I love science. Science is simply the study of the mechanics of the universe. Religion, on the other hand, is the study of the meaning of the universe. Science and religion should not be seen as competitors, but simply different lenses through which we see and try to understand life. My faith is informed by science, and never threatened by it. An honest and authentic approach to faith can receive the teachings of science as simply a different approach to truth.
One scientific theory that fits well with our overall Soul-Centered theme, and specifically with this week’s theme on all of us being Soul Mates, is the Big Bang theory. According to the theory, the universe began about 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang, at which time what had previously been a singularity (a single point of infinite density) exploded, rapidly expanding into a universe and the first elements, which over the course of billions of years went through other explosions and expansions and chemical reactions to form additional elements… which eventually wound up as part of each of us. If the theory is true, then the elements that compose the human body literally did come from the stars. Not only that, but if we go back far enough, all of us - and indeed everyone and everything that has ever existed - existed together in that infinitely dense singular point. (It’s striking to me that I’m writing about something being infinitely dense on a night I’m also watching the ridiculousness of the Iowa primaries and awaiting the President’s State of our Disunion address - but I digress…)
Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio reflects beautifully on the Big Bang in The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love. She writes: “Every human person desires to love and to be loved, to belong to another, because we come from another. We are born social and relational. We yearn to belong, to be part of a larger whole that includes not only friends and family but neighbors, community, trees, flowers, sun, Earth, stars. We are born of nature and are part of nature; that is, we are born into a web of life and are part of a web of life. We cannot know what this means, however, without seeing ourselves within the story of the Big Bang universe. Human life must be traced back to the time when life was deeply one, a Singularity, whereby the intensity of mass-energy exploded into consciousness. Deep in our DNA we belong to the stars, the trees, and the galaxies.
Deep within we long for unity because, at the most fundamental level, we are already one. We belong to one another because we have the same source of love; the love that flows through the trees is the same love that flows through my being... We are deeply connected in this flow of love, beginning on the level of nature where we are the closest of kin because the Earth is our mother.”
We are all Stardust.