Peter Dresser got into a bit of trouble when one of our conservative journalistic friends tried to use in for nefarious purposes in one of our national newspapers a couple of years ago. In The Tablet this week there is a review of a new book by now emeritus Professor of Theology, Jack Mahoney SJ, that might suggest Peter Dresser is not that far off the money in all these difficult questions he's been putting before us. Unfortunately the review isn't available online but Jerome reprinted some lines from it on our forum HERE and I've added the book to our marketplace HERE. As Peter suggests God is Big .... Real BIG! and we all need to start re-thinking all our theologies in the light of what we're discovering about life and our universe.

Series Navigation: Prologue & Preamble | Chapter One: The Thinking of Pooh | Orthodoxy | Who or What is God? I | Who or What is God? II | God and Jesus I | God and Jesus II | Jesus the Avatar I | Jesus the Avatar II | Religion & Literalism I | Religion & Literalism II | Religion & Literalism III | Religion & Literalism IV | Religion & Literalism V | Religion & Literalism VI | Our Universe I | Our Universe II | The God of Our Universe I | The God of Our Universe II | God, Our Universe & Ourselves I | God, Our Universe & Ourselves II | God, Our Universe & Ourselves III | God, Our Universe & Ourselves IV | Ourselves & Prayer I | Ourselves & Prayer II | Ourselves & Prayer III | Ourselves & Prayer IV | Epilogue

Chapter Seven (Part 2): Our Universe

Each of us is a mere bit of stardust...

Chet Raymo gives a personal account of attempting to depict a time line of the history of Earth. He takes up the story:

There are lots of different depictions of the Timeline of the History of the Earth available on a Google Search. The one above come from a site called "Destination of Marvel: Your journey to the origin of the universe, mankind and science". Click the image or HERE to see the original timeline enlarged.

"In an earth science course that I teach at Stonehill College, I ask students to make a time line of Earth history. One imaginative young woman returned to class with a melon-size ball of yarn. Each foot of yarn represented 10 million years. Major geologic eras – Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic – were different colours of yarn, and multicolored buttons tied along the strand were keyed to important events in Earth history, described on an accompanying sheet of paper. There was not enough space to unwind the ball in the classroom, so we took it outside into the college quad. When the yearn was unrolled, it was 450 feet long, the length of one and a half football fields, representing 4.5 billion years of Earth history. I stood with the class at one end of the strand – the present – and looked off to the other end where a student stood at the epoch of the Earth's beginning, solitary and distant. It was an impressive demonstration of the abyss of geologic time."[53]

Carl Sagan who has been mentioned previously is a man completely carried away with the enormity of the universe. Even in his novels (I am reading one at the moment) he is moved by the size of the cosmos and notes details, e.g., that the Milky Way galaxy is 26,000 light years away.[54]Indeed so many writers of both non-fiction and fiction attempt to create a sense of the immensity of our universe and consequently try to create a feeling of awe and reverence and wonderment. Some writers in addition to describing the wonderment of the cosmos also look at microbial life on our own planet Earth. It has been calculated that there exists a potential mass of underground bacteria of 200,000,000,000,000 tons. This figure is equivalent to a layer five feet thick spread out over the earth's entire land surface. Not only this, but modal bacteria may not only dominate, even by weight, on earth, but may also represent life's only common mode throughout the universe.[55]

Archangel Michael crushing Satan underfoot depicted by Italian painter Guido Reni (1575–1642). Click to enlarge and for further information at Wikipedia.

I am frequently overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe and by the spectacular display of nature. At times I am totally overcome with an experience of my smallness and insignificance in the midst of all that is. It certainly has the effect of leading to a total acceptance of myself for what I am, a total acceptance of myself physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually and in every other conceivable way. But whilst I remain conscious of my smallness in the vastness of the cosmos and therefore my insignificance, I also see myself as a child of this great universe, as a miracle in the evolutionary event, and thus to a large extent my insignificance becomes quite significant. I am an important and necessary part in the whole evolutionary scenario and form a significant link in the interconnectedness with everything that exists. But more importantly I, just a bit of stardust myself, can hold before my eyes the magnificence of it all, can live in it, revel in it, praise it in wonder, reverence and awe. I, a part of the universe, can reflect upon the universe. I, a child of the universe, can reflect on my interconnectedness with all that is. And above all else I share the view of so many others that if there is a future for God, it can only be by our taking account of the scientific worldview, not by fleeing from it. Consequently science will be subsumed by religion "so that the world revealed by science (will be) perceived with an abiding sense of the sacred, celebrated liturgically, and lovingly cherished."[56]

