New Cosmology for a New Millennium

Abstract

Seminary training, as it was commonly known prior to the 1960s, included a course that was called “cosmology.” In the broadest sense of the term, cosmology is understood to be a discipline that attempts to explain the universe precisely as an orderly system, and hence as a cosmos and not just as an accidental juxtaposition of many pieces that are basically unrelated. This course in the seminary was given in the context of the philosophical program; that is, prior to and independently of any theology of creation. In the typical handbook used in seminaries at that time, this would have been the point at which students would have studied some of the key ideas and theories of the Aristotelian vision of the universe. This would have involved issues such as the nature and structure of material bodies commonly dealt with in terms of the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism. At that time for many Christian thinkers, such a theory was practically normative for Christian thought. Not only was it practically a metaphysical dogma, but it seemed to many to be necessary as a condition for explaining certain Christian doctrines such as sacramental theology and, above all, the theology of the Eucharist. As a theory that explained not only the structure of bodies but the possibility and limits of change, it would become an important tool for some authors to prove for philosophical reasons that any theory such as Darwin’s theory of evolution was metaphysically impossible. Such a course could be taken with virtually no knowledge of the insights and theories of the physical sciences; and, indeed, it could easily become an argument against the very possibility that such viewpoints might have some validity. In my own seminary experience, the course called cosmology was approached from a very different perspective. Working on the assumption that the sciences were important sources for a descriptive picture as to what the universe looks like and how it operates, this course was constructed in relation to the then most contemporary theories about the physics of the universe. This included such things as quantum theory, relativity, and the earliest form of big-bang cosmology. From this scientific understanding of the universe nine major questions were drawn out to become the subject matter for the rest of the course. Questions such as: How big is the universe? What is space and time? What is the nature of matter? What is life?