In the beginning ... the Big Bang
In 1970 Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking published a paper with a proof based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity together with Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding. Experimental and theoretical evidence had been mounting to show that the universe must have had a beginning in time. It’s easy to forget how recently we have been introduced to this knowledge, knowledge that has significantly influenced my construct of faith.
In 2013 the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft measured the age of the universe at 13.82 billion years. The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe might be considered as a powerful scientific myth, the closest description to the truth of the beginning of the universe that we can yet devise.
Life emerges
In the course of the 13.82 billion years of cosmic history, life emerged out of lifeless matter about 3.7 billion years ago. Much, much more recently, consciousness, and with it reflective thought, arrived - less than 200,000 years ago. Simultaneously with thought, faith evolved as an essential part of the cosmic story. In the course of several thousands of years, after the early religious traditions became literate, their teachers sometimes thought of the cosmos as a book or scroll, the scroll of nature.
Faith in One God
Somewhere between two and three thousand years ago, human beings began to create myths and other kinds of narrative whose function was to weave the otherwise diverse episodes of human experience into an overarching coherence. Out of these long and tangled webs of mythic narratives there emerged from an insignificant Semitic tribe the story of faith in the oneness of God.
Anticipatory faith
Abrahamic monotheism is not a search for certitude but an expression of the human need to wait in hope for the final dramatic unifying of all things. Belief in one God is a matter of patient expectation. Anticipatory faith gives dramatic meaning to our lives in the here and now by encouraging us to keep our attention fixed not on the past or the eternal present but on what is yet to come. It is this Abrahamic brand of expectation that animated the earliest Christian communities. Sadly, the early Christian spirit of anticipation has often give way to a world-fleeing nostalgia for timelessness in both religious and secular cultures.
Loss of faith
During the first half of the seventeenth century thanks to Galileo and Descartes a neo-Pythagorean quest for understanding things of nature exclusively in terms of geometric coherence began to edge out what remained of the anticipatory Abrahamic faith. This loss of anticipatory Abrahamic faith seems to have happened all too easily at the beginning of the modern age.
Three answers to What’s going on?
In his recently published book God After Einstein: What’s Really Going On In the Universe? John F. Haught describes three different answers to the existential question “how do things somehow hang together”, models that he sees as having evolved in the course of the last two centuries.
The first answer, which Haught names archaeonomy, trusts that cosmic coherence was established in the beginning and can be discovered only by our going all the way back in cosmic time. Genesis 1 holds the answer. Religious fundamentalism continues to reply on an archaeonomic world view.
The second answer, which Haught labels analogy, trusts that the principle of the world’s intelligibility lies beyond time altogether, having already unified all things eternally, although in a way that is now mostly inaccessible to finite minds immersed in matter and time. For Immanuel Kant, the moral life was analogically grounded in a timeless divine imperative awakened in each person’s heart from up above.
Haught thinks Christian theology and philosophy had never fully appreciated the reality of time. Habits of mind had been changed by long exposure to the analogical stance in classical Christian interpretations of the world. For several centuries the analogical reading had persuaded philosophical and religious minds to locate the source of the world’s intelligibility in a place untouched by time, hiding the passing of time for centuries under the shadow of an eternal divine present.
I think this was the primary world view informing the Christian theology that was current in my youth in the church where I was inducted in the faith (and probably still is).
Anticipatory faith
The third answer is given by what Haught calls anticipatory faith. This trusts that cosmic coherence lies in the direction of what is not-yet in the passage of time. Nature’s dramatic constitution is becoming increasingly evident. Einstein’s cosmology and the Big Bang theory let us understand faith, including the tacit faith of scientists, as a dramatic new development in an awakening universe. In this model, faith returns to the anticipatory quality of faith found in Abrahamic monotheism and early Christianity.
Science has demonstrated that we live in a universe that is still awakening and is therefore open to new possibilities of being. An anticipatory faith looks at the universe as the primary subject of awakening.
Until relatively modern times religions assumed that to find out what’s really going on in the universe, an ongoing transformation of hearts and minds was essential. Our own minds and hearts are required to undergo an extraordinary transformation to put us in touch with the deepest meaning of the cosmic story. Each of us can contribute to this cosmic awakening.
Intuitively, I have always been aware that the analogy world into which I was inducted as a child didn’t work. Life evolves, we are here to be transformed, to live into life in all its fullness. Haught’s anticipatory faith has helped me understand why there is such a frustrating decades-long difficulty within Christian churches as they attempt to come to terms with human gender and sexuality. To me, it’s obvious. I’m gay. That’s the way I was born. I live an evolving life in an evolving universe. It’s obvious. That’s where I experience the Mystery, the unconditional, infinite, intimate love of God – in the core of my being. What’s your problem with that, Church of England bishops?
Haught, F. G. 2022. God After Einstein: What’s Really Going On in the Universe? Yale University Press, New Haven and London