Cosmology in Theological Perspective

Understanding Our Place in the Universe

Olli-Pekka Vainio

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780801099434
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493414505
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Olli-Pekka Vainio, a leading expert in science and theology, explores questions concerning the place and significance of humans in the cosmos. Vainio introduces cosmology from a "state of the question" perspective, examining the history of the idea in dialogue with C. S. Lewis. This work, which is related to a NASA-funded project on astrobiology, ties into the ongoing debate on the relationship between Christian theism and scientific worldview and shows what the stakes are for religion and theology in the rise of modern science.

1
Every Saga Has a Beginning

Philosophical Cosmologies in the Ancient World

In order to grasp the relationship between contemporary science and the Christian worldview, it is helpful to look back and see how cosmologies were constructed in the past. In this chapter, I will briefly examine cosmologies in the ancient Near East and their similarities and dissimilarities with the Old Testament. Plato and Aristotle offer the first major philosophical accounts of cosmology, and they had significant influence on early Christianity. For the first Christians, these were the “scientific” models of the world that they tried to reconcile with their faith. On several points, they were in fundamental agreement. Nonetheless, Christians came to deny the existence of a past-eternal universe, and their view of God—namely, that God is one and personal—differed from that in the Greek tradition.

Cosmos in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Old Testament

The Greek word cosmos in its mundane usage referred to skillfully and beautifully composed objects, like jewels, statues, or machines. For example, in Homer’s Odyssey (8.492), the Trojan horse is called a cosmos. The opposite of cosmos is chaos and disorder. Charles Taylor aptly captures the idea of prescientific cosmologies: “I use ‘cosmos’ for our forebearers’ idea of the totality of existence because it contains the idea of an ordered whole. It is not that our own universe isn’t in its own way ordered, but in the cosmos the order of things was a humanly meaningful one. That is, the principle of order in the cosmos was closely related to, often identical with, that which gives shape to our lives.”1

While the first cosmologies were anthropocentric, later developments have to some extent left this perspective behind; they are not directly concerned about the place and meaning of humans in the grand scheme of things. As we approach our own time, cosmology starts to focus more on things like the structure and evolution of the universe and the origin of matter. Nevertheless, questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the origin and the meaning of life are always lurking around the corner, and many cosmologists find it hard not to say something about these issues, which lie outside proper scientific method. It is, in fact, hard to tell when a cosmology is purely scientific and when it borders on the philosophical or religious. Cosmological questions are, and always have been, deeply connected with existential questions.2

Prescientific cosmologies included some claims about the nature and movements of the heavenly bodies, but they were not exclusively interested in stars alone; they sought to tell a story about everything that exists. This is common for all origin myths; they tell where we came from and what our relation to the whole is, while the most advanced ones typically point us in the direction of how we should go about living our lives.3

Prescientific cosmologies typically proceeded from perception of the immediate features of reality and aimed to provide a holistic account of everything that exists. Therefore, it is natural that such accounts were anthropocentric. A fundamental feature of these cosmologies is what a person sees and experiences, which was then inserted into a mythic framework. The same stance is portrayed in old medieval maps where the words hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) may appear on the edges. The maps portray what is known, what has been seen, and what matters. Here is the world of knowledge; there is the world of surprise. However, we should not take old maps too seriously. The old genre of mappa mundi was not meant to serve the same function as our modern maps. For example, the famous Hereford Map depicts the world with Jerusalem at its center, and it also gives the location of Eden (see fig. 1.1). It is obvious that the author of the map did not even care about geographical details, for places seem to appear in random locations. It focuses on the meanings and relations of things, not where they are. Thus, these maps illustrate a different way of placing oneself in the universe, which might at first sound strange for us. For the illustrator, the meaning of things was more important than accurate depictions of them as physical objects.

Figure 1.1. Hereford Mappa Mundi, a medieval map of the world dating from ca. 1300. The map, along with a commentary, can be browsed at https://www.themappamundi.co.uk.

To get a better grasp of the first actual cosmologies, we need to go back to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies often used the human body as a model for the cosmos (a pattern that has continued in a mutated form until this very day). The human body offers a way of structuring the world in a hierarchical manner, where certain parts are higher while others are lower. The act of creation is also typically depicted with the help of sexual images, such as in intercourse between gods and earthly elements.4

The old languages of these regions did not have a specific word for cosmos, but the world was typically divided between heaven and earth. Gods, often linked to the celestial bodies, were believed to reside in heaven, with earth consisting of the world of humans and the subterranean netherworld, the dwelling place of the dead. In the hierarchy of the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the regions closest to humans are also dwelling places of more anthropomorphic deities, whereas the peripheries are inhabited by strange gods and demonic creatures. In the story, our world is created when the hero of the story, Marduk, slays Tiamat, a chaos monster often depicted as a dragon, and builds the world from different parts of her body. As a whole, the story can be read as a theodicy that explains the birth of our world from chaos through the guiding hands of very powerful, but not ultimately perfect, deities: the world is created out of matter that is subject to change as such and also subject to the whims of gods.5

The early cosmologies typically consisted of elements and images that were familiar at the time of their writing. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh depicts the earth as a mountain surrounded by primeval waters; other texts portray the human world as a reed raft floating on water. The early cosmologies are a mixture of elementary knowledge of the movements of the stars and existential accounts of the place of humans in the grand scheme of things. Even if the texts are openly mythical and poetic, they express a familiar need to offer a systematic account of the totality of things, with an emphasis on existential questions. The depictions of wars between gods and other beings are not mere stories; they are explanations of why we humans behave as we do. In this, they are fine examples of human curiosity and cognitive capacity.6

The Egyptian cosmologies, which are slightly more developed and philosophically explicit than the Mesopotamian ones, portray the same tendencies, but they also offer a normative account of human good.7 The stars, as well as forces of nature like the primordial ocean, are gods. A central philosophical concept in Egyptian cosmology is maʿat, which refers to the balance of the cosmos. When there is balance, there is also justice, harmony, and prosperity. The opposite of maʿat is chaos, which presents itself in war, famine, and a lack of various virtues. In the beginning, humans lived peacefully under the reign of the sun god Re, the ruler of both gods and men. When humans rebelled, gods were sent to destroy the human race. Re pitied humans and decided not to execute his sentence, but the alliance between gods and men was still broken. The gods left Earth for the sky, and humans were destined to remain behind. The earthly king, Pharaoh, ruled as a steward of divine order, and he was supposed to represent maʿat in his rule as well as he could, lest the world succumb to chaos.

In its post-fall state, the Egyptian cosmos consists of the following elements. The world of humans is a disk that floats on an immense ocean. The god of the air, Shu, holds up the god of the sky, Hathor, who forms a cupola over the Earth. Her belly glitters with stars by night, and by day Re sails his boat across the horizon. During the night, Re enters the underworld where the dead reside. The Egyptians thought that the Earth-disk is the physical center of the universe, around which everything else revolves. However, this was not a place of great value, as the divine realm was held to be the true, nonphysical center. Humans had value only relative to order and the hierarchy of the cosmos.

The Nordic mythologies portray the cosmos in a simil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Every Saga Has a Beginning
• 2. The Voyage Home
• 3. Resistance Is Futile
• 4. All These Worlds
• 5. If It’s Just Us, It Seems Like an Awful Waste of Space
• 6. Infinite Space, Infinite Terror
• 7. In Space No One Can Hear You Scream?
• 8. There Is No Gene for the Human Spirit
• 9. Come with Me If You Want to Live
• 10. To Boldly Go
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover