IEC2012 Pt. 5: From Big Bang to Big Mystery

As a follow up to my spending June 11-13 at the three first full days of 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, I am writing a series of reflections on the different talks, addresses, and workshops I attended on the theme of The Eucharist: Communion with Christ and with One Another. I took notes (including some quotes, hopefully nearly verbatim, that will appear within quotation marks) during the speeches based on different things that struck me personally, and what I offer here on the blog is simply a distillation of how the speeches affected me. They are not meant to be comprehensive summaries but rather the reactions of one pilgrim from a subjective perspective.

Part 5

From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Reflections on Human Origins

Rev. Dr. Brendan Purcell, Professor at Notre Dame University, Australia

Monday, June 11 - 7pm

Dr. Purcell's talk

I initially was thinking this talk was going to be about cosmology, a look into how we can associate the mystery of our Creator God with what science is learning about the "Big Bang" and the origins of the universe. However, Dr. Purcell deals more so with biological and evolutionary considerations, tracing the links between humanity and the world that we came from. He frames humanity and our lived existence in the context of Creation and its Creator.

He started by looking back to the roots of monotheistic religion. Yahweh and the Israelites transformed spirituality, which he defined as the human quest for gods/God, because Yahweh showed that God is personal. Yahweh intervened for Israel and with Israel in the Israelites' lives.

Dr. Purcell said that God didn't create the world in several acts per se, but rather, Creation is a grand, whole act of love by God - what Dr. Purcell called "Creative Love." God gives us a share in His existence but also wants us to embrace and harness the creative power that He gave us - a tip that sounded to me like Dr. Purcell's interpretation of humanity as stewards of Creation, as the ones with dominion over it. We are intended to use our rationality and innovation - the gifts God gave us - to be an extension of Creative Love. Dr. Purcell said that this isn't evidence of some weakness on God's part; conversely, it's actually an example of His infinite goodness.

In a nod to godless skeptics and atheists, Dr. Purcell quoted the great astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle. Hoyle renounced his atheism in the face of his career's work of studying the universe: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion [the existence of a superintellect] almost beyond question." (full quote courtesy of UCSB)

Dr. Purcell's view of the tensions and relations between science and religion is indicative of his faith. He believes if gaps exist in our explanations of the universe and its origins, the gaps are in science, the limits of human reason, and in our vocabulary. To Dr. Purcell, "God's Act of Creation is full and perfect." This includes Christ's sacrifice, which was one that gave over all six levels of being - human, zoological, biological, botanical, physical, and chemical - to the seventh and greatest level, the Divine. Christ gave a whole and full sacrifice to God.

He then outlined "7 Grace Notes" special to human beings:

1. We are all member of a species that is only recently diversifying - the first human beings 200,000-140,000 years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa aren't that old, relatively speaking. Part of this point was his argument (I didn't record the scientific data he cited) that we didn't "come from monkeys."
2. We have a brain capacity to receive and produce speech alongside a unique physical ability to vocalize.
3. Human infancy/childhood lasts much longer for us than other animals - we have the chance to learn intellectually, to go beyond instincts and transmitted knowledge. This is not a biological advantage, but it is crucial to our nature as social beings.
4. We have a penchant for symbolism, a capacity and desire for inner meaning and next-level significance.
5. Human languages give unique realization to our form of being (human).
6. We have unique knowledge that combines sensory experience, understanding, and judgments.
7. Freedom. We can make free decisions above this threefold equation of knowledge, which constitutes a conscience that can override instinct and mechanized survivalism.

Some other nuggets:

• Procreation = pro-creation : participation in the one Creative Love.
• Citing Benedict XVI, he said that Eucharist helps make the world - the whole cosmos - into a living liturgy in which all things can give praise to God.
• History is the exposition of the reality of Christ as large, having an infinite reach. Christ, who is the God that exists beyond time, entered history and instituted the Eucharist within time. Through the Eucharist, Christ can reach all people in all spaces and in all times.