Speculative Thinking About The Cosmos
Last Thursday, I talked about St. Maximos the Confessor’s theology of man as a bridge, connecting not only himself to the cosmos but relating all things to God. He said that God’s Son, the Logos, is in all things as what he termed the logoi, and that all things in the cosmos are moving toward completion in God. This understanding is not unique to St. Maximos. St. Paul puts it this way:
And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).
I was recently made aware of the work of Nobel Prize physicist Brian Josephson who says this, which fascinatingly dovetails with St. Maximos’s cosmic understanding of the Logos:
Our universe seems fine-tuned for life, with the constants of physical laws having to be within tight boundaries. Does this mean that the universe has a goal of consciousness? Is there a directedness of the universe toward consciousness? Is consciousness entirely contingent or is it something special,even an ultimate object of universal development?
Is God’s plan for the universe a kind of “universal consciousness”? Is this another way of talking about Jesus Christ the Logos and the logoi? My knowledge of science is severely limited, but it is a fascinating idea. Here is a link to an article about Dr. Josephson.
Along the same lines, Oxford professor of Mathematics John Lennox says this, about the relationship between science and theology:
Faith is the axiom for doing science. (It is) to believe that the universe is intelligible. (For) it bears the imprint of a Creator, and I see that at the level of mathematics it is the capacity to at least in part give a handle on what’s out there. And also biology, where we have at the heart of (a) living cell the longest word ever found in the genetic code! And all of that leads me to formulate it as follows: that we live in a word-based universe, and that’s the key of the logos…The Greek concept of logos, the intrinsic logic in the cosmos aligns perfectly with the Judeo-Christian idea of the Word Incarnate. It’s like two puzzle pieces (i.e., science and theology) snapping together! (go to 28 minutes 30 seconds into the video here:
Fascinating, isn’t it?
Fr. Paul Martin
Annunciation & St. Paraskevi Greek Orthodox Church
New Buffalo, MI