This idea is not far removed surely from the wonder and awe that earlier men and women experienced when they reflected on the cosmology of their time. It was certainly the sense of wonder that lifted them out of themselves as it were, and also helped to develop a true sense of proportion and distance and perspective. It was no doubt this sense or feeling that gave rise to sentiments expressed for example in Psalm Eight:

When I look at the heavens,
The work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that
You have established;
What are human beings that you
Are mindful of them,
Mortals that you care for
Them?
Yet you have made them a little
Lower than God…

With a vastly more developed understanding of our universe, we should perhaps experience to a greater extent our position in the universe. We live in a busy world, a fast world where the pace of many people's lives has increased. There is a need for us to slow down a little, to be quiet and to look beyond our own small world to the larger world, the universe that we are part of. And William Breault[57] makes the comment that "if you wish to come home to God, you must first come home to yourself. When your vision becomes clouded over with responsibilities and obligations, restore your peace by taking a walk under the stars, looking up, and spending a few moments in silence."

In conclusion I return to the observation made at the beginning of this chapter, namely that we are structurally no different from the rest of the universe. And to understand this is to let ourselves expand into infinity. As Chet Raymo continues:

Chet Raymo's book is out of print.

"It remains to be seen if or how theologians will reconcile the traditional notion of immortality with the new materialistic, mechanistic self. It may be best to simply toss immortality aside and get on with the celebration of the cosmically embedded self.

We have more to gain than to lose. In the biological and neurological discoveries of the past quarter century, we catch a glimpse of a marvelous cosmic self in resonance with the universe, a distillation of stellar fires, a Heraclitean spark of the substance of the stars. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures tell us that God created the first man and woman out of the slime of the Earth, breathed life into them, and pronounced them good. The myth is consistent with our current understanding of the nature of life. According to the best scientific theories, we are literally animated slime. Now we must relearn to think ourselves good"[58]

Once again I have this feeling of being one with what I call the Universal Spirit, of living with and within this Universal Soul, the feeling of melting into this God and, at death, melting even further and more deeply into this universal vibrance and energy. We are all children of the universe; we are children of God. God is within us and we within God. I am not the centre of the universe. I am certainly not the beginning of the universe and quite certainly not its end point. Somewhere in between; but connected with its beginning and with its end. Entirely and utterly insignificant; entirely and utterly significant. And so we all proceed with our brief physical existence wandering planet earth continually energised by our connectedness with each other and with the entire universe, and continually energised by the Spirit and Soul of our universe, the Being we call God.

NEXT WEEK: Chapter Eight Part 1: "The God of Our Universe"

Series Navigation: Prologue & Preamble | Chapter One: The Thinking of Pooh | Orthodoxy | Who or What is God? I | Who or What is God? II | God and Jesus I | God and Jesus II | Jesus the Avatar I | Jesus the Avatar II | Religion & Literalism I | Religion & Literalism II | Religion & Literalism III | Religion & Literalism IV | Religion & Literalism V | Religion & Literalism VI | Our Universe I | Our Universe II | The God of Our Universe I | The God of Our Universe II | God, Our Universe & Ourselves I | God, Our Universe & Ourselves II | God, Our Universe & Ourselves III | God, Our Universe & Ourselves IV | Ourselves & Prayer I | Ourselves & Prayer II | Ourselves & Prayer III | Ourselves & Prayer IV | Epilogue

FOOTNOTES:
[53] Chet Raymo, Skeptics and True Believers, Allen and Unwin, Australia, l998, p.82-83.
[54] Carl Sagan, Contact, Century Publishing, London, 1985, p.71.
[55] Stephen Jay Gould, Life's Grandeur, Random House, Australia, 1996, p.194-195
[56] Chet Raymo, Op.cit p.119
[57] William Breault S.J. A Voice Over the Water, Ave Maria Press, Indiana, 1985, p.23
[58] Chet Raymo, Op.cit. pp131-132.

IMAGE CREDITS:
Clicking on the images in the body of this article will take you to the original source and further information.

[Index of Commentaries by Fr Peter Dresser]