c) Final Remark
Perhaps the most important result to emerge from the shifts
in cosmology over the past decades is the emergence of the hot Big Bang as a
permanent description of our universe from the Planck time some 12-15
billion years ago to the present. Gone is the time when Hoyles steady state
model posed a serious challenge to the Big Bang, with its picture of a single,
ever-expanding universe whose fundamental features were time-independent.
Instead the domain of debate has shifted to the pre-Planck era and what might
lie endlessly before the Big Bang in quantum superspace. We have witnessed
what Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams call an encompassing revolution as
distinguished from the kind of Kuhnian replacing revolution one usually
thinks of when scientific paradigms change. In such an encompassing revolution,
the new paradigm, e.g., quantum cosmology, contains the old one, e.g., Big Bang
cosmology as a limit case, e.g., when quantum effects can be ignored. To paraphrase a point made by Charles Misner, we can have confidence in relying
on the Big Bang scenario, since we know just where it fails: prior to the
Planck time. In this
sense the Big Bang is here to stay.
Given this perspective, the time is ripe for a renewed
theological focus on the universe in which we have evolved, and a setting aside
of what were interesting issues surrounding t=0 but which are now becoming
rapidly outmoded.Instead we are poised, as never before, to focus research in theology and
science on its 15 billion year history and the evolution of life, at least on
planet Earth and perhaps throughout the universe. What will life in the
universe tell us about the meaning of the universe, and about human life in
particular? These questions suggest how cosmology, as a part of physics, and
evolution, as a part of biology, are coming together in a fusion of horizons
that seemed impossible during the past three centuries. The theological
challenges and opportunities are tremendous!
Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell
|
