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www.MYS ERION.it W.R. STOEGER S.J. 64 1 (2008) 64-77 Discerning God’s Creative Action in Cosmic and Biological Evolution di William R. Stoeger, S.J. God is not above and beyond us, but right in the midst of our universe, our world, our being. God is present, active and struggling in the heart of all that is – in the evolving processes, regularities and relationships – to create, fashion, and complete, while reverencing and rejoicing in the autonomy, beauty and emerging possibilities of the material world. “From the beginning until now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth, and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free” (Romans 8:22-23). The Big Bang, the formation of the first stars, and the formation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, or even the birth of our Sun and our Earth may seem of very remote interest to us and far from our concerns today. However, without them, and without the many other processes and transitions linking us to those events and times, we simply would not be here, or be what we are. All that exists utterly depends upon God. But God has endowed Nature with potentialities, dynamisms, and relationships which develop and evolve. And thus we also depend utterly and completely on the cosmic, terrestrial and local environments which envelop us and nourish us – for keeping us alive at the present moment, but even more for the eons of careful, patient fashioning we have undergone as entities, organisms, human beings. In fact, God continues to create and draw all things to completion in and through these intrinsic dynamisms, processes and relationships – those we understand and those we do not understand – as well as through the personal relationships God has established with us through life-giving and saving persons, through Jesus Christ and through His Spirit. The depth and extent of God’s creative and dynamic love and gift is only partially revealed in the Universe and in Nature. But it is often forgotten or missed there, too. So, here I shall reflect first on the wonders of God’s presence and action – of God’s struggle to create – in the cosmos, creatively enabling the gradual emergence through regularities, chance and serendipity of the conditions for life and consciousness – and then on the earth, drawing life into being through the laws of nature, and encouraging it to evolve towards greater complexity and organization, to the point of the emergence of self-reflecting and freely willing persons. We need to sense and relish our profound connectedness to all of our ancestors, to all of the events and processes on which our life and being depend, stetching back from the present moment to our parents, to the animals and more primitive organisms from which we have evolved, to the stars whose life
www.MYS ERION.it W.R. STOEGER S.J. 65 1 (2008) 64-77 and death produced all the heavy elements (heavier than helium) which make up our bodies, to the Big Bang in which our possibility was first initiated and expressed. 1. Cosmic Evolution and the Mystery of the Beginning Before life could originate in our Universe, its building blocks and suitable environments for its emergence had to be fashioned. In particular, the 92 natural chemical elements had to be manufactured, and cool, stable, chemically rich places like our earth near – but not too near – a reliable sources of energy like our Sun needed to be put in place. This took of the order of 9 billion years after the Big Bang. As we peer out into the far reaches of our universe, what do we see? We see hundreds of billions of stars, of great variety – some like our Sun but others very different – aggregated to clusters, some having as many as 100,000 stars (like in the beautiful, spherically symmetric arrays we call globular clusters). These clusters of stars are further organized into spiral, elliptical and irregular galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, for instance, is probably a barred spiral consisting of about 100 billion stars, and stretching about 100,000 light years in diameter. The galaxies themselves, in turn, are often grouped into clusters – some having as many as 2,000 galaxies swarming together through intergalactic space – gravitationally interacting, sometimes colliding and merging, thus triggering spectacular bursts of star formation. Our Milky Way is part of a very small cluster of galaxies called the Local Group, which consists of several large galaxies like the Milky Way itself, Andromeda, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, which can be seen clearly in the southern hemisphere with the naked eye, and about 40 or 50 dwarf spiral and elliptical galaxies. The clusters of galaxies in turn are grouped into long filametary superclusters which span hundreds of millions of light years. At the other extreme, as we look at the microscopic organization of Nature, we see similar hierarchical clustering. We see fundamental particles, like quarks, grouped into the basic baryons like protons and neutrons under the action of the strong nuclear force, and the leptons, the most famous of which is the electron. These together constitute atoms through the strong nuclear and the electromagnetic forces. And with these are particles of light, photons, which provide some of the energy and communication among the atoms. The atoms in turn can be clustered into molecules, with millions of different properties, and supermolecules which are the important basic constituents of living organisms. These molecules can be organized in highly intricate ways into systems like cells, which contain all the information needed for their reproduction and metabolic functioning. At higher levels the cells are organized into richly differentiated multicellular organisms and animals, some of which possess highly sophisticated neural systems and brains. In some of these the brains are so advanced that they manifest intelligence, creative, free will, and the capacity for abstract communication, personal relationship and culture. Was the earth and the universe always this way? It is very obvious to us now that it was not! The earth and Sun are about 4.6 billion years old, and it is clear that human beings have only been present for maybe a five hundred thousand years at most, and our
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