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FRANK PARKINSON
First Reading, comprised of two selections from Thomas Merton in shortened form, which I have taken from the Rev. Bill Darlison's collection of addresses, The Penultimate Truth:
You will have heard of the Hubble telescope, which is orbiting the earth and sending back the most stunning pictures of distant galaxies. It is named after Edwin Hubble, who unexpectedly and unwillingly became one of two great prophets who are opening up a new understanding of God, of religion and of what it means to be human. The other great prophet is another scientist, Charles Darwin, who has given his name to the theory of biological evolution, although it was discovered at the same time by Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin died believing sadly that he had finished off religion with his theory of biological evolution, while Wallace, his equal in genius, believed that knowing the human species has evolved from lower animals enables us for the first time to come to grips with human destiny. Each position depends upon a different act of faith - and thus each might be seen as the basis of a new religion, either of despair or optimism. The crucial issue is whether or not we believe that our species is still evolving, for if it is, then the purpose of religion may be seen quite simply as enabling us to become a higher kind of species, helping us to become co-creators with God. I would like to think that we gather here in this church to work out the agenda for that massive enterprise, each in our own small way. I must, however, leave Darwin for some future occasion, for I want today to look more closely at the new understanding of God that has been revealed by Hubble's astronomical exploration. In one sense it is not at all new, for it is to be found in both of today's readings. The first is from a Trappist monk, who died only about twenty years ago but cannot have understood the religious significance of Hubble's Law, for otherwise I don't see how he could say that the oneness of the human race which he experienced as a sort of revelation was unexplainable. The second reading is from a fourteenth century anchoress, a sort of hermit, attached to a church in Norwich. Although she lived long before telescopes were invented and before science as we know it existed, she was given to know intuitively a religious truth that cosmological science is now revealing logically. It is the particular task and glory of science to pursue truth logically and make it publicly acceptable, where the poet and artist communicate their inspiration in an individual way. However, the knowledge of how the universe was created which science is opening up today differs in one vitally important respect from the revelations in both readings, for where the authors believed from the Bible that God made all things out of nothing "by His word", the only conclusion that science can reach is that the creating power has made, and continues to make, everything out of itself. That is both a revelation and a revolution. It means, in a word, that we all exist within God but each of us has God within. Do we then have to abandon the traditional Christian image of this power as a loving father "up there"? It may come as a surprise that the answer to that very important question is that the humanness of the creating power is confirmed by science, for if we can trace our humanity to its primal source, it is logical that there is something humanlike about that source, certainly the power to love and something akin to human will and personality. The mediaevals had a Latin tag that sums up this logic - Nemo dat quod non habet, no one gives what they haven't got. So although it is naive and misleading to think of God as a big man above the clouds, it is not wrong to think of our creative source as a loving power, for if it did not love, it would be inferior to the beings it has created out of its own substance. Science, in fact, reinforces the homespun theology of an Irish friend I once had, who used to assure me, "God is more human than you think." I will try to explain briefly why Hubble's Law leads to a new understanding of God. He did most of his astronomy in the 1920's and 1930's at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. There he noticed that distant galaxies gave off a reddish light, and from that seemingly unimportant fact he deduced that they were all moving away from our galaxy and from each other. If they had been stationary, they would have given off a white light, and if they had been coming in our direction, they would have given off a blue light. (The reason for this is very similar to the explanation of why an ambulance siren gives a different sound, depending on whether it is coming towards or going away from us.) From this small detail a whole new science of astronomy was born, for we have had to come to terms with a universe that was not fixed and static but continually expanding. More importantly for us, a new kind of religion was conceived and is in the process of being born. It is now in the birth canal of history and I believe that our community is playing a small part in midwifing it into existence. The critical fact, which Hubble himself did not at first want to believe, is that if the whole of our cosmos is expanding, science faces the question of how it all began - and that, of course, is the question that all religions answer with their own creation story. We have the chance now of finding out how God actually created the world, instead of having to fall back on guesswork and myths. Some of these myths are inspiring - the order of creation which we find in the Old Testament story is, for instance, astonishingly accurate. Some, however, are simply childish fantasies. The eminent physicist John Wheeler tells of an occasion when he was giving a public lecture on the Big Bang theory, and was interrupted by a woman who said, "You have it completely wrong, Professor Wheeler, the world is supported on back of a giant turtle." Taken aback, he replied, "But what is the turtle standing on?" and she responded with withering pity, "It's turtles all the way down." There is a true story about Hubble's successor at the observatory, Allan Sandage, which illustrates how close is the overlap between cosmology and creation theology. On one occasion Sandage had finished his work at the observatory and went with some fellow astronomers to a restaurant. During the meal they were talking shop, discussing the origin of the expanding cosmos. Their discussion became so animated