Three Critical Moments in the History of the Cosmos

About a month ago, I was in a casual conversation with a former student who said that though he accepts Christianity in most fundamental points, the Eucharist is a teaching about which he is still unsure. His exact wording was that he didn’t know “how that would work.” His comment set me to musing about the many things the workings of which I am totally ignorant. Perhaps my poor educational background explains why I don’t know what fire is, or gravity, or light. However, if I were to shy away from the benefits of these and other things merely because I don’t know how they work, my comings and goings in this world would be severely handicapped.

There are certain mysteries, natural and supernatural, that consistently resist the firm grip of the human mind. Our acceptance of these ideas, however, is not based on cognitive mastery of all the details therein but on the fact that they seem to correspond to a certain pattern of experience. British scientist Arthur Eddington, for example, set up an experiment in 1919 that demonstrated rather convincingly that there are curvatures in the fabric of space. Wait — curvatures in what? The fabric of space? Spacetime? This is all completely beyond us, yet we do know that if we stretch out a bed sheet and put a tennis ball in its center, anything we roll across that sheet will be attracted to the depression caused by the ball. We have, then, a certain experience that helps us “understand” curvatures in spacetime and the theory of relativity.

I sympathize with my student in that I, too, don’t know how the Eucharist works. Nevertheless, I do find that it fits into a certain pattern — a pattern of history and science. It is a pattern of singularities, of small things appearing out of nowhere and becoming very big things. I think we can put the Eucharist in line with three critical moments in the history of our cosmos. We can call them critical moments of life, having to do with: first, the creation of the universe; second, the creation of life on Earth; and finally, the relatively sudden appearance in Homo sapiens of a transcendent capacity — a capacity some might identify simply as the soul. For each of these events, science can trace back a certain sequence of effects, but it stops, baffled, in consideration of a final cause of those effects. These three critical moments have two shared characteristics: first, each emerges from a singularity, meaning a small, primary point of origin; second, each singularity seems to sort of pop into existence, apparently lacking any preceding causation. It’s as though each event, each singularity, were created from nothing.

To illustrate: When we consider the creation of the universe, we are considering an event popularly known as the “Big Bang” (although most cosmologists would agree that this term is ready for the shredder). What happened was not a bang but the sudden yet controlled expansion of the cosmos from a single, atomically small point (they call it a singularity), almost infinitely hot and dense — so hot that it would take 380,000 years of expansion before the universe was cool enough to allow the first elements to form. From the initial expansion to the ultimate formation of stars and planets, science can trace the sequence. On the origins of the initial singularity, however, science (pure science) is mute.

There are many chapters in the eventual discovery of this original, cosmic moment — chapters having to do with the perception of red shift in distant galaxies and microwave radiation suffused throughout the universe. The best chapter, though, is about how a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, had to explain to Albert Einstein the significance of his own field equations. When Einstein first began to suspect that the equations were telling the story of a shifting, unstable universe, he simply inserted into the equations a term that would bring stability back to his world. It’s called the cosmological constant. Einstein inserted it because he believed that the material universe is a fixed, eternal reality. In truth, the universe is more akin to the floating islands of C.S. Lewis’s book Perelandra.

Eventually, Einstein gave Fr. Lemaître a standing ovation. Other physicists, however, to this very day resist the idea of a beginning point and sequential expansion of the universe. The problem, of course, is that if there really was a beginning point in the history of the cosmos, then we must entertain notions of a Someone outside that beginning point who caused that beginning point. To avoid this potential pitfall, some suggest that while we are now, perhaps, in a period of expansion, it was preceded by a period of contraction, and the cycle eternally revolves. Though this argument has a certain pagan appeal to it, scientifically it doesn’t work, as it assumes the material universe is eternal — a notion that is in flat contradiction to the law of entropy, which states, in poetic form, that things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Stephen Hawking made a more scientifically sophisticated attempt to avoid the “God possibility” in the appearance of the universe. The universe, he wrote, is a perfect balance of negative and positive energy. And what do you get when you average out the amount of negative and positive energy? Zero! There you have it, proof that spontaneous generation from nothing is possible! (I suppose that by the same logic, if two kids are perfectly balanced on a seesaw, there are actually no kids on the seesaw at all. Hmm.)

We have no honest recourse, then, but to look back on the 13.8 billion years of the history of our universe’s expansion to acknowledge that that history does indeed have a beginning — a beginning for which there is no explanation, a beginning that seems to come out of nowhere.

Another critical yet mysterious moment in the history of the cosmos is the appearance of life on our planet. Life has not been found in any other part of the universe, even though there are cosmic regions in which the conditions for life are actually better than they are here on Earth. In fact, that life exists on this planet some consider to be sheer accident, even a farce (see, for example, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe by Nobel prize-winner Steven Weinberg, 1977). Part of the understood definition of an accident, though, is a statistically unlikely occurrence. And for some writers and thinkers, the fact that we are statistically unlikely is exactly the point. In other words, the precision-tuning of many factors and forces makes our existence highly unlikely. Some call these occurrences of precision-tuning anthropic coincidences — involving, for example, the precise balance between outward expulsion and gravitational attraction in our expanding universe, so that expansion does not occur so fast as to make cohesion impossible, or so slowly that gravitational force overwhelms and implodes the cosmos.

As another example of a finely tuned balance, consider the number of big stars in our universe, the ones that produced the chemical elements of which man is made, having spewed those elements into the cosmos before our Sun existed. Too many of these big stars, though, would create conditions too extreme for supporting life (see Invisible Matter and the Fate of the Universe by Barry Parker, 1989).

