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[Woodstock Report, June 1994, no. 38, pp. 3-10]
The Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a forum on April 28, 1994, entitled "Ecology, Cosmology, and Culture: Opportunities for a Constructive Trialogue." The conversation focused on the roles of science and theology in our evolving universe, how God interacts with this universe, and how human persons can relate responsibly to it. Panelists were John F. Haught, chair of the department of theology at Georgetown University; George V. Coyne, S.J., director of the Vatican Observatory; and Robert John Russell, director of The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Berkeley, California. Mary S. Collins, O.S.B., chair and associate professor in the department of religion and religious education at The Catholic University of America, moderated the forum. Charles L. Currie, S.J., an associate fellow of Woodstock and coordinator of its program in science, technology, and culture, organized this forum and introduced the discussion. The views expressed at a Woodstock forum do not necessarily reflect the views of the Woodstock Theological Center.
John F. Haught is chair of the theology department and professor of theology at Georgetown University. He has written The Promise of Nature: Ecology and Cosmic Purpose; Mystery and Promise: A Theology of Revelation; The Revelation of God in History; and The Cosmic Adventure.
My assignment is to talk about how ecological concern might make contact with cosmology and theology. One way to make such a connection is to note that a major concern of ecologists is to convince us that we humans really do belong to the universe and to the earth. In fact, an axiom of many ecological ethicists is that unless we think of the earth or the cosmos as our home in some sense, unless we learn to feel deeply that we belong to nature, we will probably not be too interested in taking care of it.
However, both traditional religions and modern cosmology (from the 17th century until roughly the turn of the present century) have often given us the impression that we are really strangers here. Of course, a sense of homelessness, detachment, or restlessness is an essential aspect of our religious traditions. Abraham, for example, is encouraged to leave his ancestral home in pursuit of the promise. In Israelite religion our life here is said to be an exodus journey, a pilgrimage, a desert wandering. In our western religious traditions the world in which we live has often seemed to be a prison, or at best a place of exile.
If we turn to the East we notice also that the Buddha has to leave home to find enlightenment. And in Hinduism, the sannyasin finally forsakes home and family in order to be closer to God. Generally speaking, then, authentic religion requires a sense of homelessness as a condition for final liberation.
Ecologically, the problem is not religious homelessness per se, but that somewhere along the way religious homelessness was translated into a terrestrial homelessness. The earth became a place to get away from in order to find salvation and fulfillment and liberation. It was understood as a "soul school" or a "vale of soul-making" in which to prove our moral mettle so as to be worthy of entering heaven, our "true" home in a world elsewhere. The cosmos, or the world of nature, was interpreted as a launching pad for the spiritual journey, something we could jettison as soon as the journey got going full steam. But in this view nature was little more than a point of departure for the spiritual journey. The cosmos became a victim of our religious restlessness, and it seemed to lack the intrinsic value that would allow us to reverence it for its own sake.
Of course, the sacramental aspects of religion have the potential to reconcile us to nature. But many of us still harbor the deep suspicion that we really don't belong here. We fear that it would be a capitulation to naturalism or "neo-paganism" if we put our roots down too firmly in the natural world. So in the name of religion we distance ourselves from nature.
Modern theology has also done little to remove this sense of cosmic homelessness. Particularly in this century theology has handed over to science the study of the natural world and retreated into the more elusive and purely human realms of history, freedom, existential subjectivity, or the quest for meaning. It has become largely irrelevant to our understanding of the cosmos, while the universe has been largely lost to theology.
Moreover, modern scientific cosmology (since Newton and Descartes) has done its part also to exile us from nature. This cosmology is metaphysically based on the Cartesian dualism that exorcised mind from nature, leaving nature to be understood as mindless, lifeless, and purposeless material stuff. The cosmos came to be perceived as fundamentally alien to mind, and it has been very difficult for humans to feel at home in such a spiritless world. At the same time, scientism, by enshrining the subject/object dualism, has left us with a picture of the universe from which we ourselves are absent.
By promoting cosmic homelessness, both theology and scientific cosmology have been ecologically problematic. How can we love and care for such a forbidding universe?
