Dear Theophilus, 

In the last letter I discussed some of the objections that you had to belief in God. In this letter I would like to expand on the role of science because this seems to be a topic that is of deep interest to you.

One of the things about the universe that people find very hard to accept and to place themselves into a meaningful relationship to the universe is the size and age of the universe. The universe is many billions of years old and this boggles our minds. A billion years seems like such a large number of years, especially when compared to the brief life-span that we are permitted. Moreover, the size of the universe is unimaginable and this adds to the feeling that many of us have of our unimportance. In the past, you say, people thought of the universe as relatively small and therefore they could place humanity at the center of things and the earth was of great importance. With modern discoveries, this has all vanished and now we stand before immense spaces and immense amounts of time and ask ourselves where do we fit into all this?

I sympathize with the way you feel and maybe I can point out a few things that would make the matter a little bit more understandable to you. There is a statement in theology that casts some light on the question of the universe and creation in general. The question that was posed was the following: why did God create at all? If God is perfect, why did He need something else? There is an important concept hidden here and that is that God did not have to create. He created because He wanted to or another way to state this is that He created because He willed to create. Creation therefore is not a necessity and this is important because if creation is not a necessity, then its meaning and importance lies not in its usefulness or in some other aspect but its importance lies in love. This is the basis of the great statement made by St. John the Apostle. God is love. And what are the characteristics of love? For love to exist there must be an other, someone different from you, or love cannot exist. And love implies something else that is of fundamental importance to humans and that is, freedom. Creation must be free if it is to be a true creation and not some game with contrived rules. There is risk involved and there is permission given for creation to manage its own affairs, to a certain extent. The limits on this extent we will consider shortly. The concept of love has a bearing on soteriology, that is, salvation. In systems where creation in the true sense does not exist and the universe, in a sense is part of god, then salvation comes through knowledge. We suffer because we do not know who we truly are and as a result, we behave abominably. This type of teaching occurs in a system called gnosticism and it was severely criticized by Christianity. In Christianity, salvation involves freedom and love and suffering and sacrifice.

But, let me get back to the point of freedom. The universe and all of creation is granted freedom which means we can act in accordance with our wishes as opposed to acting in accordance with the wishes of God. We are given this, and the universe is given this. The greatest expression of freedom occurs in persons and we have already discussed some of the characteristics of personhood in previous letters. There are certain rules which govern how impersonal creation behaves and acts and these rules are being discovered by us as the laws of science. The universe has been given freedom to behave in accordance with these rules.

For love to exist there must be conscious and rational beings. The way these rational beings came into existence seems to be, to a large extent, through the process of evolution. Evolution, as the science of biology teaches, produces new structures through the gradual gathering of properties, and structures become more complex (The question still remains unanswered: why is creation heading to complexity? Often it is the simplest of structures that have the greatest capability for survival. If survival is the prime goal of all that exists, then why head for complexity which opens up possible weaknesses in organisms?) At some point in this process, which is governed by scientific laws coupled with statistics, and probably with God's intervention, physical creatures, capable of operating rationally and of sufficient complexity to be able to sustain self-consciousness and self-awareness, rational beings, come into existence. It is at this point, our faith teaches us, that God intervenes most directly and man is created. Some new element enters the created realm and this is expressed in the scriptures as the creation of a creature, man, in the image and likeness of God. Before I go any further, I'd like to address a few questions that I am sure have entered your mind. Why doesn't God just not bother with evolution and the errors that are introduced through faulty mutations and the like, and simply make man directly? One possible answer to this is that God respects the independent integrity of creation. Well, if that is the case, isn't God curtailing creation's freedom by overseeing it and giving it a nudge now and then? The answer to this depends on how you define freedom. If by freedom you mean a total independence from any influence at all, then this does not and never did, exist. Freedom does not mean isolation or total independence. It means, to a large extent, choices and that freedom was given creation as is evidenced by errors in evolution, by dead-end lines in the evolutionary process, which have resulted in the extinction of certain groups and so on. But involvement and interaction with someone does not mean loss of freedom. Love in itself, implies some involvement and therefore, God's interactions with creation do not represent unusual intrusions on the freedom of creation. Probably the clearest example of this is our own interaction with creation. We interact with creation, and modify certain aspects of it and use it to fashion things that are useful for us. Does this limit creation's freedom? I hardly think that anyone would hold this position.

But there is something else that underlies the use of evolution to create a universe capable of harboring humans. It takes time, a lot of time, as we can see from the past history of the universe and from our study of changes in organisms. Thus time is simply an indicator of the tools used for making man - time is not some barometer that can be used to judge value. Time points to the freedom of the universe and tells us that the creator of the universe is fundamentally, love. Tied to the concept of time is the concept of space. Without movement, there is no time and since time is so large, and movement accompanies this vast time, then the resultant movement must result in the expansion of the universe to the extent that it has up to now. Thus, the two quantities of huge time and huge space point to several important conclusions which I will now summarize: the universe is free because it was created by a loving creator and this creator is personal in the sense of that He is loving.

Why did God create the world? God created the world for something like the same reason it is hard to keep a secret! Good things are hard to keep to yourself. If anyone has a rose garden he will see that the rose is good, and tells of its goodness in its perfume. The sun has goodness, and tells its secret in light and heat and splendor. But God is infinitely good, and therefore infinitely loving. Why therefore could not He, by a free expression of His love let this love overflow and bring creation into being? God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His Love, and the telling of it in creation. God leaves us hints of His love and the vast time and the vast spaces are pointers of this, as we saw above. Sometimes He is even more pointed. In His holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally, not too often, drops a handkerchief as if to gain our loving attention so that we do not forget Him. Those handkerchieves are called by us saints, who represent God's presence for us in a very tangible and graspable fashion.

There are many other things that could be said, but I would like to end by stating a general principle. All forms of knowledge are good and useful. Among these forms of knowledge is science, which has been particularly fruitful in describing our universe and giving us a deeper understanding as to how the universe functions. If we are to take the doctrine of creation seriously, then we cannot ignore the world nor can we say that it does not teach us anything about God. On the contrary, we should be able to discern God's traces in creation and what science shows, is that if we come to the universe without biases, we will see indications of a loving personal Creator. Our attitude to science should be that it is part of our ongoing discussion with God and creation and we would become poorer for losing science. What is unfortunate is that some people abuse science. The only way to fight this is for ourselves to become more aware of what science teaches and to become conscious of the biases that people bring with them when they invoke science in laying a basis for atheism. Remember, we all have a responsibility to use words accurately and well. This isn't easy. Words can be carelessly used by some and cunningly used by others. In our discussions, Theophilus, we both, I think have seen the importance of words.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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