Cosmos and Revelation

Reimagining God’s Creation in the Age of Science

Peter R. Stork

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666730272
  9781666721546
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666721553
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Science and technology have profoundly altered the cosmic and societal perceptions of the world. Regrettably, the Christian imagination has not kept pace. Most believers still adhere to pre-scientific views. Cosmos and Revelation urges the Christian community to reimagine God's creation by engaging the data of science. For if God has indeed brought forth an intelligible world for us to explore through scientific research, those who profess this faith ought to, as a minimum, allow scientific findings to expand their theological horizon. Drawing on his scientific qualification and academic background in theology, Peter R. Stork opens several windows on God's creation, from galactic star nurseries to the wonderland of living cells. After rereading Genesis 1 and 2, the author interlaces examples and reflections to present a coherent yet provocative sketch of the new landscape that spreads out before us, leaving it to his readers to intuit for themselves the immensities Christians are challenged to embrace in the age of science.

1

The Nature of Revelation

Modern science has created formidable challenges to traditional views of the world, how it works, and how it came to be. These discoveries raise completely new questions for theology and the concept of revelation, challenging Christians to address them if the message of the church is to meet the spiritual hunger of an increasingly science-informed public. By exploring various approaches to the meaning of revelation, this chapter sets the stage for what follows.

The Dimension of Mystery

The oldest fossil of the genus Homo—known as the “Jedi jaw” and found in Ethiopia—dates from around 2.8 million years ago.13 The last shoot on the human family tree had begun to stretch forth at least 100,000 years before the present as a new species, Homo sapiens (the self-styled “wise human”). With rising consciousness, their epic voyage of self-discovery was accompanied by a growing awareness of a mysterious dimension that encompassed their existence. It met them again and again in their living and dying, in the natural world with its wonders and dangers, in pain and suffering, in the forces that formed the land, that brought or withheld rain, in the awesome vistas of the night sky, and more. Already their older cousins, the Neanderthals, with whom Homo sapiens lived and interbred in Europe between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, seemed to have had a remarkable awareness of mystery. Based on a Neanderthal find dated from 176,000 years ago, the Bruniquel Cave in the Aveyron Valley (France) holds a rock structure erected from 400 deliberately broken pieces of stalagmites in two concentric rings. Dubbed the Paleolithic Stonehenge, it seems to have served cultic purposes.14 Sacramental behavior has been observed elsewhere, in ritual burial sites dating from around 100,000 years ago, and in an even older Homo erectus site. What these finds seem to indicate is that the human response to the mysterious dimension is religion.

As speech developed along with the ability to symbolize, our prehistoric ancestors told mythical stories about their world. In Australia many Aboriginal groups, though widely scattered across the continent, share variations of the same myth that tells the story of a powerful, often dangerous serpent of vast dimensions. This mythical creature is believed to be a descendant of the much larger being visible at night as a dark streak in the Milky Way. It is closely related to rainbows, rivers, and deep water holes. The Rainbow Serpent, according to legend, reveals itself to people on Earth as a rainbow, as water, as floods; it names springs and water holes, swallows people, and sometimes drowns them. It also imparts knowledge and wisdom, enabling some humans to make rain and heal illnesses, striking others with weakness, sores, illness, and death.

The practice of naming the mystery and telling stories about it belongs to the realm of primal religion. Our ancestors lived in an enchanted world and by naming the mystery its invisible forces not only acquired less fearsome and fateful forms but became more accessible. With time, belief systems emerged, including moral codes, rituals, and norms for communal living. In early religion, symbols are the actual presence of the numinous mystery, not a mere representation, almost a type of revelation. When Aboriginal people, for instance, perform their ancient rituals, they are living the past, not symbolically but actually.

As we would expect, religions that have come to prominence in the historical period—the period dating from the invention of writing in the fourth millennium BCE—are known as historical religions. Here, participants are more conscious that the mystery they are aware of is not the same thing as the symbol. A statue or picture of a god no longer stands as its numinous power but as its symbolic representation. With advancing historical consciousness, people became more conscious of one all-encompassing, infinite, and eternal power in the world that, in the end, is perceived as incomprehensible. They know that no statue, image, ritual, or moral code can adequately capture the mystery, for what is infinite and eternal must always be beyond what is merely finite, representational, and symbolic. If this mystery is to be known, it will have to disclose itself.

