It seems very probable that the Big Bang—the rapid expansion some 14 billion years ago or so of the spatiotemporal and material universe and its ongoing cosmic evolution to the present state in which it now exists and one of several possible ends it may reach in the future—is not the first of its kind. It seems to scientists that the material universe may well go through cycles and epicycles of creation and destruction, of Big Bang and Big Crunch, of explosion and retraction; and in any event, if ours is just one universe in an infinite, ultimate multiverse, then the beginning and end and beginning again of our universe would itself be simply part of a larger process of life, death, and rebirth on a cosmic scale that far exceeds the normative ways that we contemplate time when and space where.1 Conventionally, the Big Bang remains a useful way for talking about the “beginning” of our current cosmic cycle, but if we confuse that cosmic cycle with an absolute beginning in time, then we radically misunderstand the utility and scope of the theory as it was Hubbled together in the first half of the 20th century.2
In the eyes of some religious people and some scientists, this is apparently a problem for religion. In fairness, it has taken some religious communities—particularly Christian ones—an awful long time to integrate the Big Bang into their inherited cosmology. Among evangelicals, for example, it has taken until the 21st century for something like The Biologos Foundation to enjoy widespread credence, and yet its marriage of faith and science has yet to be normative in the evangelical world. Officially, Catholicism affirms the natural sciences, and yet there remain Young-Earth creationists in the Catholic blogosphere and Internet scene (I won’t name names). For those who have sought integration, a change in the meaning of the Big Bang that opens the door to a temporally infinite universe threatens paradigm stability; for those who have never sought integration, this change is simply confirmation bias that serious engagement with the natural sciences is unwise or unhealthy for religious communities. Often, the people most ardently committed to the imbecility of the Conflict Thesis are not scientists but the religious themselves.
Of course, this restructuring of the significance of the Big Bang is not new, but it is gaining more recent steam. Two years ago, British physicist Brian Cox, sort of the UK’s version of Neil Degrasse-Tyson (without the scandal or the belligerence), made a bit of noise on a variety of talk-shows (including Joe Rogan’s, though I don’t usually like to platform him) raising the question of God in modern physics. Though Cox himself is an atheist, it is appreciable that his position is more or less that the question is an open one: as he acknowledges, where other famous British atheists typically do not, many deeply intelligent and influential people in Western philosophy and science down to the present have believed in God, so God is not easily dismissed as a psychosis or a bit of undigested beef. Cox does, however, puzzle about how it could be that God could serve as Creator in a universe that does not have an obvious beginning in time or space once we have retconned the Big Bang, and articulated his dilemma about this to a gathering of UK bishops who met to discuss science and religion earlier that year. How to square a temporally and spatially infinite kosmos, perhaps itself existing in an infinite number of states, perhaps but one of an infinite number of kosmoi, with the explanatory value of God?
This is where a decent metaphysical training might save a good number of contemporary scientists and those interested in popular science (religious and not) from themselves. Clearly, any “God” whose existence or activity are predicable on the grounds of certain mechanical traditions is merely a god, a being in the taxonomy of encosmic and hypercosmic beings whose act of existence, however superior to our own, is still contingent, mutable, and subject to investigation if we had the appropriate sensory aids. The God of classical monotheism does not need to fill a scientific gap in the emanation or generation or creation (more on this in a minute) of the universe, and plenty of ancient philosophers—especially Platonists and Aristotelians—took the universe to be temporally eternal even if deriving its existence from a higher metaphysical cause (the Demiurge, the Unmoved Mover, the One acting through Intellect and Soul, God, etc.). The universe need not inhabit any particular shape, configuration, extent, or anything of the sort to be dignum Deo in this sense: divine transcendence is the ground of absolute immanence to any and every conceivable universe, since it is God who is the infinite Mind in which all such worlds are contemplated and, simultaneously with that very act of contemplation, loved forth into being.3
