Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour
Chapter 5: Astronomy and Creation
IV. Theological Implications
3. The Significance of Humanity
On the theological side, continuing creation expresses the theme of God’s immanence and participation in the ongoing world. God builds on what is already there, and each successive level of reality requires the structures of lower levels. Here I find the insights of process philosophy particularly helpful. For Whitehead and his followers, God is the source of both order and novelty. This is one of the few schools of thought that takes seriously the contingency of events, from indeterminacy in
physics to the freedom of human beings. In this "dipolar" view, God is both eternal and temporal: eternal in character and purpose, but
temporal in being affected by interaction with the world. God’s knowledge of the world changes as unpredictable events occur.48 The God of process thought is neither omnipotent nor powerless.
Creation occurs throughout time and in the midst of other entities. God does not predetermine or control the world but participates in it at all levels to orchestrate the spontaneity of all beings, in order to achieve a richer coherence. God does not act directly, and nothing that happens is God’s act alone; instead, God acts along with other causes and
influences the creatures to act. God does not intervene sporadically from outside but is present in the unfolding of every event. Creative
potentialities are actualized by each being in the world, in response both to God and to other beings. The process view emphasizes divine
immanence, but it by no means leaves out transcendence. If it is carefully articulated, I believe that it can express the ideas that in the past have been represented by both the ex nihilo and the continuing creation themes (see chapter 8).
to challenge the biblical understanding of the significance of human life.
What are the implications of modern cosmology for our self-
understanding? Can they be reconciled with the message of the biblical creation story?
1. The Immensity of Space and Time. Humanity seems insignificant in the midst of such vast stretches of time and space. But today those immensities do not seem inappropriate. We now know that it takes about fifteen billion years for heavy elements to be cooked in the interior of stars and then scattered to form a second generation of stars with planets, followed by the evolution of life and consciousness. A very old expanding universe has to be a huge universe -- on the order of fifteen billion light years. Moreover, as Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, we should not measure significance by size and duration, but by such criteria as complexity and consciousness.49 The greatest complexity has apparently been achieved in the middle range of size, not at atomic dimensions or galactic dimensions. There are a hundred trillion
synapses in a human brain; the number of possible ways of connecting them is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. A higher level of organization and a greater richness of experience occurs in a human being than in a thousand lifeless galaxies. It is human beings, after all, that reach out to understand that cosmic immensity.
2. Interdependence. Cosmology joins evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and ecology in showing the interdependence of all things. We are part of an ongoing community of being; we are kin to all creatures, past and present. From astrophysics we know about our indebtedness to a common legacy of physical events. The chemical elements in your hand and in your brain were forged in the furnaces of stars. The cosmos is all of a piece. It is multileveled; each new higher level was built-on lower levels from the past. Humanity is the most advanced form of life we know, but it is fully a part of a wider process in space and time. The new view may undercut anthropocentric claims that set humanity
completely apart from the rest of nature, but it by no means makes human life insignificant. But along with this interconnectedness, we have to recognize that cosmic distances are so vast that we are cut off from communication with most of the universe.
I. Life on Other Planets. Planets are so numerous that if even a small fraction of them are habitable, life could exist in many stellar systems.
Most scientists are open to the possibility of intelligent life on relatively nearby galaxies, though biologists seem to consider it less likely than do
astronomers or science fiction writers. But the possibility of beings superior to us, living in more advanced civilizations, is a further
warning against anthropocentrism. It also calls into question exclusive claims concerning God’s revelation in Christ. Here we can recall that even on our planet the work of the logos, the Eternal Word, was not confined to its self-expression in Christ. If that Word is active in continuing creation throughout the cosmos, we can assume that it will also have revealed itself as the power of redemption at other points in space and time, in ways appropriate to the forms of life existing there.
4. Chance and Purpose. Traditionally, we said, God’s purpose in creation was identified with order. An emphasis on God’s sovereignty led to a determinism in which everything was thought to happen in accordance with a detailed divine plan. Any element of chance was viewed as a threat to God’s total control. It is not surprising, then, that some scientists and philosophers who are impressed by the role of chance are led to reject theism. (Bertrand Russell, Jacques Monod, Stephen Jay Gould, and Steven Weinberg, for example, view life as the accidental result of chance and assume that chance and theism are incompatible.) Whereas the appropriate response to design would be gratitude and thanksgiving, the response to pure chance would be despair and a sense of futility and cosmic alienation.
One possible answer is to say that God really controls all the events that appear to us to be chance -- whether in quantum uncertainties,
evolutionary mutations, or the accidents of human history. This would preserve divine determinism at a subtle level undetectable to science.
But I will argue in the next chapter that the presence of genuine chance is not incompatible with theism. We can see design in the whole process by which life came into being, with whatever combination of
probabilistic and deterministic features the process had. Natural laws and chance may equally be instruments of God’s intentions. There can be purpose without an exact predetermined plan.
A contingency of events in personal life faces each of us at the existential level. We are all vulnerable to unpredictable events: the actions of other people, natural catastrophes, illness, and, above all, death. Our freedom is always limited by events we cannot control. We know the anxiety and insecurity of temporality and finitude. In the face of all such contingency, the gospel does not promise immunity from suffering or loss but rather the courage to affirm life in spite of them and the confidence that God’s love is with us in the midst of them.