But this is precisely why some recent developments in scientific cosmology are of such interest from the point of view of both ecology and theology. There are a number of features in the new cosmology that seem congenial to ecology today, especially the emphasis on a holistic, organismic, relational universe. But I shall dwell here on two more specific features: first, the new scientific suspicion that the cosmos may not be eternal, that the universe quite possibly had a beginning and hence a finite span of duration. Second, the set of ideas in 20th century physics and astrophysics that once again seem to make mind an intrinsic part of nature. I propose that these two aspects of recent science make it possible both intellectually and spiritually for us to think of ourselves once again as belonging to the universe.
First, big bang cosmology, especially, challenges the ancient assumption that the universe is eternal. But if the universe has a finite past and possibly a clear beginning, then it becomes possible for us to understand the whole of the universe as a still unfolding story. And this would mean that it is not just the human spirit that has embarked upon an immense journey. Rather, the entire cosmos, and not just the human dimension, may be seen as a kind of homeless wandering.
Therefore, we don't need to abandon the universe in order to follow the religious advice to live homelessly. We don't need to make the cosmos an ecological victim of our religious restlessness. Indeed, we may even be permitted to say that the universe's inherent adventurousness is the very root system of our religious restlessness. The new scientific cosmology allows us to belong fully to the universe without our having to sacrifice the ideal of religious homelessness. I like to say that we are not lost in the cosmos (which is the Gnostic interpretation of human existence), but instead that we are lost with the cosmos: there is a kinship or togetherness in our mutual forlornness, in our common distance from destiny. Religious homelessness, to repeat, does not therefore have to entail an ecologically noxious cosmic homelessness.
Second, other recent scientific developments also have the effect of reinserting mind back into nature. They challenge the dualistic assumption that mind is fundamentally alien to the cosmos. The divorce of mind from nature has been taken for granted by the scientism, materialism, and cosmic pessimism in much modern thought, but recent scientific developments challenge this split.
Special relativity, for example, suggests that the way physical reality shows itself to us is not independent of the observer's frame of reference. The worldview of classical physics had allowed that our subjectivity is inseparable from the so-called "secondary qualities" (those associated with the five senses), but it held that there was a realm of "primary qualities" that existed "out there" in a space and time completely untouched by human subjectivity. This realm of "objective" qualities was taken to be the real world, and everything else (such as beauty, value, and meaning) were seen as a mere "coating" that human subjects placed over the colorless, odorless, valueless world of primary qualities.
Special relativity, however, implies that we cast a long "subjective" shadow even over the primary qualities, qualities that we used to think were objectively the same from all frames of reference. We are finding that mind is much more mysteriously mixed up with the physical universe than we have previously suspected.
Also, quantum physics and the principle of indeterminacy also apparently tie the observer intricately into the fabric of the scientifically observed world. Quantum physicists imply that our own mentality puts a kink in our grasp of the position or momentum of a subatomic particle, and that therefore the observed world cannot be sharply segregated from the observer.
Finally, what I find especially intriguing today is that some astrophysicists and cosmologists are now suggesting that the very structure of physical reality, from the first moments of the cosmic dawn, cannot be adequately understood apart from the eventual emergence of mind. This thinking is known as the "Strong Anthropic Principle." It maintains that the initial conditions and fundamental physical constants at the time of cosmic origins had to have been very precisely fine-tuned if mind was ever to appear in evolution. If the force of gravity, the rate of cosmic expansion, the ratio of electron to proton mass or of weak to strong nuclear forces had been only infinitesimally different, say one part in a million, we (beings endowed with minds) would not be here.
If there is anything to this, then it is tempting to conclude that mind is a fundamental aspect of the universe. This, too, would fly in the face of the dualism and cosmic pessimism that have made mind an accidental intrusion. And even if one does not want to accept the stronger version of the anthropic principle, it is still interesting that the physics of the universe is remarkably suited to the emergence of life and mind.
By way of conclusion, "scientific materialism" has held that matter is fundamentally hostile or indifferent to life and mind, that the physical universe only grudgingly and sparingly and by the sheerest of accidents allowed life and mind to appear and flourish for a brief season in an otherwise mindless universe. But it is getting much more difficult to uphold this prejudice on scientific grounds. Science now seems to point toward the inseparability of mind and nature.
What this means theologically is that we can no longer separate concern for our own destiny from that of the whole universe. The cosmos is essentially linked with our humanity. Or better, our humanity is forever situated within the more encompassing framework of a restless universe.