that it caught the attention of a man at a nearby table, who finally came across to them and said, "I couldn't help hearing your conversation, gentlemen, and wonder if I might join you. I am a minister of religion too." When we are talking about creation, what is true for science must be true for religion, or else we might as well join the woman with the turtles. The more we find out about creation the more we shall know about our creator, and fulfil the commandment of Jesus to love God with all our mind. If we wind back a mental film of the expanding universe, we must eventually come to the point where it all started, about thirteen billion years ago, where we encounter something which, from a religious perspective is remarkably like the picture that both Julian of Norwich and Thomas Merton give. It hardly needs to be said that we humans, who share 99% of our genes with chimpanzees, cannot hope to grasp the infinite unknowability of God, but, in fact, what science is telling us is that knowing God is not a matter of grasping but of being grasped. Catching sight of God through science is very much like catching sight of a perfect rose or a sunset or the smile of a baby: once seen, their beauty reaches out and seizes us. Few religious scholars are willing to explore this new revelation, for it would mean jettisoning most of what they learned at theological college, while practical ministers of religion, even those who claim to be broad-minded, usually beg to be excused from the challenge, on the grounds that they have a prior obligation not to disturb the faith of their congregations. Most scientists too are equally uncomfortable at the convergence between science and religion, for they predefine religion as a truth communicated in the form of myth, if not outright superstition, and thus it is understandable that they wish to keep science as a God-free zone and become very nervous when they hear astronomers like George Smoot describing the data coming back from the edge of space as "the fingerprints of God." In his book God and the Astronomers Robert Jastrow, who calls himself an agnostic, described the present situation very aptly: "Astronomers are curiously upset by proof that the universe had a beginning .... For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason the story of modern cosmology ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." Julian of Norwich is one who will be up there, for the vision which she had of "all that is made" within the "little thing, the size of a hazelnut" on the palm of her hand is a good description of our cosmos some millionths of a second after the Big Bang. It is an astonishing thought, but we know for sure that unless all the laws of science have been suspended, there was at this moment no such thing even as atoms, only energy contained in a space this size. It was not "pure energy" since it was energy limited by the three dimensions by which our universe is defined. We cannot wind back the film of creation right to the beginning, for we run into a mental barrier some billionths of a second before the film gets there, where science has no picture and no equations with which to model the reality that then existed. This cosmological "little thing", which is as wonderful and incomprehensible as Julian's hazelnut, is called the Planck domain, after Max Planck, the genius who pioneered the physics of the quantum, which seeks to reveal the heart of the atom, where there is no matter, only energy dancing in different patterns. At the boundary of the Planck domain, where the whole of the cosmos has shrunk to an unimaginably small size, far far less than a speck of flour, physics and cosmology (which are now inseparable) lose their nerve, for if we keep winding back the imaginary film to the utter beginning, we finish up with what scientists call, a naked singularity - that is to say a point of no dimensions at all, not so much a "what" as a "where". No wonder scientific theorists back off, for a point is a "no-thing". Where science is left with a real head-scratcher, however, theology's response will be "Well, of course. It's obvious," and this is really what Thomas Merton and Julian of Norwich are saying in their different ways. Cosmology is telling us that everything once existed in a single point, and they are telling us that the single point is God, and the same point is everywhere in creation and especially within us. In Merton's words, "At the centre of our being is a point of nothingness ... a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God ... from which God disposes of our lives." And in Julian's words, "After this I saw the whole Godhead concentrated, as it were, in a single point and thereby I learnt that he is in all things." What baffles the scientist is that time itself began when our universe started to expand from that point. We can't ask what happened before then, because there was no time, but we can ask what lies beyond it. For the person with even a minimum of spiritual sensitivity the answer comes naturally and logically - the infinite, eternal, timeless power that we call God. We creatures of time are born and die, but while we are here we can make contact with that power, for each moment of our lives is a sort of cross hairs where the timeless intersects with time. We are looking at a religion now where the cross becomes a doubly inspiring religious symbol - but that is something I must leave for the present, for my purpose is to show how a new understanding of God can bring a new sense of oneness to a world becoming atomized into millions of self-centred, individuals, where community is reduced to blank-faced people pushing their trolleys around at Tesco. Human evolution may be visualized as a rising spiral, returning at a higher level to what we once had to leave behind in order to progress. To gain maturity and for modern civilisation to develop it was necessary for each individual to feel self-reliant and independent, but in the process we have lost our sense of community, and now it must be reinvented in a different form. The challenge we now face is to understand ourselves not as an individual personality with a soul but as part of a great soul with many personalities. We must, as Thomas Merton says, "awaken from a dream of separateness" and, as Julian says, realise that "God is in all things". In one of his major essays, Alfred Russel Wallace expressed this by quoting a hymn whose poetry echoed the intuition at which he had arrived through science, and which will provide a fitting ending for this address:
Frank Parkinson |