Impossible to Believe

In flipping through the channels one evening this past week, I landed briefly on a TV show about the Universe that included a sequence that alternated between shots of a beach and of the stars.  The commentator made the point that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches of Earth.  It has become a commonplace truism that we cannot imagine the greatness of the Universe nor can we really comprehend out utter smallness in it.

That being said, it is impossible to believe that Earth is the only planet on which life lives.  It is impossible to believe that we are the only intelligent species in all of that Great Expanse.  So great is the size of the Universe that we may never meet another intelligent species, but it wouldn't be wise to be on it.  And it is impossible to believe that the God of traditional thinking is real or could be the creator of the Universe.  The God of the Bible is inevitably too tiny because "he" is only as large as the imagination of ancient peoples who lived in a tiny, tiny Earth-centered little bitty universe hardly larger than Earth itself.  The Creator God of the Bible is a God of immense but imaginable power while the Creator God of the Universe necessarily stands outside of time, space, and all imagining.

A crucial task of theology today is to catch up with our modern knowledge of the reality of the Universe.  Astronomy and quantum physics are key sources of revelation about the nature of God the Beyond.  Biology, meanwhile, provides insights into the evolutionary ways of God the Beyond that bring us back to the Presence of God in our teeny tiny little lives.  In light of all of this, we have to recalibrate our understanding of the person of Christ and the meaning of Incarnation.  What exciting times we live in!  and scary.