What’s fascinating about our evolving universe is that newer, and even more complex forms of life emerge whenever previously existing entities unite. The universe is seemingly relational in its fabric. As entities combine, the universe becomes a self-transcending reality that keeps moving beyond itself in complexity, depth, and unity.
Science tells us that the universe began about 13.7 billion years ago with an event that has been coined the Big Bang. Interestingly enough, some scientific theories now suggest that before, or perhaps concurrently to the Big Bang, a mirror-image of the universe (or an anti-universe) was birthed that runs backward in time and is made of antimatter instead of matter. Think of it as the Benjamin Button universe, where what happens here happens there but working backward.
Mentioning the word Christ in the same breath as evolution is not without challenges. If you visit an evangelical church in the United States and get the chance to speak with the pastor, ask him whether Christ and evolution go hand in hand.
One of the truly great minds of the last century was Tielhard de Chardin, the French philosopher and Jesuit Priest. He suggested that God inserted himself into the evolutionary process. De Chardin famously concluded that God unified the universe…
When I began to search for truth that would set me free, it didn’t take long before I became more interested in science. If I could trust science’s inventions to get me on a gigantic Boeing 777 for a 15-hour flight across the ocean, and fork over a considerable amount of money for the latest Apple device, I could not turn a deaf ear to other aspects of science that were not as friendly to my religious traditions.
Science was not exactly my favorite class in high school. Maybe it was the difficulty of a subject that didn’t lend itself to my impatient youthful temperament, the challenge of understanding textbooks that used words beyond my comprehension level at the time, or the fervent opposition to the subject that I had inherited from my religious upbringing.