There is no time for God, at least if time (chronos in Greek) is understood in the normal sense, as a measurement of change and movement according to before, after, and duration. God is well and truly eternal (aidios), experiencing no diminution or gain in God’s pure actuality from moment to moment, and therefore experiencing no succession of moments whatsoever; there is for God only the eternal Now, which is a replete fullness, a genuine pleroma of God in God, all things in God, and God in all things (1 Cor 15:28). Time is a function of the finite, of that which is capable of moving from potency to act and back again, of mutability, of movement (or, rather, what we call movement): and as such, just like space, it is infinitely divisible, infinitely extensible, quantitatively without limit though each arbitrary unit of it never manifests the whole as actuality.4 Time can thus be heaven or hell; it can be what Paul Griffiths calls the “metronome,”5 or it can be what Plato suggested, the mobile image of eternity, turning forth in sequence all that is contained in eternity’s infinite fullness, though delineated by the addition of potency such that no one moment is ever obviously suffused with the eternal, at least in this fallen kosmos (see Plato, Timaeus 37d).6 There are points of intersection between finite chronology and the aeon of moving rest in the eternal, the olam haba, the sophianic ktisis which is for God the only universe he truly knows, the universe in which time, space, and matter are all suffused with the divine glory such that every finite being miraculously, graciously manifests the infinite; those sparks of light still sometimes shine in our world as kairoi, moments of genuine communion between the Divine and Creaturely Wisdom, where the World Soul successfully contemplates the Logos and animates the universe with the logoi it finds therein, the Jubilee, the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God, Satya Yuga—whatever one wants to call it, and however. So whether the universe has “a beginning in time,” and that beginning is the Big Bang, or whether it endures an infinite cycle of creation and destruction at the temporal level, makes no difference whatsoever for creation as traditionally meant by Jews and Christians. Indeed, Philo of Alexandria explicitly rejects the idea that the Elohist creation account of Genesis 1:1-2:3 narrates a beginning in time at all: for him, this first creation narrative is an account of the creation of the intelligible universe, which was simultaneous, immediate, and eternal for God in his Logos, while the second, Yahwist creation account from 2:4-3:24 is that of the aesthetic, sense-perceptible universe and proceeds in different fashion, with no account of an absolute beginning in time either (Philo, De Opificio Mundi V; XVIII.135). Such would continue to be the dominant interpretive understanding of creation among the Greek Fathers and the Neoplatonically influenced Latin Fathers, too, until the middle ages (and for some, thereafter as well).
For Origen of Alexandria, standing in Philonic tradition, there are three creations: the poiesis of God, which the Elohist creation narrative recounts; the plasis or “molding” of God, which the Yahwist recounts; and the ktisis of God, which is the final union of the poiesis and the plasis, the realization of the divine blueprint for the created world in the Divine Wisdom which is Jesus Christ. For Origen, the poetic creation is the one eternally prefigured in Christ as God’s Wisdom, in whom also God’s ktisis is always, from God’s perspective, eternally realized; the plastic creation is the spatiotemporal and material universe as we experience it, which is itself mutable and subject to either spiritual improvement or diminishment on the basis of the activities of rational creatures (see Origen, De Principiis I.2.10; Comm. Jo. XX.182).7 God providentially governs the universe towards its final end, of course, but he will not finally bring it to pass without the consent of rational beings who partake of his own Wisdom, Word, and Spirit and stand in the divine council; he will permit this world and every world to take an utterly free course, without any looming determinism or impending interference, until all creation says “Amen” together, which is the very place where God, in and through Christ who has been hailed as Lord by all, becomes all in all (Phil 2:6-11; 1 Cor 15:20-28; De Principiis III.6.6).8 It is this sort of cosmological thinking that allowed some Early Jews and many philosophically sophisticated Christians to believe that the material universe as it now exists was fallen from the moment of its becoming in time, as the result of a pretemporal fall of humanity from an angelic status in which the universe may have progressed effortlessly to the realization of the Kingdom to the state in which we experience it, where time, space, matter, and embodiment, though they are not evil in themselves, are nevertheless profoundly degraded in their plastic quality from their poetic purpose in the Divine Mind.
