The Divine Universe

The story of the universe is a story of new things. The current version, informed by post-modern science, begins with the Big Bang. From the initial “singularity”, as it is called, new things have continually emerged, and there is no sign that novelty will not continue to be the pattern of the future. New biological organisms are emerging even now, and humankind is part of an evolutionary process.

The first new thing to emerge from the Big Bang was space and time. When time had stretched to a trillion trillionth of a second, the universe had grown to about 100cm. And then there was light: a ball of energy, blazing at a thousand, trillion, trillion degrees. This ball was not completely smooth; it had little lumps in it called protons, neutrons and electrons.

After a minute and a half the universe had grown to ten thousand trillion kilometres; the temperature was down to a billion degrees, and another new thing emerged: atoms of helium and hydrogen.

Events got slower as expansion and cooling continued. After 56,000 years, with the temperature at 9000ºK, there was enough space for light to begin to move freely between the atoms. After 380,000 years, the universe a balmy 3000º, the atoms began to clump together. Change is slowing down but after 100-200 million years the first stars began to form, like blazing snowballs, rapidly gathering more material from around them. These huge protostars soon became so big that gravity caused them to collapse inwards, to implode, scattering their helium and hydrogen into dark space.

Back to the drawing board! The universe had another try with smaller stars that would live longer. These became hot enough in the centre for nuclear fusion and bigger atoms were created, including carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and silicon. The largest of all was uranium. In time, however, these stars also either imploded or burned out and scattered their stuff into space again. The universe was still hot enough in places for chemical reactions to occur between elements, producing compounds like silicates (rock), water and long chain molecules with carbon (which can link with itself).

When the third generation of stars began to form, they gathered small, cold lumps of the heavier elements and compounds that orbited round them. The Sun and Solar System formed some 4.6 billion years ago. On the third planet from the Sun very special conditions existed. There was liquid water and some of those long carbon molecules. In a process still not well understood, super-molecules began to form a new kind of material entity: the living cell. Living organisms did new things. They grew and changed; they metabolised material from their environment and, with energy from the Sun, sustained themselves. Even more amazingly, they reproduced themselves, sometimes with slight modifications due to small errors in reproduction. So they evolved: they didn’t only grow and change during their lifetime; they changed from generation to generation.

Now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the temperature of dark space is less than three degrees above zero. The universe has expanded to some thousand, trillion, trillion kilometres in extent – further than it is possible to observe anything. It is still expanding, and now the expansion seems to be getting faster.

2000 years ago – a tick of the cosmic clock – in the species ‘homo sapiens’, a uniquely gifted individual appeared. His was a superior level of consciousness. He spoke of a new kind of human society: he called it the kingdom of heaven. He spoke of God, the Ultimate Totality and Essence of all Being, and called him his Father.

The development of the new society, the kingdom of heaven, seems terribly slow, but we celebrate the birth of him who inaugurated it every year. In the south it is high summer; in the north deep winter. Jesus was a new thing. He was a new kind of person whom no one had ever encountered before and whose wisdom and beauty very few people seemed ready for. But, though the process has seemed terribly slow, a new kind of person began to emerge. They leaven the dull, inertial lump of humankind. For all the stupidity, ignorance, blind prejudice, injustice and cruelty that goes on, human society gives hints of new wisdom and kindness down the centuries.

Not everyone can see it. Even the ability to recognise that a new thing is happening seems like a special gift. But it’s not just wishful thinking. In the end we will get what we want. And we will want better things as our understanding grows. Human consciousness is expanding and maturing, and Jesus, the new man, gave signs of the way it will go.