THE UNFINISHED UNIVERSE

...Stoics read the cosmos as the outward manifestation of an inner rationality that they called Logos...

...And the Gospel of John pierced beneath all things to an eternal Word that was in the beginning with God, and that was God...

...Whitehead speculated that the problem of evil comes down, in the end, to the plain fact that "things perish," and he was acutely aware that the most beautiful entities and ideals last least long of all...

...Pythagoreans, for example, found in the depths of nature a mystical realm of musical and numerical enchantment...

...For 15 billion years our universe has shown itself to possess a fathomless reserve of creativity...

...In God's experience, the entire sweep of events that we call the universe is endowed with permanence along with purpose...

...We can now fill it, he counseled us, with our own meanings...

...The ever-expanding divine beauty, in turn, becomes the ultimate context for the ongoing world-process, adding new definition to what has already become...

...To others, it is a blank tablet onto which we may inscribe our own human meanings...

...Is such a proposal believable...

...God, therefore, is not only the lure that summons the world to realize more intense beauty, but also the compassionate "fellow sufferer" who preserves everlastingly all of the transient value that the evolving cosmos achieves...

...By beauty I mean the harmony of contrasts, the ordering of complexity, the fragile combining of what is new with what is stable, of fresh nuance with persistent pattern...

...Today, "cosmic purpose" is scarcely mentioned in learned circles-a hush not only tolerated but at times even celebrated in the academic world...

...The randomness and impersonality of life's evolutionary epic have made nature seem forever in-compliant to the human heart's habitual longing for a purposive universe...

...Faith reads the universe now only "through a glass darkly," and the darkness that goes with faith, Teilhard instructed us, is somehow inseparable from the incompleteness of the cosmos...

...Organisms all die, and great civilizations sooner or later decay...

...Deeper yet, purpose implies that something of great value is in the process of being realized...

...Hence, if there is any purpose to the universe, perishing must be redeemed-not only our own but all perishing...

...However, any answer we give to the question of what's going on in the universe requires our taking into account the undeniable discoveries of science...

...The incontestable fact of an unfinished universe may not seem like much of a footing upon which to erect a sense of cosmic meaning, but at least it invites us to keep on reading...

...And how might we understand the entire cosmic process disclosed by modern science as purposeful...

...However, we may still approach the emerging cosmos in a spirit of expectation...

...Within God the whole universe and its finite history are transformed into an everlasting beauty...

...A meaningless universe, he testifies, "leaves me free to forge my own meaning...

...Something other than just the mere reshuffling of atoms has been going on here...

...But how are we to read a narrative that is still in process...

...Even the passing of an entire cosmic epoch- such as the predicted dissolution of our own expanding universe-would not entail its absolute disappearance...

...Finally, however, both Whitehead and Teilhard would not let us forget that the incompleteness of the cosmos, our first scientific pillar, is inseparable from the second-that out of nothingness a world rich in beauty and consciousness has already awakened...

...By surrendering ourselves to causes that embody imperishable values, we discover a coherence to our lives, a backbone to our commitments, and at times even a reason to die...

...Its history, down to the last detail, is internalized forever in the life of God...

...The vast distances below, above, behind, and ahead of us extinguish any such pretense...

...One could not really come to know the universe without being deeply changed in the process...

...I would suggest that there are at least two...

...Philosophies and religions were aware of nature's flaws, of course, but they viewed the cosmos as a "great teaching," at times even as a sacred text...

...Purpose means the "realizing of value," and to Whitehead beauty is the queen of all values...

...For all we know, a deeply meaningful story is in the process of unfolding...

...Since it is primarily through scientific exploration that we learn about the universe, any coherent quest for cosmic purpose today cannot ignore what science has seen...

...Surely, by any objective standard of measurement, something momentous has been going on here...

...To some, the universe is a swirl of meaningless matter on which a patina of life and mind glimmers for a cosmic instant before fading out forever...

...We can't know for sure...

...Any meaning it may have will be at least partially hidden from us-at least for now...

...But what about the dark side of things-the tragedy in life's evolution and the moral evil in human existence...

...But what could this possibly be...

...And what sense can we make of the dismal scenarios that cos-mologists are now entertaining about the eventual, though certainly far off, demise of the universe...

...Purpose" usually means the "goal" or "end" toward which a particular set of events is oriented...

...Traditionally, almost all religions and philosophies read the universe as a revelation of order or purpose...

...After Darwin, any claim that the universe is the unfolding of a profound meaning sounds especially strained...

...They were entirely unknown to ancient religions and philosophies, and they have altered forever the rules for reading the universe...

...Evolutionary biology, geology, and cosmology have now established as fact that the cosmos is still emerging, and that it remains incomplete...

...Now that we know for sure that the universe is an incomplete story, we may find there the kind of dramatic tension that compels us to keep on reading...

...Transformation does not keep pace with information...

...Likewise, the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould claimed that a pointless universe is a great new opportunity for humans...

...Although religions are imprecise and inconsistent, he thought they could read more penetratingly into the fabric of the universe than can the clearer abstractions of science...

...I, for one, am glad that the universe has no meaning," says philosopher E. D. Klemke, "for thereby is man all the more glorious...

...It is concerned with physical, not final, causes...

...do not read the cosmos as a text bearing any deep meaning at all...

...Science, it is true, does not deal formally with the question of purpose or value...

...And what is the story really all about...

...This article is adapted from an essay that will appear in Spiritual Information, edited by Charles L. Harper Jr...

