In a cosmos of proportions so tremendous that they even defy the power of the imagination.

1. The Picture of Reality in Contemporary Science (The Hermeneutic Dimension)IntroductionThe hands of “space-time" have moved forward and ahead! As one scientist quipped: "Science speeds on unabashed!". Once dominated by inspirational mythical accounts of origins and clockwork mechanistic ideas of the universe, twentieth-century science has undergone striking changes in focus.

2. In the so-called postmodern or contemporary period, not surprisingly, what has begun to emerge was quite another sense of reality.

3. Scientists, philosophers, thinkers, artists, mystics, social activists and theologians have started to realize that the old dominant technological view of what was real sold short the full scope of both human and cosmic truth.

4. Today, contemporary science imagines reality in a far more inclusive, open, expanding, and participative manner.

5. As Mary Jo Nye observed: Much of recent research has explored 19th- and 20th-century science, especially the genetic and behavioral sciences, with new emphasis on the sciences of animal behavior, ecology, and environmentalism, as well as on nuclear and high-energy physics.

6. Ian Barbour outlines the twentieth scientific paradigm on nature by differentiating it from the Medieval and Newtonian.

7. Among the significant elements found in this contemporary scientific picture of reality are: 1) evolutionary, historical, emergent, 2) law and change, structure and openness, 3) relational, ecological, interdependent, 4) systems and wholes, organismic, 5) multi-levelled, and 6) community.

8. While it is true that for the theologian "attempting to cross disciplines is a risky venture," I would say that it is an endeavor worth risking because a progressive overview, that is, a view which scientists find generally acceptable "will provide a meaningful perspective for contemporary theological reflection.”

9. This section will proceed thus by presenting the "fresh data" of natural science adapting what has been called by some authors as “a new sense of things" or a new story”.

10. There are at least three general, but meaningful, aspects by which we can experience this "new sense of things" in creation as furnished by contemporary "reflective" scientists, namely, A. The Enormity of the Universe, B. The Intelligibility of the World and C. The Balance of the Cosmos.

11. A. The Enormity of the Universe At the outset one can say that contemporary natural science has widened the scope of space and time considerably which presents the universe as remarkably enormous. Its incredible vastness and eons of time are difficult to imagine.

12. If we, for example, say that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains between ten billion and one hundred billion stars and measures about 100,000 light years in diameter, our minds will be lost in the counting.

13. As Rahner wrote, in the face of the vastness of the cosmos, we will be feeling “dizzy". Saying is different from imagining. Seeing is different from understanding.

14. In a Time article entitled “Cosmic Close-ups", Michael Lemonick describes the stunning new photos of stars from the Hubble Space Telescope in the following:

15. They look remarkably like great towering thunderheads, billowing high into the evening sky as they catch the last rays of the setting sun.

16. They are so sharp, so startlingly three dimensional, that the mind wants to domesticate them, to bring them down to earth, to imagine them rising on the horizon or just beyond the wings of an airliner.

17. These are no ordinary clouds, however. They stand not 9,000 m but almost 10 trillion km high. They are illuminated not with ordinary earthly light but with searing ultraviolet radiation spewing from nuclear fires at the center of a handful of newly formed stars.

18. And they're 7,000 light-years from Earth more than 400 million times as far away as the sun...The momentous sights revealed by the Hubble can stir anybody's imagination.

19. These are rare glimpses of the outer boundaries of physical reality, and of the field cataclysms in which nature perpetually regenerates itself...

20. The enormity of the universe is a first contemporary scientific datum that needs to be examined more deeply because of the implications it has for theology and life.

21. There are at least three significant observations according to present scientific consensus which will illustrate what this first aspect manifests and implies:1) An Enigmatic Awesomeness, 2) A Comparative Magnitude, and 3) An Ever-Increasing Complexity.

22. 1) An Enigmatic Awesomeness Consciously or unconsciously, we inhabit a planet circling an undistinguished galaxy among the thousand million galaxies of the observable universe.

23. The galaxies are too awesome and too enigmatic to comprehend in the events that have unfolded in the course of time.

24. This is the first observable manifestation of an enormous universe: its enigmatic awesomeness. Of course, it would be a foolish error to confuse size with significance.

25. These are two different, though not unrelated, concepts. For there is something chilling and baffling about the vastness of the universe in which we are placed.

26. Somehow, its "bigness" affects our feeling of "importance”. It was built for them and it was there for them.

27. From a contemporary scientific picture of reality, Rahner says that one may feel insignificant or lost in the cosmos.

28. This is when the cosmos is considered as an expression and mediation of an ultimate experience of contingency.

29. In his own words: Nowadays the Christian has to live on a tiny planet in a solar system which in its turn is part of a galaxy of a hundred thousand light years with thirty billion stars and whereby this galaxy is estimated to be only one of a billion such galaxies in the universe.

30. In such a universe it is certainly not easy for human beings to feel that they are the ones for whom this cosmos ultimately exists.

31. In a cosmos of proportions so tremendous that they even defy the power of the imagination.

32. It is quite possible for human beings to feel they are an accidental, marginal phenomenon, particularly when they know themselves to be product of an evolution which itself has to work with numerous and improbable accidents...

33. This enigmatic awesomeness of the universe, however, stirs up our minds to reflect on it more deeply, to contemplate on its mysteries, to marvel at its wonders.

34. This was what the popular scientist Carl Sagan wrote in describing "the shores of the cosmic ocean”.

35. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries...

36. The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home...

37. Consequently, when new worlds in unsullied scales are studied, a number of fundamental concepts that were taken for granted were found to be invalid or at least not very useful anymore.

38. To replace them, more abstract fundamental concepts must be constructed. One of these fundamental concepts is the "dynamic quality" of the cosmos.

39. This means that the universe could no longer be understood as static. Expansion is another name for this dynamic feature of the vast universe. The distance between galaxies is growing all the time.

40. We inhabit an expanding world. The fact that the universe is evolving suggests that the expansion began from an extremely compressed and dense state.

41. For many contemporary scientists, it supports the idea of an initial explosion. In fact, according to the most common scientific view, the universe had its beginning between 10,000 and 20,000 million years ago with a primeval explosion, known as the “big bang”.

42. Contemporary science understood this explosion to be the origin not only of matter, but of space and time as well. Time is inextricably linked to space.

43. As space stretches so does time. The expanding universe is not seen as matter exploding through space, so much as space-time itself stretching and inflating.

44. The discovery in 1965 of background microwave radiation throughout the universe has lent further support to the “big bang” theory over "steady-state" and other theories of the universe.

45. It was believed that this microwave radiation survived from the radiation era of the big bang, so that scientists can describe the universe filled with this radiation as "bathed in the afterglow of the big bang.”

46. The temperature of this cosmic afterglow, three degrees above absolute zero, was a remnant of the intense heat of the fiery origin of the universe. Below is its brief account according to John Polkinghorne.

47. In the beginning was the big bang. The earliest moment in the history of the world that science can conceive is when the universe was concentrated into a single point.

48. As matter expanded from this initial singularity it cooled and successive regimes decoupled from thermal equilibrium.

49. Thus after about three minutes the temperature had dropped to a thousand million degrees. That was cool enough for deuterium to form.

50. The arrival on the scene of this stable composite of a proton and a neutron helped to fix the global balance of hydrogen and helium in the universe for the rest of its evolution.