I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but after the disruptions of a worldwide pandemic, global inflation and recession, hyper-political partisanship dividing families, friends, and nations, and new NFL rules allowing a fair catch to be called, permitting the football to be placed on the 25-yard line, a recent article in the New York Times warns that the standard model of cosmology may be wrong.

    The standard model of cosmology gave us the Big Bang (or as my philosophy professor said, “the Big Sneeze”) and an orderly method for dating the ongoing expansion of our universe.  The new Webb telescope has made observations that show ancient galaxies forming faster than the standard cosmology model predicts. The article concludes that we may have to completely rethink everything we thought we knew and had observed about our universe.

    The article explains that one problem with observing our universe is that we are in the universe, and we cannot “see outside of it.”  Theologians grasp immediately that this phenomenon explains why we have trouble apprehending, or even understanding, God.  Since we are creatures created by God, we are not able to know God in His own self without anything else.  A fascinating article in Church Life Journal, “What Difference Does Nothing Make?” asks this same question.  It is standard Catholic and Christian theology to say that we are creatio ex nihilo or created from nothing.  Contemporary nihilism or existentialism suggests “nothing matters” but intends this statement as an indictment of belief in God altogether.  It is often cited by nonbelievers as an answer to the problem of evil. 

There is a point to all this abstract, even mind-numbing prose. The existentialists are correct when they say, “Nothing matters,” but not in the way they use the term.  It is God’s gratuitous act of creation that makes “nothing matter.”  This is the whole confounding point of the Incarnation.  God became nothing so that nothing would matter. According to the early church fathers, God became human so that we could participate in God. Whether it is a Big Bang, a Big Sneeze, or a Big “something else,” Creation always matters because it is a gift of an impossible-to-understand God—and when all time is complete, it will be the only thing that matters.  This is why we worship.