And what this means ecologically is that we can no longer plausibly think of the physical universe as though it were not our home. The sense of cosmic homelessness, which underlies so much of our ecological neglect, is no longer intellectually or theologically acceptable. If we ever learn to accept the fact that we do belong to the natural world, something which we have not yet done in a deep way, then we might start treating it better. Cosmology does indeed make a difference to both theology and ecology.
George V. Coyne, S.J., is director of the Vatican Observatory. He has been acting director of the University of Arizona Observatories and chairman of its department of astronomy. He is coeditor of John Paul II on Science and Religion: Reflections on the New View from Rome.
I am playing the role of a cosmologist. I am not strictly a cosmologist, but an astrophysicist. I study elements that are within the universe, as such. In cosmology we study the universe as an object of investigation. We ask things about the origin of the universe, the evolution of the universe, and the structure of the universe. As we would study a loaf of bread, we study the universe as an object.
The methods we use are what I call the hard sciences. There is a tradition in which physics, chemistry, biology, and their derivatives, molecular biology, biophysics, etc., are the hard sciences. Cosmology differs from all the hard sciences in the fact that it is not experimental, it is observational. It is very important to note that a cosmologist cannot manipulate the universe. I cannot turn a galaxy around to see whether it is a spiral galaxy or an elliptical one. I cannot even see anything as it is but as it was. I am at one point in space and time. I don't see the sun as it is, but as it was eight minutes ago. I don't see the nucleus of our galaxy as it is, but as it was 30,000 years ago. I don't see the nearest galaxy to our own as it is but as it was two million years ago. I don't see the nearest cluster of galaxies as it is, but as it was eight million years ago, and so on. As we look out into space, we're looking back in time. This observational character of cosmology is extremely important. We do not have what we are trying to understand on our laboratory table.
How do we "do" cosmology? We observe and we gather data, we get facts, so to speak, and then we use mathematics, physics, and the other hard sciences to develop what we call models to explain those facts. Then we return to the data with the model and see how well it fits. We get more data and if we see that it doesn't fit, we redevelop the model. This is an iterative process and an approximative one. We are fundamentally ignorant in search of knowledge. We hope that our ignorance is dwindling as we go forth. As a matter of fact, in most cases, our ignorance increases. The size of the universe within the past two decades has expanded and shrunk, according to cosmologists, at least five times by factors of two to four. We know this simply because we have acquired more observational data and better models.
I want to emphasize the approximative and iterative character of cosmology. How do we know that our model is even approximating our facts? What are the criteria by which we judge? There are standard criteria. One criterion is simplicity: the model that makes the fewest assumptions to make the most explanations. That is an economic factor. We always have to make assumptions. I have to assume that the laws of physics that I can experiment with here hold for those objects upon which I cannot experiment. That is a fundamental assumption. But how am I going to do cosmology unless I make that assumption? The best model makes the fewest assumptions and gets the best explanatory power.
Secondly, the model has predictability. I can tell you that the moon is going to be eclipsed at 10:08:05 a.m., and the eclipse will happen. That is a pretty good sign that I know what I am talking about. If I predict something and it happens, then it is verifiable. This does not mean that I can verify it, but it means that there is a way of thinking, a way of verifying my model with respect to the data.
Another criterion I will call beauty. I am indebted, somewhat, for the notion of beauty I am proposing to Jack Haught and his books, namely, that there is a certain character about a scientific theory that clinches it, as far as the data we have, but leaves it open to future novelty. There is a certain beauty, and all the great scientists, Einstein among them, saw this.
Last, I would like to introduce something which I think is new among cosmologists, but is becoming more and more acceptable: unifying explanatory power. This means that what I know as a hard scientist not only does not contradict what I know as a poet, religious person, literary person, philosopher, or theologian, but it tends to help unify my explanation as it comes from these other fields. Most cosmologists today would yield to that criterion, which is a great breakthrough. Since we are dealing with fundamental questions about the universe it seems obvious that we must interact with other sciences that are dealing with fundamental questions. This is certainly true of philosophy and theology and the ecological issues that derive from them.
