation between God and his image-bearing creatures. Given
that the outcome of that broken relationship is an hostility between the fabric of the world and the
human race and that the ultimate expression of this hostility is God, we should not be surprised
that the effecting of reconciliation involves death in particular — both the act of dying, which is
the ultimate physical judgement, and the overcoming of death.
The Universe is a ‘Story’
What all this also means is that the Universe has a ‘narrative’ — a story. There is a beginning,
there is an end, and we are therefore in the middle. The Christian Universe is therefore going
somewhere, whereas the atheist materialist Universe is not, or rather it is, but the place it is going
is to a state of ‘heat death’, where nothing will ever happen again, forever. Either that, or it will
somehow ‘restart’ into an endlessly repeating cycle.
Some materialists see nothing to worry about in either scenario. Yet as the South African
philosopher, David Benatar, observes in his book Better Never to Have Been, if suffering is the
inevitable accompaniment of life (and it is) and if life (as he believes) has no other outcome than
death and non-existence, then why not skip the ‘middle bit’. It is ‘better never to have been’ than
to come into existence without being asked and to experience suffering, despite the occasional
‘offset’ of pleasure. In his view, the sum of ‘suffering+pleasure’ can never outweigh the assured
result of not coming into existence, which is a guarantee of no suffering ever.
A Christian cosmology, however, rejects this conclusion since it asserts that there is, in fact,
something still to come. Specifically, in God’s purposes there will come a time when the entire
fabric of creation is renewed and restored — what the Bible calls ‘a new heaven and a new
earth’.
You reading this may have many reasons to be greatly interested in the narrative of your life, and
indeed of the wider world. You may have ambitions, goals and intentions for yourself and those
human beings who mean most to you. But our assessment of these concerns must differ
fundamentally, given our basic cosmology.
According to a Christian cosmology, you are not wrong to think of yourself and others as
fundamentally important — and not just to you but in the great scheme of things, not least
because there is such a thing as a ‘great scheme, for the world you and they inhabit is a created
thing, whose purposes lie in the mind of a Creator.
A materialist cosmology, however, must throw a bucket of cold water over your consideration of
yourself and those you might love, for both you and they are the outcome of forces which are
presumed to have no interest in such beings as yourself and which are fundamentally unmoved by
the fate of you and yours. Insofar as there is any ‘meaning’ to your personal narrative, it is one
that you impose, not one that is in any way related to a wider ‘plotline’. You are an accident of
accidents, here for no reason and destined to be forgotten in a universe where there will one day
be forever no one to remember.
But the Christian says ‘No’ — for the outcome is not the endless non-being of death. And to this
point we must now turn.
The Universe will End
Again, Christian theology agress with much modern science that the Universe will have an end.
Where they differ, of course, is on the nature and causes of that end.
For the materialist scientist, it is a result of that mysterious thing called ‘entropy’ — the tendency
of energy to spread itself evenly throughout a system. It is the principal of entropy that causes
your cup of tea to cool to room temperature and it is doing the same to the whole Universe,
though the final temperature will be well below 20o Celsius. Indeed, it will be something like
what is called ‘Absolute Zero’: -273o, at which temperature nothing can happen. The final fate of
the materialist universe is a truly depressing eternity of cold and dark.
By contrast the Christian view is that the end of the Universe as we know it is by no means the
‘end’ in absolute terms. But it’s complicated and we’ll have to return to that subject later.
For the atheist, the beginning may just be one beginning amongst many. Furthermore, it is of no
significance for what happens next, or for what sentient beings like ourselves might think about
what happens in the ‘middle bit’.
Of course, lots of things have happened since the ‘Big Bang’, and lots of other things will
probably continue to happen. But according to this view, there is no ‘story’. To quote the title of
the book by Jacob Bronowski, for example, there is no ‘ascent of man’.
Of course, the human race has come into existence in that time and has developed in its
capacities to understand and control the world. But these developments are not, for the atheist,
part of a developing plotline. It is pure chance that the human race happens to exist and to
possess the capabilities it does. And human history will probably have no effect on the ‘End’ to
which the Universe is inevitably heading — nor is that ‘End’ going to give meaning to the human
story. Like the Universe itself, we came into existence and we will one day disappear, but it
makes no difference to anything, except our own individual experiences on the way.
By contrast, Christianity emphatically does think in terms of a ‘story’. The universe exists for a
reason. It is changing and developing for a reason. And when it comes to an end, this will also be
for a reason — because that part of the ‘story’ is finished. The overall story may not be clear to us
now, but it is there, and the reason is because of the Universe’s own basic cause.
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