In honor of Christmas yesterday, which I spent with a stomach virus (bah humbug!), I’ll present a quote from Christian theological writer Sallie McFague: “The picture of reality coming to us from contemporary science is so attractive to theology that we would be fools not to use it”. I’m not sure exactly what aspects of science Ms. McFague finds so theologically attractive. Evolution? OK, most theists have made their peace with Darwin, but it’s kid of messy, not terribly attractive. Quantum physics, with all its sub-atomic randomness and indeterminacy? Einstein couldn’t believe that God would play dice with physics, but more than a half century of research shows that something dice-like is indeed being played in the heart of every atom and even in the so-called empty voids of space.

Nevertheless, on the cosmological level, the past 50 years have been kind to theists in need of physical evidence, given the general acceptance of the “Big Bang” as the physical origin of the Universe. If everything started in a “singularity”, a grand event where conventional physics don’t apply, it isn’t such a great leap of faith to posit God as the metaphysical cause behind the Big Bang (albeit, this still is a leap of faith). Although the evidence for the Big Bang didn’t become clear until the 1960s (with the accidental discovery of cosmic background radiation by Bell Lab researchers), Jesuit physicist Rev. Georges Lemaitre was pushing his view of the Universe unfolding from a “primeval atom” since the 1930s, with Vatican consent. The Church always liked the Big Bang, so much so that Pope John Paul II warned cosmologists not to go looking for the cause of it.

Hey, JP2, what are you afraid of? I’d guess that he’s afraid that physicists will eventually demystify it. Until about 250 years ago, priests and preachers could captivate their audiences by refering to lightening as a sure sign of God’s anger. Then along came Ben Franklin and other electrical researchers, and the preachers lost a wonderful attention-grabbing device. But then the Big Bang came along, and the churchmen found a replacement for lightening (albeit, a less angry one). Various cosmologists are now working with theories that would put the Big Bang into a grander scheme, making it not so special or unexplainable after all (via superstring theory, loop quantum gravity, quintessence, chaotic inflation, etc.). If experimental evidence turns out to support their paradigms, there may have been plenty of Big Bangs and plenty more to come, all as a part of some huge natural process where there are countless Universes (some like ours, some not).

That doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t a God who is bigger still. But church leaders and theologians should know better by now not to embrace or condemn what the scientists are doing based on what lends the most drama to their sermons. Because once the scientists throw out the mythical bathwater behind things like lightening, shooting stars, and Big Bangs, the preachers and theologians will then have a hard time keeping the theological “baby” from going out the window with it.