Cosmic Soup

Whilst tsunami waves were consuming whole communities on the east coast of Japan I was proof reading a short document for a Romanian colleague. Nicu, who is professor of theology at the University of Oradea, had sent me the extract of his work on Basil the Great and his understanding of the relationship between science and religion. Nicu sugguests that Basil's "pneumatological vision of creation" and his understanding of the "transfiguration of humanity in Christ" provide us not with an alternative to our scientific understanding of reality but rather the firmest of foundations for such an understanding. Science and religion do not stand in opposition but rather cannot stand at all without each other!

But how does that enable me to make sense of the tsunami, the 'careless' destruction of life I am witnessing on my TV screen?

Allow me one more digression. Earlier this week I watched Professor Brian Cox as he took us through billions of years of the history (and future) of our solar system to explain the second law of thermodynamics - in other words everything always goes from order to disorder (as anyone who watched by desk during the day will already know!). Time is a one way process. Our universe is steadily moving from simplicity, through complexity, to a final state which will be so complex, so mixed up, so disordered that it will actually be very simple - one universal 'soup'. Sadly the content of the tsunami wave as it crossed previously ordered agricultural land in Sendai began to resemble that 'universal soup'.

So where does God fit into all of this? - Romanian theology, tsunami waves and Brian Cox. As a saviour? As the one to whom we cry out in lamentation? Perhaps 'fit in' is the wrong question. As Basil the Great (an accomplished scientist as well as theologian) understood well, the purposes of God do not 'fit in' to science or 'rescue us from' the outworkings of science. In fact it is the purposes of God that give science its meaning. Tsunamis are one small part of the second law of thermodynamics (order to disorder) and that law is just one tiny part of the 'transfiguration of all things in Christ' which is the love and purpose of God.

But don't ask me to understand all that! I'm not God.