How does cosmology, as I have described it in broad strokes, interact with ecology? I think we have to scientifically accept what is scientifically true, to the best of our knowledge, that we are part of the universe. We are integrated into the universe, not only in our origins and evolution but with respect to the future. There is a continuity. We have always emphasized the leveling, the direct creation by God of the human soul in all of this. I do not deny creation insofar as it is a classical description of things. I am not trying to propagate heresy. I am saying that we have not seen enough of the continuity of our existence with the existence of the whole universe. With the great development of human reason in the enlightenment and the great satisfaction of knowing that we could explain things, a dualism developed. Descartes is an example of that kind of dualism, of the mind-matter dualism. We were the self-reflecting element in the universe that was now coming to understand the universe.
The universe only came to reflect upon itself in us. We did not appreciate that there were ingredients of that growing ever since the big bang cosmology. Our place in time, for instance, has been described in many ways. The universe is about 15 billion years old. There is good scientific evidence for that figure, give or take a few billion years. To get a feeling for when we came to be in that universe, let it begin in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. This will allow us to focus upon some history that we know. The universe began, then, in 1776. The earth came to be at the time of the great depression in 1930. Hominids, our most immediate ancestors, came about 10 days ago. Abraham came across the desert 40 minutes ago, and you and I appeared here 90 seconds ago.
Why are we at the tail end of this whole cosmological evolution? We could not have existed earlier because of the nature of the universe. The universe we observe and in which we exist and which we are trying to understand required three generations of stars. That is, a star had to be born and had to die. Then another generation of stars had to be born from the material left over by that dead star. Then that generation had to die. This had to happen three times before the chemical ingredients to put together a human being became available. There had to be at least three generations of stars.
It took three billion years to make a galaxy. We do not quite understand why, but that is more or less the case. Within that galaxy, it took a star like the sun about 100 million years to be born. The sun has lived for five billion years and the earth came along about four and one-half billion years ago. These are simple examples that we are in continuity with the cosmos, with the universe. This is a scientific fact.
With respect to theology, I would say that the anthropic principle, already introduced by Jack Haught, is a scientific problem. Our existence is a scientific problem; it is not understood by scientists in terms of our understanding of the cosmos. Statistically speaking, we should not be here. Who tuned up all the constants of nature and the laws of nature so that you and I could be here? Change the mass of the electron by one part in a million, and we would not be here. I see this as a scientific problem, rising from our integration into the universe. It does not have a scientific answer yet. It has propositions, such as we are in one universe, of which there have been many. The universe is pulsating. We are in an epic when the universe is expanding. There have been a large number of expansions and collapses of the universe, or there are simultaneously many universes. To me, none of these theories satisfy the criterion of verifiability. I take the anthropic principle to be an invitation to think beyond the scientific method, to invite the possibility that science does not have all the answers.
There are four questions posed in the program of this forum. My answer to the first question, "How do we speak of God and God's action in a universe described by quantum cosmology and evolutionary theory?," is that God is not an answer to questions about the universe. God is not an explanation of things. God is the beginning and the end. God is the source, He or She, and the "attracting cause." I am inventing a word. I do not like to use the words "final cause," because it brings me too much into Aristotelianism and scholasticism. I mean more than final cause. I mean more than classical teleology. God is more than an efficient cause. I am not denying God's creation of the universe, though I do not know what that means. I am saying that God is an attracting cause in the universe. God is bringing the universe out of itself.
The answer to the second question, "What has happened to the "Watchmaker God," or the "God of the Gaps?," is that the "Watchmaker God" and the "God of the Gaps" are dead.
"How can we human beings be at home and act responsibly within an evolving universe?" We can be a self-reflecting part of it all by integrating the past in ourselves and being open to the future. We are a critical part of the universe at this time, a self-reflecting part that can incorporate the past. I can tell you the universe is 15 billion years old. I can tell you it took three generations of stars to make the chemistry that made you. These are great achievements, but they are only the beginning. They are an integration of what has happened in the past with a look into the future.
To answer the question, "How do we function within a cosmos of `chaos' and complexity?," you must understand chaos in the scientific sense. Briefly, I would describe it through classical physics, through a controlled, bounded system. If I know certain boundary conditions, I can predict what will happen. A simple example would be that of a pendulum clock swinging along. I can predict to you in the next millennia, and the next millennia, and the next millennia, where that pendulum will be any time as long as I know where it is at any one time, because I know the laws of physics. If I put a boundary condition on a confined system, I can predict everything that will happen in that system.