However, symbols bring a certain problem. As descriptions, depictions, and representations with all their sensual appeal, they can be misleading and even dangerous. Having emerged from within a given culture, symbols tend to make people comfortable with their religious tradition, even indulgent in that the need to wrestle with ultimate questions in each historical situation is not urgent. Speaking in the current Christian context, theology has been too comfortable with its traditional answers, especially regarding creation. Today, scientific descriptions of the universe have so radically altered the cosmic and societal perceptions of the world that a new Christian understanding of creation is required. Christians and Christian theology must come to terms with the expanse of creation, its complexity, its incompleteness, its emergence over time, its inner dynamism and wholeness, and with humanity’s place in the cosmic and biological order. Simply put, to the degree that the Christian vision of creation remains tied to the old cosmic story, it is too small. The same goes for a vision of the Creator.

Still, many Christians reject the findings of modern science as a basis for their understanding of creation; having chosen the so-called plain reading of the Genesis text as the only valid exegesis, they are captive to an outdated cosmic conception that inhibits their ability to communicate meaningfully with contemporary culture. By the same token, many who have embraced the scientific description of the cosmos struggle (as I have) with their commitment to remain faithful to the scriptural text. It is mainly for them that I have written this book.

The book is based on my belief that this world, as the sciences describe it, was created in God’s perfect love as revealed in Jesus Christ, that it reflects the best possible world, and that it is sustained in being by God’s will. It is further based on the understanding that creation includes multiple levels of biological organization, and that one of these brought forth a level of human consciousness that resulted in the present age of scientific discovery. Additionally, since this love-created world is far larger and more dynamic than anything Christians have ever imagined—the Milky Way, our home galaxy, alone registers as only one among hundreds of billions of other galaxies, each containing 200 billion stars like our sun—it seems to me that we urgently need a vastly expanded vision of the Creator. How else would Christianity in an age of science make plausible its claim that God revealed himself in human form—the result of a long and arduous cosmic process over billions of years—as God’s ultimate way of expressing his character as creative love and as the ultimate mystery?15

A Brief Theology of Revelation

In the broadest sense, theology is critical thinking about religious beliefs and more specifically also the science of the God of revelation. General parlance often uses “revelation” when something that has been unclear or obscure to us suddenly makes sense, or when, in a moment of illumination, we can somehow see reality more clearly than by ordinary reason alone. Yet many puzzles remain. For one, revelation as generally understood is personal. Theologically, it is an occasional disclosure of divine truth through the experience of a single individual like a prophet or seer, but this disclosure is not obvious to everyone.

Then there are questions about its origin. Culturally, there is a deep-seated notion that religious experiences that mediate ideas, say about the meaning and purpose of the world or human lives, are derived from “above,” from otherworldly sources—that is, by way of revelation—while critical reason asks, “How do we know?” A secular world may say that moments of illumination are nothing more than the effect of our brain cells connecting the dots in a new way. And even if we hold to a divine origin of revelation, we cannot avoid the problem that such knowledge is thoroughly conditioned by nature, as it needs to make use of our neuronal tissue, while many are convinced that such a view would demean the value of revelation. Yet, we must go farther and ask how the concept of divine revelation is to be understood in our time.

Then there are questions regarding God’s revelation in history. How plausible is the claim of the Judeo-Christian tradition today that God should have been so partial as to reveal himself to one particular man, Abraham, at a particular time in history and later to his offspring, the people of Israel? What these questions highlight is that the notion of revelation, while on the one hand a rather simple notion, is on the other hand not easily dealt with in our time.

The word revelation comes from the Latin verb form revelo, meaning to unveil (equivalents in Hebrew and Greek are gālâ and apocalyptō respectively), all expressing the same idea of unveiling something hidden. The Bible uses this vocabulary in several ways: making obscure things clear, bringing hidden things to light, showing signs, speaking words, and causing the persons addressed to see, hea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Nature of Revelation
• Chapter 2: The Biblical Account of Creation
• Chapter 3: The New Cosmic Story
• Chapter 4: Understanding Our Place in the Universe
• Chapter 5: Humanity—An Evolving Phenomenon
• Chapter 6: The Human Brain and the Rise of Human Consciousness
• Chapter 7: The Inside Story Solidifies—Religious Symbols
• Chapter 8: Desire, Sacrifice, and Revelation
• Chapter 9: Toward an Expanded Theology
• Bibliography