Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God

Introduction

1 Introduction Donna Bowman and Clayton Crockett What does energy have to do with theology? We face an energy crisis, an energy deficit, not only in material resources but also in terms of creative thinking. Theology is reflection about what concerns us ultimately, and many theologians and religious people give that object of ultimate concern the name God. Today we live in a world that is threatened in ecological and environmental ways, and many humans, including theologians, are drawing on traditional, modern, technical, and spiritual resources to reflect upon and provide resources to intervene with this situation. Eco-theology is a vital and important discourse, but there has been almost no explicit attention to the topic of energy from a theological perspective. One counterinstance , however, is Flora Keshgegian, who, toward the end of her book God Reflected: Metaphors for Life, invokes the metaphor of energy. She asks: “What happens to our image of God if the divine is understood to be energy for life? What difference would it make if God were not a being, but energy as the really real that makes life happen?”1 Following upon Keshgegian’s question, Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God brings together a group of essays by creative theologians and theorists of religion on the interdisciplinary topic of energy. The contribu- 2 Donna Bowman and Clayton Crockett tors of this volume think across some of these religious, environmental, and scientific boundaries in order to grapple powerfully with the topic of energy in multifaceted ways. We want to briefly mention three aspects of energy that are relevant today and that provoke theoretical and theological reflection: energy resource scarcity, cosmological dark energy, and spiritual energy. We currently exist in a state of energy crisis due to increasing costs and approaching limits of fossil fuel extraction and production. Even if oil production has not yet peaked globally, it has become more expensive and more difficult to extract, leading to petroleum exploration of tar sands and deeper and deeper on the ocean floor. The April 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a sad result of this situation. The Deepwater Horizon rig was attempting to extract oil at extreme depths, where proven technical methods and reliable safety mechanisms are lacking. The fact that this ecological disaster has resulted in only a temporary six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling despite the devastating environmental and economic damage caused by the spill is a testament to just how desperate we are for oil and how precarious our economy (both in the United States and globally) remains in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore , we recognize that while fossil fuels are extremely cheap sources of stored solar energy, they are finite in quantity and polluting in practice. Energy scarcity is a serious global concern, and one question is whether the physical scarcity mandated by earth’s limits necessarily entails metaphysical scarcity at the level of creative ideas. On another plane, cosmological physicists discovered in 1998 that the universe’s expansion appears to be accelerating, and they posit something they call dark energy as the driver of that acceleration. Dark energy is “the extra ingredient that cosmologists require in order to balance the density of the universe and account for why its expansion is accelerating.”2 This balancing act is extraordinary, because whatever dark energy is, it seems to make up more than three-quarters of the matter/energy of the universe. Dark energy requires a kind of cosmological constant, whether it is actually constant or in fact declining ever so slightly, to balance the observed acceleration of the universe’s expansion with what we know about its content , including the four basic forces, and about light and dark matter. Dark energy currently represents a frontier and a limit of experimental and theoretical understanding, and even though this frontier is constantly shifting , it still raises metaphysical and theological questions about the nature and fate of the universe. What we know about the universe we live in may be much more unsettled at the edges than many nonscientists realize. Introduction 3 Finally, spiritual energy has long been a traditional topic of interest for some of the most creative religious and philosophical thinkers. How do we connect spiritual and metaphysical conceptions of energy, including divine energy, with physical and material notions of energy? We suggest that...