In chaos, certain systems do not obey that law. The classic example is that of the butterfly which whips its wings around in Bombay, India, and can cause a hurricane in North Carolina. Because the air currents caused by the butterfly can be amplified, this is scientifically true, but they cannot be predicted. We cannot know all the boundary conditions in order to predict what will happen. That is a chaotic system.
God does not dominate the universe. Complex systems are systems in which there is more at the end than at the beginning. Therefore, the end product is not simply a summation of parts, but more than what was put together. Complex systems grow in complexity. The "more" becomes more and more complicated. I look upon both chaos and complexity as an analog in the universe of human freedom. The universe is determinable not according to strict, ordered laws. The universe has a certain indeterminacy about it, an ontological indeterminacy. If God is the lure, or attraction, to all of this, that is the way God wanted it. God did not dominate the universe. God is bringing the universe along. The universe is open to the future.
Robert John Russell directs The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California, and is professor of theology and science at the Graduate Theological Union. He is also a minister of the United Church of Christ, Congregational.
I would like to say a few words about the changing climate in philosophy, theology, and science in academic circles and why it is important to us. These changes give academic credibility to the kinds of very persuasive and evocative arguments we have heard so far. These arguments allow us to take our case into the public arena and make intelligible and plausible the basics of the Christian faith.
In philosophy, the first half of our century was dominated by a kind of empiricism which argued that if there is no data, don't talk about it; seeing is believing. That argument has been largely subsumed by a much more subtle understanding of the problem of how one proves theories: in fact, one cannot verify, one can only falsify a theory.
We have a much more aggressive and complex understanding of theorizing in science. We know that data is theory-laden, that there is no raw data that can serve as a ubiquitous foundation for science; rather, data is chosen through its relevancy to theory and choice. So data itself is contextualized in the sciences. Cosmology is an excellent example of the more complex and subtle notion we have of what constitutes science because cosmology is clearly a part of science. Yet, it is also a historical discipline, since there is only one universe and it has a history that cannot be repeated. It bridges the natural sciences and historical sciences in a very unusual way, suggesting that nature is at root historical, not just eternal.
The second thing is to argue, as Thomas Kahn and Imre Lakatos have written, that science consists of a theory, of a set of paradigms which give radically different explanations of the world. This, in some ways, suggests that the life of faith we all share, with its set of paradigms within Christianity, is not an aspect of irrationality but is consistent with the way knowledge occurs in communities, demanding personal conviction and standing up for one's faith premises. Michael Polanyi has argued that the basis of all knowing is a set of assumptions. Making assumptions, having a faith position, working out of a faith stance toward an experiment is not only a part of religious life, it is essential to science. So philosophers of this century have shown us that our simpler notions of science are not adequate to science. In fact, science is very much a human enterprise. As such, science and theology lie on a sort of continuum in their claims to epistemology, that is, to knowledge.
There have been major, important changes in contemporary theology in both Catholic and Protestant circles, especially since the 1950s and 1960s. There has been a growth of process theology, of liberation theology, and of other forms of theology which take very seriously the social-political matrix of our lives and now the scientific matrix. It is exciting to see that a number of my colleagues are taking the sciences very seriously and saying, "If I want to do theology right today, if I want to speak relevantly to communities across my constituency, I need to take on the importance of science and technology. I need it to prune me of false superstitions about the world. I also need it to have a message that makes sense and one that I can defend and use to bring people to the kind of authentic existence that religion demands of us."
We have also seen a major change in physics and cosmology, which opens up the dialogue. Quantum physics continues to be a staggering and challenging theory. We understand how to do the calculations rather well, but we do not know what it says about nature. Quantum physics poses an incredibly challenging set of concepts and ideas about nature, and it allows itself to be interpreted in a variety of ways. Really, no one agrees on the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Special relativity is an astonishingly simple and yet challenging theory which continues to be debated philosophically and theologically. It really invites our continued theological introspection. Special relativity suggests that our common sense notions of space and time are anthropocentric and that the universe is much more subtle than that. It does suggest that our experience of the world is ambiguous and that our space and time experience, our historical experience, are projections or shadows of deeper reality which is there to be explored, but which is not self-evident. Physics, which comes out of a kind of classical view of the world, an ordinary view of tables and clocks and chairs and people, leads to a view of this same world which is really counter-intuitive. It really challenges our basic understanding of the world.
