Within the Magnificence of the Boundless

All cultures in all times have possessed a cosmology, a story that attempts to address and explain the origins of the physical world, its many elements and its life forms, including human beings. The cosmology of any culture is an intimate part of that culture. Most often it is the basis on which decisions are made, obligations are determined, and actions taken. Each cosmology is integral to the functioning of its particular society. Today, the cosmology of our society, the story of how the universe began, how life arose, what components make up the physical world and how that world proceeds, the history of the universe, including the earth, and in some respects also its future--this story is being told, is in the process of being told, by science.

The cosmological story science is telling is so interwoven with our thoughts and our images today, our vocabulary and our vision of ourselves, so integral to our being and our imaginations and lives that we often aren't aware of how we are daily encountering this story, telling this story ourselves, interacting with this story and exhibiting our acceptance of it. This cosmology is ours, the story of our time and place. It seems to me debilitating to deny or discount the story. To attempt to do so alienates us in an artificial way from ourselves and our culture and the ways by which we live and maintain ourselves, the tools we employ, the methods we use to define ourselves and to locate ourselves in space and time. Our cosmology is a powerful, beautiful, frightening, astonishingly new, shockingly new story, and it is an unfinished story, a story still in the process of being told. Exploring, discovering, researching, modifying the structure and details of the story when verified data indicate modification is necessary, these are major elements of the story itself. The story is not dogmatic. It urges constant and circumspect reconsideration of itself. Our cosmology is not only a story of creation, it is a story in the midst of being created. Our cosmology says of itself, in essence, "This is the story so far. It is only fragmentary. The elements of the story may be modified and expanded as we continue to investigate, to re-examine, to ask insightful questions."

This is exciting and liberating. This is bewildering and distressing. How do we maintain our balance in the midst of such a cosmology? To what can we cling with confidence during those times when we need something certain and unchanging to cling to? I started to write "something rock-certain to cling to." But, according to our cosmology, and contrary to many older cosmologies, rock is not certain and unchanging; oceans and mountains are not certain, they rise and they fall; the earth is not certain, the land masses float and shift; the sun and the moon are not certain, they slowly expend themselves; even stars are not certain, all are in the process of being born and dying, all are in the process of constant change, all appearing and disappearing. None will be forever what they appear to be to us today. Our cosmology tells us this, just as it tells us that we live on a spinning earth that is gradually slowing as it revolves around the star nearest to us, the sun gradually exhausting its energy, circling the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a medium-sized galaxy speeding with the Solar System through the cosmos among billions of other galaxies burning and erupting, bearing young growing stars and old dying stars.

I once read a statement that has stayed with me. Speaking of the evolution of Homo sapiens, the author wrote, "It was as if Nature, after wearing out several billion years of tossing off new creatures like nutshells, looked up to see that one had come back and was eyeing her squarely." ¹ Homo sapiens--the creature who turned around...