Let’s face it both cosmologists/astrophysicists and theologians have a lot of explaining to do if they intend to give us a comprehensive and comprehensible idea as to why the universe is the way it is.
Cosmologists puzzle over why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate when current theories say it should not be so based upon our understanding of gravity and the nature of the universe. In a New York Times science article of 3 June 2008 entitled Dark, Perhaps Forever, Dennis Overbye ponders the mystery which currently is beyond scientific understanding and shocking to many scientists. (See the New York Times full graphic)
Overbye writes, “It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.”
Ahh, yes. And just when science was on the verge of supplanting religion and being able to claim it can explain everything. Science the omniscient. But apparently it is not to be so. It is the same kind of dilemma that Christian theologians (and all theistic believers) face in explaining how to hold together a belief in a good, merciful and all powerful God on the one hand and the existence of random forces in nature, evil and suffering on the other.
Both theists and cosmologists have come to recognize the dark side of the universe. Both are dealing with something that is experienced within the universe but which is not easily explained. The term theodicy has been coined by theologians to cover the topic of how to explain the existence of evil in a universe which is created by a God who is good and all powerful. Overbye postulates that what science now needs is a solution to its dark energy problem which is going to come from creativity and a new way of understanding the universe rather than from empirical evidence, much like, he says, when quantum mechanics was first proposed in the 1920’s and which “overturned science” at that time.
The irrefutable truths of science in the 1920’s were shown to be an inadequate understanding of the universe. Scientists need to open their minds to new ways of seeing the universe in order to cope with mystery and the unexplainable. They find themselves in the same position as theologians who have wrestled with the inexplicable for millennia, dealing with the observable universe and the unknowable as well.
And to the new mysteries of the universe, Christians will continue to maintain that rationalism and the scientific method have their limits. Christians will continue to see those mysteries of the universe which are beyond our understanding of the continued signs of the God who also is beyond our greatest understanding. So we can look with empathy upon the dilemmas of science, and offer compassionate understanding for not only is the universe mysterious and beyond our comprehension, so is the God who created it.
See also my Coloring In the Lines of Space and Time
Fraternized 