...The aim toward beauty As with any book still being written, we cannot yet read the universe all the way down to its ultimate depths, either through science or theology...

...Parallel to a meaningful human life, a purposeful universe would have to possess at least a loosely directional aim toward bringing about something of great and lasting consequence...

...Science & purpose If the idea is to make sense at all today, therefore, what could it possibly mean to say that the universe has a purpose...

...Yet both Klemke and Gould would agree that, in the end, all meaning will vanish along with our lives...

...In God the world remains eternally new, even if many of its temporal epochs are now over...

...Commenting on neo-Darwinism, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has confidently declared that the only message in evolution is that "the universe has no message...

...The first pillar is our new certainty that the physical universe is unfinished...

...These two scientific fixtures do not by themselves prove that purpose pervades the universe, but they give us something to stand on as we speculate about what might be going on in the cosmic depths...

...Egyptians delved beneath the surface of nature to the realm of Maat, Indians to the domain of Dharma, and Taoists to the Tao...

...Here, as Whitehead also understood, the risk of faith accompanies the certainties of science...

...Our second pillar is the new scientific disclosure of a universe that has evolved over the course of an unimaginably prolonged history into a stupendous array of beauty...

...The universe, in any case, has an overarching inclination to make its way from trivial toward more intense versions of beauty...

...ve us "a reason for our hope...

...With the help of science we can now read the universe quite competently-or so it seems-but we are seldom significantly changed in the process...

...In the process of penetrating to the world's inner substance, the interpreter would have to undergo a purifying transformation...

...Cosmic purpose, he argued in Adventures of Ideas, consists of an overall aim-not always successful-toward the heightening of beauty...

...We have laid bare nature's atomic and molecular alphabet, its genetic lexicon and its evolutionary grammar, but we are less confident than ever that any profound teaching lies beneath its surface...

...It has not only been winning the war against nothingness but in its emergent beauty, feeling, and "thought" it has triumphed...

...At one time an atheist, Whitehead eventually concluded that there is something in the depths of the world-process that redresses the fact that nothing lasts...

...If a plot is still unfolding there, we cannot expect it to be fully manifest to us yet...

...Reading the universe, however, was not an exercise to be undertaken lightly, for beneath nature's surface lurked layer upon layer of challenging mystery and meaning...

...The natural world seemed to be here for a reason, though it was not always easy to say exactly what this was...

...His own suffering and searching led him to reach beneath the transient flux of immediate things to something that endures everlastingly, and in whose embrace all actualities attain a kind of immortality...

...and published later this year by the Templeton Foundation...

...In arriving at his sense of the permanence beneath all perishing, unlike most other academic philosophers in the twentieth century, Whitehead took religious experience as seriously as he took science...

...What is really going on in the universe...

...If the unfinished universe has something to do with the uncertainty in our faith, then the creative resourcefulness embedded in the universe cannot fail to give us "a reason for our hope...

...God, in White-head's interpretation of religion, has the breadth and depth of feeling to take into the divine life the entire cosmic story, including its episodes of tragedy and its final expiration...

...What pillars of certainty, then, could we possibly uncover in the burgeoning mound of scientific information that might render it at least conceivable that the universe has some overall point to it...

...This also means that such a quest cannot truthfully disregard the ambiguities in evolution and the prospect of an eventual physical dissolution of the entire universe...

...While scientific understanding of the universe progresses at an accelerating rate, our lives do not necessarily become deeper, better, or happier...

...Can we realistically expect our faith traditions to answer with climactic clarity the truly big questions as long as the universe itself is still in via-and we along with it...

...As a work in progress, an unfinished universe is a book still being written...

...By approaching it reverently, one could read beneath its surface and discover a profound message hidden from ordinary awareness...

...Scientifically educated people today, generally speaking, John F. Haught teaches theology at Georgetown...

...If the cosmos is an unfinished story, it is also a story that at least until now has been open to surprising and momentous outcomes...

...Our own lives, for example, are said to have purpose if we dedicate them to bringing about something of lasting importance...

...And while the journey from primordial cosmic monotony to the intense beauty of life, mind, and culture is no hard proof of an intentional cosmic director, this itinerary is at least open to the kind of "ultimate" explanation that religions seek to provide...

...His most recent book is Theology after Darwin (Westview...

...The cosmos, to be specific, has made its way gradually from a monotonous primordial sea of subatomic mist, through the emergence of atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, and life, to the bursting forth of sentience, mentality, self-consciousness, language, ethics, art, religion, and science...

...It simply cannot be unremarkable, for example, that the universe eventually abandoned the relative simplicity of its earliest moments and flowered, over the course of billions of years, into an astounding array of complexity and diversity, including human consciousness and moral aspiration...

...But what value could the universe possibly be in the process of realizing...

...That we have to walk by faith and not by sight, Teilhard noted, is one more corollary of the fact that we and our religions are also part of an unfinished universe...

...This aesthetic directionality was enough finally to convince the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, after a long period of skepticism, that there is indeed a point to the universe...

...This understanding no longer works for most of us...

...Ancient Israelites read the universe as an expression of divine Wisdom...

...And can science help us find out...

...Before complaining that faith is an escape from reason or reality, we might reflect on an observation made by Whitehead's contemporary, the Jesuit geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin...

...How do we know that all things will not finally trail off into lifeless and mindless oblivion...

...Science deals well with the surface of nature, but only religious intuition can carry us beneath the temporal flux to a "tender care that nothing be lost," that is, to God...