CATHOLIC CATECHISM

by HFH Reuvers



BIG BANG AND EVOLUTION

"In the beginning, God created heaven and earth."
These are the first words of the Bibel.
The simplest word among them is "earth". The cosmos, as we experience it, must somehow have originated. It is asking for a cause that must of course be infinitely "greater" than the cosmos itself.
We call this cause God.
My children think God must somehow originate, too. This is because they consider God a creature. But He isn't. By definition, He is Who finds its cause in itself. Although we don't understand HOW God can exist, we can see THAT God exists. We'll speak about this in some forthcoming section.
According to the most modern insight of physics, the whole space-time "began" with a big bang. But physics doesn't ask the natural question how this big bang originated and which cause this space-time phenomenon has.
According to the most modern insight of geophysics and biology, life as we find it in cosmos developed in the course of billions of years from lower forms of life. There was a permanent struggle for existence, in which only the fittest forms survived. But these sciences don't explain the phenomenon of "life" itself, and they don't ask whereto this evolution is leading us.
Teilhard de Chardin did pose this last question, as a philosopher. He thinks space-time is evolving into an ever higher level and will eventually become something absolute. However, it's clear creation will stay limited and finite until the end of time. And Teilhard de Chardin doesn't explain as well as Thomas Aquinas why I myself am on earth. We'll speak about thomism later on.
We can understand the word "heaven" in the opening of the Bible as the sky where we see the stars, but it's also referring to the "place" outside space-time where man will eventually "end up". We'll speak about this later on.


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