If we were to consider all occasions of such balance — and there are many more, as you will discover through a quick Internet search — we would find that the overall odds of life on Earth are exceedingly unfavorable — so unfavorable that Nobel Prize-winner Francis Crick once proposed that, in view of the very small odds of life’s having formed here, it must have been transported from somewhere else. On the eve of its own demise, Crick proposed, an advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe launched the seeds of life into the cosmos, eventually to be planted here on Earth. It’s a theory called directed panspermia, and it’s evidence of just how far from the realm of science some will stray in order to find a reason for our planet’s existence, since real reasons are not closer at hand.

A third critical moment in our history is when a certain species of the genus Homo suddenly began to act peculiarly. Somewhere around 60,000 years ago, evolution and survival, from what we can tell by the archeological record, were no longer the primary concerns of Homo sapiens. Quite unlike his fellow animals, this creature became restless in pursuit of ideals that have no practical benefit. Beyond wanting to know how to build a good fire, he wanted to know what is true. Beyond being able to communicate danger to his tribe, he wanted to communicate abstract thoughts and emotions. Beyond leaving behind crude maps and signals, he wanted to create designs of beauty. Are these desires the result of evolutionary forces? How could they be, since evolutionary forces strive for nothing more than adaptation and survival, while these desires lend us no advantages in that regard?

The genus Homo, however, has not always demonstrated such longing for the transcendent. Certainly, he has been around for a long time and has played his part in the evolutionary scheme. About two million years ago, Homo habilis showed a capacity for the production and use of stone tools; then Homo erectus, with a greater cranial capacity than Homo habilis, migrated out of Africa to Europe, China, and Indonesia. Afterwards, about 700,000 years ago, came Homo heidelbergensis, demonstrating abilities with spears and fire. Homo neanderthalensis, for his part, contributed to the evolutionary story an advanced tool capacity — axes, blades, and awls. So, we’re talking about a long stretch of time, more than a million years, with not much changing except for a larger migratory pattern and greater sophistication in tools.

With Homo sapiens, however, everything changes. William Johnson and David Strayer (in Advances in Psychology, 2001) point out that until Homo sapiens, “human evolution with all of its phase transitions…was unspectacular.” Christopher T. Baglow (in Faith, Science, & Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge, 2009) makes the same point, that early Homo sapiens “was still using the same kind of tools as Homo erectus.” Somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 years ago, though, the changes are so extraordinary that they have been called a cultural revolution. Ofer Bar-Yosef of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, summarizing this cultural revolution (in “The Upper Paleolithic Revolution,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 31, 2002), says it brought about “rapid technological changes, emergence of self-awareness and group identity, increased social diversification, formation of long-distance alliances, the ability to symbolically record information.” In other words, we find in this period that which, most certainly, is not necessary for survival, including painting, personal ornamentation, pottery, and, most significantly, evidence of language. Suddenly, inexplicably, man is seeking. Why?

It’s interesting to note that the folks who bear the above-listed characteristics “emerged from one line of Homo sapiens in a single location in Africa,” Baglow writes. That being the case — that is, the discovery of roots of true human culture in a specific place, population, and time — I think the “ontological leap” to which Pope St. John Paul II referred during a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences can be connected more convincingly to an original parentage.

Whence came the universe? Who planted it there? Whence came life on Earth? And in the nature of man, how do we account for that which evolution cannot explain?

St. Augustine would have answered these questions through the concept of rationes seminales. These “seeds of reason,” he believed, were planted into time and space by God at the moment of creation, each seed to sprout in due season. Every new star or planet, every new species or type is the realization of a potentiality implanted by God in the beginning. In more modern terminology, rationes seminales might be called spontaneous generation, the apparent growth of organic life from non-organic sources.

Hundreds of years after Augustine, Louis Pasteur’s experiments led to his famous conclusion, Omne vivum ex vivo — “all life is from life” — which would seem to put an end to ideas of spontaneous generation. In the broad perspective, however, I do not find a contradiction between the ideas of spontaneous generation and parental generation, or biogenesis. The universe itself seems to be a product of spontaneous generation, as does life on Earth, as does the appearance of a metaphysical property in man. Pasteur can conclude rightly that all life is from life; yet as we trace the sequence of life all the way back to that first singularity that was the cosmos, don’t we find an original spontaneous generation? (Though some physicists argue that the primordial singularity and the expansion that flowed, and continues to flow, from it do indeed come from pre-existing materials, their explanations defy the laws of science and logic.)

If we insist on remaining in the physical realm, we will not get very far — because, so far, Pasteur’s conclusion is not contradicted. And yet, the three critical moments in our shared history, the moments reviewed above, suggest that, at certain junctions of time, life did come out of nowhere. To find the reconciliation, then, perhaps we need to abandon the scientific term spontaneous generation and return to Augustine’s rationes seminales, which says that to identify critical phenomena as instances of spontaneous generation is somewhat correct because there is indeed no pre-existing physical cause. On the other hand, Pasteur’s Omne vivum ex vivo is also correct, as long as we remember and consider the final source of life: Ego sum via, veritas et vita — “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Now we must return to the young man’s comment about not understanding how the Eucharist works. On the physical level, there are many things the workings of which we cannot understand, things that seem to flow spontaneously from no pre-existing causation. In their essence, they are gifts of life, gifts from He who is eternally without pre-existing causation. And in many ways, we see that they are, in essence, like the Eucharist: God spoke, He planted His order into the void, and the universe was; God spoke, He planted His bounty on a barren rock, and the Earth was; God spoke, He planted His image in an intelligent animal, and man was. Finally, God spoke, and continues to speak, and He plants His full self not merely in the splendor of the stars, in the beauty of the earth, or in the desires of His greatest creation, but in the Eucharist, in which He plants Himself in what is now the richest gift of all, in the midst of the small, daily moment, in the midst of the small, daily individual — in the midst, if you will, of a singularity.

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