General relativity, of course, compounds the problem and leads to big bang cosmology. In big bang cosmology we have good evidence that the universe has a finite age and had a beginning. Since the 1950s this finding has created any number of debates between theology and science in which people have said, "Look, this might serve in some ways as a suggestion or warrant or support or even evidence for a notion of creation ex nihilo." That is a fascinating subject.
Most of us would agree that big bang cosmology does not prove Christian doctrine and it should not. There is a resonance or, as Ernan McMullin at Notre Dame calls it, a consonance between Christian faith and contemporary science which is really evocative. Science certainly challenges us to think more deeply about what it does mean. It also raises the question of how is it that life evolved in the first place in a universe like ours with a finite age. Or given evolution in the Darwin perspective, why is it that the universe is set up to produce that kind of perspective? The universe raises boundary questions, limit questions. Science raises questions which it cannot answer. The way in which one brings a theological or philosophical response is critical.
The popularity of Stephen Hawking's work, A Brief History of Time, shows how evocative this question is. It also shows how one can be distracted by a kind of answer which may not be very helpful. We heard earlier that deism is dead. Hawking and Carl Sagan are contemporary examples of deists. Their position is: if the universe has no beginning, then there is nothing left for God to do. That theory presupposes that the only thing that God does is to get things going, which is deism. It is an unusual kind of "gaps" argument.
Of course the answer from Christian theology has been that there is a lot for God to do. In fact, the whole Biblical narrative is of a God who interacts with the people of faith, who answers prayers, who brings Israel out of exile, raises Jesus from the dead, and creates the church. It is up to us to say, "Can God, in fact, act in this universe, even if there is not a beginning?" In what sense is the beginning a pivotal issue to be debated? Some of my own work has focused on notions of creation of a finite universe without a beginning. Hawking asks an important question, "What do Christians say about a universe with no beginning?" The answer is we have a lot to say and the challenge ahead of us is to speak to that question.
This leads directly into the order-out-of-chaos argument which is in both Prigogine's thermodynamics theory and in chaos theory. Fr. Coyne suggests that the chaos theory provides one way of talking about God's action in the world. So does the thermodynamics theory, which contends that complex systems develop out of simpler systems. One could say theologically that God is not only the transcendent creator of all that is, but God is also the immanent spirit urging us toward the future and guiding us in that evolutionary process. If evolution, chaos and complexity, and thermodynamics all suggest the universe is open and indeterministic, and temporal and historical, then it certainly suggests that a God who is immanent to and persuasive of natural processes is a God we can talk about once again in light of contemporary science.
There is a new attitude that theologians have adopted to be hypothetical about their doctrines and theories. I am speaking of theories relating to religious experience coming out of a tradition, a set of creeds that we hold dearly and are convicted on, but at the same time are held objectively and also as hypothetical. The mark of humility in science is not being a humble person, but being willing to take our most cherished ideas and make them falsifiable, exposing them to the rigors of evidence. That is the call that the theology and science debate gives to theologians. Humility means to present your ideas in their maximally falsifiable mode because what you lose you did not want and what you have kept might be true.
Theological theories must be held accountable to the data that is germane to religious studies, data from Scripture, from tradition, from magisterium, from conscience, from the political agenda of the world, but data that challenges our theology to be consistent, coherent, to have scope, to be extendable to new areas, and to be fertile.
It is important that we recognize the challenge of secular thought to contemporary Christian thought. Some have argued that nature is blind. Others suggest that science tells us that God cannot act in the world. So, the fundamental challenge is to respond in ways in which we can say, "Yes, God can and does act in the world." We are in the presence of God's action, the world is God's action. If we place our foundations in science rather than in experience, tradition and Scripture, and personal testimony and conviction, we will create the climate of atheism that we live in, and that is exactly what happened historically. Deism is gone, but atheism is quite alive and well.
How can we be at home in the world and act responsibly? Our challenge is to continue Teilhard de Chardin's project of seeing Christ as the omega point of the entire process in which God is immanently involved. Moreover, the cosmic Christ calls the entire universe to redemption, not simply us humans or the tiny planet earth. That realization grounds the dialogue between cosmology and theology.