All of this to say, a temporally infinite universe forwards and backwards is no more problematic for Christian cosmology than is a spatially infinite multiverse in which ours is but of one of countless worlds that God gives rise to. In point of fact, it is probably more metaphysically correct to see things this way. The fundamental confession of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds—that God is “Creator of heaven and earth”—is not impugned in the slightest by whatever we may discover about the physical origins or characteristics of the universe. Creation is a metaphysical, not a physical, doctrine; and once one’s doctrine of God is metaphysically purified, it is also clear that creation itself is, for God, an eternal act. There is no moment when God first began to contemplate or to work to bring the creation forward ex nihilo into being; the nothingness from which God created the universe is in fact nothing other than himself, such that creation itself is an emanation of God, always willed and intentional by the God who is purely active and in no way naturally passive. In the specifically Christian doctrine of God, the locus of the world is the kenosis, “self-emptying” of the Logos, the tzimtzum of the Ein Sof to make room for the finite manifestation of the infinite, which St. Maximos the Confessor would describe as the Logos’ perennial quest for embodiment in and as the logoi of all created things (Amb. 7.22).9 The universe—every universe—is nothing other than the body of the Logos, and the garment of God (LXX Ps 103:1-2); the fallen worlds die, but the true world rises, just as God changes his garments (102:27). All this is but the playfulness of the Trinitarian perichoresis, the interpenetrative circle-dancing of Father, Son, and Spirit in the processional exitus of generation and spiration and eternal reditus of knowledge and love: just as the origin of every world is nothing other than God, so too is the destiny of every world nothing other than God, all ignorance, sin, and evil vanishing like a dream in the waking world of the true Kingdom.10 In that Kingdom, the engines of cosmic violence and death which have driven evolution as we have experienced it will be no more, but there will still be a ceaseless unraveling of potency into act as we ascend ever higher into the divine mystery. And so it now falls to us to be living kairoi—continuations of the mystery of the Logos’ incarnation, dwelling in the world while renouncing its fruits so as to bring it to its intended end.
In general, scientists study the universe’s past for keys to its present and future and our role in it. Cox, who is interested in these questions of the physics of the early universe, is also a rich guide to the possible “Horizons” of our temporal, contingent futures; so, too, is Brian Thomas Swimme. These futures are not fixed; human beings may yet prove capable of the maturity required to enter into larger cosmic vistas, or they may ensure their own destruction in this world. What is important to press as humans imagine various possible futures for themselves is that, minimally, far from being the enemy of the sciences in shaping that future, religion is a fundamental human resource for enumerating the values and imagination that it will require to build a better future.11 From an emically Christian perspective, we might also say that the narrative of the Gospel—of the Logos’ descent in incarnation to enable the ascent of all creation into God—carries with it a sophianic vision of the dignity of every creature, especially every human being, that might well contradict some secular visions for the human future which border on the nightmarish, eldritch, and chthonic. But Christians and non-Christian people of faith alike should be plugged into conversations and mythmaking about the cosmic and human past as well as the cosmic and human future; forfeiting our place in that conversation expresses either a defeatism or an infantilism that is inappropriate to a kosmos where God is looking for us to synergistically make use of rather than monergistically submit to the grace of the eschaton. God is our destiny, but God is also our journey thither.
For what it’s worth, I certainly think this is true, and for a history and detail of the idea, I would point everyone to the wonderful work of Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: On the Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia, 2014). Really, everything by Rubenstein is superb.
A Perennial Digression is officially a place for bad jokes now.
I feel like I constantly reference this book, but once more, with feeling: see David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
There are two ways to talk about this; one may talk about God as “unmoved,” but this simply means that God is impassible to movement from the outside, not that he is static, frozen, or, effectively, dead. Another way to speak of the difference, more appropriate to the specifically Trinitarian metaphysics of Christianity, is that God’s movement is infinite, whereas time measures only finite movement.
Paul Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).
For a comprehensive overview, see Daniel Vazquez and Alberto Ross, Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2022).
See also Origen, On First Principles, trans. and ed. John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), lvi-lxii.
Look for Jordan Daniel Wood’s forthcoming book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 2022).
For more, see David Bentley Hart, “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo,” Radical Orthodoxy 3 (2015), 1-17.
This is basically the fundamental conviction of the Templeton Foundation.
I'm interested by your statement that time (like space) is 'infinitely divisible'. I have just read that this is an assumption of 'Pythagorean-Parmenidean mindsets where, in order to deny genuine reality to elapsing time, the physical instant is supposed infinitesimal.'
Can you please write a blog on John behrs new book